“For every person, with all his functions, society has a stand-in ready, to whom the former is in any case no more than an intrusive occupier of his workplace” (Adorno)
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.
Friday, August 20, 2004
A Warning From History
'Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also be quiet about fascism'
The quote is from Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was one of the Co-founders of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933 the Institute was closed by the Nazis, and Horkheimer, along with other members of the institute, forced to emigrate. The Institute was deeply informed by Marxism and many of its leading members were Jewish. On both counts it was targeted by the Nazis.
It is worth remembering Horkheimer et al’s hard earned truths about fascism, won at cost in a moment of immense danger, when the demand for truth had a genuine, possibly fatal urgency. It is worth remembering because it has recently been strategically forgotten and in some cases turned upside down. ‘Fascism’ is being re-written. For one thing, the Right are trying to disown it, engaging in the most shocking revisionism and paralogical torsions imaginable. Attempts to identify Fascism with the Left even go so far as quoting Goebbels to the effect that ‘we are socialists’, prepared, that is, to regurgitate Nazi propaganda if it means scoring a point. (They do not of course quote explicitly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Marxist statements). On the other hand, the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘totalitarian’ are banded around like so much devalued currency, without any attempt to define them or to situate them historically but with much concern for their resonances and rhetorical effects. Terms like ‘Fascist Left’ ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Islamic Fascism’ may, conceivably, I suppose, have conceptual content. But it needs to be argued and argued with rigour and theoretical labour. The first and obvious step would be a discussion of what Fascism was/ is, and it is precisely this that I have failed to discover in the polemical labours of those who use the cited terms. What I have encountered is the insistent repetition of these terms, like an underaged drinker insistently knocking on the door of a nightclub: “please let me in to the received political vocabulary.”
The ‘miscreants’ responsible for these frankly tiresome abuses shall remain nameless. They have had too much publicity already, and the point here is not about individuals and their agendas. It is about what I sense to be a gradual re-writing of the political vocabulary and the political spectrum, the end result of which will be finally to write off whatever still remains of a genuine and radical Left.
21/8 An interesting review of Fascism: Theory and Practice, by Dave Renton, at Voice of the Turtle.
The quote is from Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was one of the Co-founders of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933 the Institute was closed by the Nazis, and Horkheimer, along with other members of the institute, forced to emigrate. The Institute was deeply informed by Marxism and many of its leading members were Jewish. On both counts it was targeted by the Nazis.
It is worth remembering Horkheimer et al’s hard earned truths about fascism, won at cost in a moment of immense danger, when the demand for truth had a genuine, possibly fatal urgency. It is worth remembering because it has recently been strategically forgotten and in some cases turned upside down. ‘Fascism’ is being re-written. For one thing, the Right are trying to disown it, engaging in the most shocking revisionism and paralogical torsions imaginable. Attempts to identify Fascism with the Left even go so far as quoting Goebbels to the effect that ‘we are socialists’, prepared, that is, to regurgitate Nazi propaganda if it means scoring a point. (They do not of course quote explicitly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Marxist statements). On the other hand, the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘totalitarian’ are banded around like so much devalued currency, without any attempt to define them or to situate them historically but with much concern for their resonances and rhetorical effects. Terms like ‘Fascist Left’ ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Islamic Fascism’ may, conceivably, I suppose, have conceptual content. But it needs to be argued and argued with rigour and theoretical labour. The first and obvious step would be a discussion of what Fascism was/ is, and it is precisely this that I have failed to discover in the polemical labours of those who use the cited terms. What I have encountered is the insistent repetition of these terms, like an underaged drinker insistently knocking on the door of a nightclub: “please let me in to the received political vocabulary.”
The ‘miscreants’ responsible for these frankly tiresome abuses shall remain nameless. They have had too much publicity already, and the point here is not about individuals and their agendas. It is about what I sense to be a gradual re-writing of the political vocabulary and the political spectrum, the end result of which will be finally to write off whatever still remains of a genuine and radical Left.
21/8 An interesting review of Fascism: Theory and Practice, by Dave Renton, at Voice of the Turtle.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Blaise Pascal d. 19th August 1662.
A thought comes when "it" will and not when "I" will. Thus it is a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject "I" conditions the predicate "think."
One should not conceal and corrupt the facts of how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees. (Nietzsche).
A thought, for Nietzsche, ought to take us by surprise, ambush us and our tired preconceptions. The image of thought here is of lightning, in search of tinder, suddenly blazing into our heads. It disarms and discomforts.
At the same time we should attend, listen if you like, to where thought comes from – all the roughness and unevenness of thought that is erased by the final polish of the essay. Thought should display, without shame, its obscure and troubled origins.
Reading Pascal, we can see, as well as a series of luminous insights the underlying movements of the thought which has generated those insights. Pascal is thinker who never forgets thinking itself: he attends not only to the content of the thoughts but is preoccupied with their specific shape and realises that, finally, shape and content ought not to be separable:
Words arranged differently have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. (23)
Pascal’s writing of course tends towards the aphoristic. Aphorisms trap thoughts, but the trap is set not by a grasping eagerness but by utter receptive openness to the event of thought. Pascal knew that, as Nietzsche later says, a thought comes when it wants rather than being consciously willedby an 'I'. It typically has its roots in shocks and transformations external to thought itself (travel would be an obvious example). Man is a ‘thinking reed’ blown by and answering a summons external to himself and forever already in place.
And indeed, despite Pascal being a lover of thought, its singular path, there is also a consistent stress on the non-intellectual non-cognitive nature of human behaviour, from which, as it were, thought must painfully rescue itself:
We are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
The notion of ‘mind’, as something wholly separable from the body, troubles Pascal: “’My mind is disquieted.’ ‘I am disquieted'would be better."
Strikingly, Pascal has been a key reference for modern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek. This is, superficially, surprising, considering Pascal’s religious ultra-orthodoxy. However, as Zizek has pointed out, Pascal reveals the paradoxical but eminently dialectical relation between the avant-garde and the archaic – the way in which the very resolute attempt to be faithful to the Old or ‘outmoded’ in new conditions produces the utterly innovative, the radically modern (more recently, much Modernism was itself this ‘archaic avant-garde’). The hungry seeker after newness, by contrast, produces only the same old thing over and over. The monotony of the merely new can be countered with the genuine difference of the past.
One should not conceal and corrupt the facts of how our thoughts have come to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will always have something of the aphoristic and unexpected character of Pascal’s Pensees. (Nietzsche).
A thought, for Nietzsche, ought to take us by surprise, ambush us and our tired preconceptions. The image of thought here is of lightning, in search of tinder, suddenly blazing into our heads. It disarms and discomforts.
At the same time we should attend, listen if you like, to where thought comes from – all the roughness and unevenness of thought that is erased by the final polish of the essay. Thought should display, without shame, its obscure and troubled origins.
Reading Pascal, we can see, as well as a series of luminous insights the underlying movements of the thought which has generated those insights. Pascal is thinker who never forgets thinking itself: he attends not only to the content of the thoughts but is preoccupied with their specific shape and realises that, finally, shape and content ought not to be separable:
Words arranged differently have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. (23)
Pascal’s writing of course tends towards the aphoristic. Aphorisms trap thoughts, but the trap is set not by a grasping eagerness but by utter receptive openness to the event of thought. Pascal knew that, as Nietzsche later says, a thought comes when it wants rather than being consciously willedby an 'I'. It typically has its roots in shocks and transformations external to thought itself (travel would be an obvious example). Man is a ‘thinking reed’ blown by and answering a summons external to himself and forever already in place.
And indeed, despite Pascal being a lover of thought, its singular path, there is also a consistent stress on the non-intellectual non-cognitive nature of human behaviour, from which, as it were, thought must painfully rescue itself:
We are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without thinking about the matter.
The notion of ‘mind’, as something wholly separable from the body, troubles Pascal: “’My mind is disquieted.’ ‘I am disquieted'would be better."
Strikingly, Pascal has been a key reference for modern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Slavoj Zizek. This is, superficially, surprising, considering Pascal’s religious ultra-orthodoxy. However, as Zizek has pointed out, Pascal reveals the paradoxical but eminently dialectical relation between the avant-garde and the archaic – the way in which the very resolute attempt to be faithful to the Old or ‘outmoded’ in new conditions produces the utterly innovative, the radically modern (more recently, much Modernism was itself this ‘archaic avant-garde’). The hungry seeker after newness, by contrast, produces only the same old thing over and over. The monotony of the merely new can be countered with the genuine difference of the past.
Homo Academicus
If any of you were wondering about my 'oblique and sceptical' relation to current academia, it partly has to do with issues touched on here, courtesy of here. It has to do with lots more besides, including some things, like the transformation of academics into bureaucrats, which are fairly recent developments, and and other things, such as the pitfalls of what Pierre Bourdieu (here, for example) calls 'Scholastic Reason', which I hope to post on in the future.
p.s. Regarding an earlier post on an interview with Negri, if anyone's interested it turns out that the entire text of Negri's Empire is available online, here! Some of Johann Hari's alarmingly casual slurs ('old terrorist' etc) are dealt with here.
p.s. Regarding an earlier post on an interview with Negri, if anyone's interested it turns out that the entire text of Negri's Empire is available online, here! Some of Johann Hari's alarmingly casual slurs ('old terrorist' etc) are dealt with here.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Baron Munchausen & Pierre Bourdieu
You will remember that Baron Munchausen, drowning without hope of rescue, so concentrates his mind that he pulls him self out of the swamp by his own hair. We, lacking the Munchausen option, have only the labour of critical thought.
One of Pierre Bourdieu’s most significant contributions to critical thinking was the notion of ‘illusio’. ‘Illusio’ is basically our libidinal and cognitive investment in a particular – historically contingent – form of life. From a removed point of view, this investment will always appear somewhat absurd:
“When you read, in Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (who should bow first), if you were not born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, the quarrel will seem futile and ridiculous to you.”
And so:
“Illusio is the fact of being interested in the game, of taking the game seriously, being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is “worth the candle”, or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort. [it is] to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes.”
Paradoxically, this means precisely not seeing it a as a ‘mere game’. Once you see it as a game you are already outside it, and the game loses its power to compel. Knowledge changes the thing known. Such ‘games’ would include, say, parliamentary politics, journalism, business meetings and, indeed, academia itself. It is evident that many of the props and rituals of these practices, the customary modes of address, the required rhetoric, the shibboleths and in-jokes, will one day appears as ridiculous as the game of the hats, cited by Bourdieu, does today. Our natural inclination, of course, is to see the game of the hats as quaint and costumed history, but our own way of doing things as just plain ‘natural’ or the ‘way things are’ and therefore just to get on with them. This attitude is illusio at its purest. So it is, that the mere fact that a form of life exists seems to be sufficient proof that it should, or, at least, its mere existence induces instant amnesia that it was ever otherwise.
But, to repeat: once you see such a form of life as a historically specific game with rules, you remove yourself, albeit by a fraction, from the ‘plane of what is'. You pull yourself out of the swamp. There is however a certain mode of removal which is mere lip service – it is of course called irony, and it is nothing more than a device allowing one to participate all the more effectively in the game. At the level of belief you make ironic jokes about it the futility of what you’re doing, but at the behavioural level you continue to act as if it were not simply a historically contingent game at all. Irony is thus a kind of false consciousness, a part of the game masquerading as critical commentary. What is needed today is an irony towards irony - which, i suppose is a bit like pulling yourself up by your own hair.
Morning Pages
I was a little intrigued to see that Norman Geras had a post entitled 'Nightmare on Charlotte Street'. My paranoia was unjustified - turns out its a rather amusing and exasperated review of one of those restaurants that sets itself up as an arbiter of cool/ social distinction. Coincidentally, I am familiar with the eatery in question and the glorified bouncer who guards the door, paid his pittance per hour to stand and signify 'exclusivity'. Rather than being crestfallen by his transformation into a signifier, he mistakes himself for an emanation of the thing signified. Perhaps I'll point this out to him.
I read (here) that Wittgenstein thought the old English expression 'it takes all sorts to make a world' a 'kind and goodly phrase'. And so it is. It would be churlish of me to cite this by way of qualification.
Elsewhere the Young Hegelian has some brief reflections on the invasion of public space by corporate propaganda and related matters.
I read (here) that Wittgenstein thought the old English expression 'it takes all sorts to make a world' a 'kind and goodly phrase'. And so it is. It would be churlish of me to cite this by way of qualification.
Elsewhere the Young Hegelian has some brief reflections on the invasion of public space by corporate propaganda and related matters.
Exhibit H.
I am no fan of Antonio Negri. But read this. An interview with Negri by Johann Hari. It reminds me, distantly, of Andrew Marr’s interview with Noam Chomsky - in each case a constitutional phrase-maker & professional Middle-Brow guilelessly locks horns with an actual thinker. And so, presented for our edification: the embarrassing spectacle of an interviewer who combines a complete ignorance of his interviewee’s work with a complete absence of intellectual humility; someone who evidently thinks that anything which can’t be immediately paraphrased into journalese must be pretentious or boring; someone who giggles when confronted with a Concept, as if it were a minor indiscretion; someone who would prefer to salute a ready made idea in passing rather than unpick a tightly woven argument; someone who spends the best part of an entire article – note, an interview with a respected thinker – gossiping about the circumstantial details of the interview itself whilst assiduously forgetting to engage with a single substantial Idea. But, perhaps most depressingly, someone who knows that his easy sneers at ‘the intellectual’ (the full armoury of stereotypes are indeed on display) will receive ready and immediate echo among his readership – and perhaps, beyond that, within the culture at large. There is a pre-existing field of presuppositions and ready-made images, into which Hari’s piece painlessly inserts itself, so lending it the brief illusion of substance. And without this field, Hari’s interview would stand revealed for what it is – a hollow and inconsequential exhibit in the Museum of Ideology.
(For some critical but informed thoughts on Negri, see here)
19/8: The Virtual Stoa has some interesting observations on Hari's methods. Also, while I'm on the subject, the closing remarks of the original Hari article:
So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.
- where, ingeniously, the chance geographical location of the Institute of Contemprary Arts serves as a whole argument in itself.
19/8 Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for a transcript of the Chomsky-Marr interview mentioned above.
(For some critical but informed thoughts on Negri, see here)
19/8: The Virtual Stoa has some interesting observations on Hari's methods. Also, while I'm on the subject, the closing remarks of the original Hari article:
So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.
- where, ingeniously, the chance geographical location of the Institute of Contemprary Arts serves as a whole argument in itself.
19/8 Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for a transcript of the Chomsky-Marr interview mentioned above.
Wrong Choice
Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child.
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless
Adorno, Mimima Moralia
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless
Adorno, Mimima Moralia
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
A Tribute to Bruno Schulz
History carries with it the dead weight of the unrealised. The present – the existence of the present – is simultaneously the suppression of untold possibilities, possibilities which somehow still exist, grown sick or bodiless, and which crowd in on us in unguarded moments or wait patiently in the recesses of dreams.
Bruno Schulz: few writers have felt so acutely the quiet force of the Possible - except here the Possible is not only quiet but muted, timid, a tad disappointed; few writers sense more keenly the pressure on the present of the unfulfilled, no writer better seems to bear out Kafka’s aphorism 'there is an infinity of hope, but not for us’.
There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realisation.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Galicia. For most of his adult life he taught drawing and handicrafts in a local school. In November 1942 he was shot dead by a Gestapo officer as he returned home with a loaf of bread.
It is perhaps a cliché, but it is the mark of a great writer that he succeeds in creating a recognisable world, a micro universe which carves out its own space and insists upon its siren like singularity.. I would like to try and give you a sense of the world of Bruno Schultz.
It is a world which the fragments of a lost Meaning lie everywhere. The world as a ripped up book, an amalgamation of broken signs, awaiting completion and restoration though the Adamic hands of the writer.
An atomised world: chance gestures, stray unconnected glances, and supernumerary acts which know no completeness, which have been snapped away from a lost wholeness - or at least give that appearance.
The crucial passage here is the father’s monologue near the beginning of the book on the subject of the Demiurge.
We are not concerned with long-winded creations, with long term beings. Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. [..] Our creations will be temporary to serve for a single occasion. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pedantic to bother with the other unnecessary leg. Their backs can be made of canvas or simply whitewashed. [..]
Demiurge, the great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the other hand, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see beneath each gesture, behind each move, its inertia.
The father is a Gnostic madman, a collector and domestic demi-god, confecting a private universe incommunicable to all but himself (like so many fathers!). In this monologue he speaks of creating a universe where beings would exist, would be conjured into life, only for the sake of a single gesture, act or pronouncement. What was superfluous would remain in the lumber-room of Non-being. And perhaps Schulz here places in the mouth of this mad aphasiac father his own aesthetic manifesto: the creation of uncanny puppets, monsters, dwarfs and cripples – one legged, bodiless, coming towards us out of the fog of Perhaps before recoiling into silence.
The father’s aesthetic manifesto is a modernist one, where modernism forever lays bare the device, enjoys exposing the creaking mechanisms of communication. And so Schulz’s works are full of whirring machinery and exposed pipes. But there is another – but related - side to Schulz’s take on creation, and it concerns and extraordinary sense of Nature, not as a realm of pleasing appearances but as a dark and inscrutable matrix.
In Nature, language has its dark roots. The world of the book is the percolation into articulate consciousness, into graphemes and syntax, of the manifold silences, the teeming capillary life of nature. Nature is that which delimits us, the non-human horizon of our Being, without which we lose our definition and collapse into the boundless universe, without which our language, predicated on finite notions of time and space would turn to rubble. Imagine: sounds snapped away from their anchoring sense, aborted stammers flying off into the night, unable to hold in grammatical or semantic check the newly expanded world.
Of course, spring has its vernal breezes, thriving greenness, seasonal promises and so on. But out of what do these arise? A pregnant dark, a vast unseen region; and the dream of spring is born in the icy sleep of winter. The floral prettiness is merely spring’s cosmetic face. Underneath, the black underworld, a remote blind world of pods and seeds unfolding in inhuman time, refusing the measure of language, deaf to the trill of birdsong, and for which the sun is only a strange prickling warmth, an unfamiliar uprush in their vegetable souls.
This sense of nature as the inhuman, with its own non-human time, is part of a Schulzian recognition of what lies outside or in-between our ways of measuring and recording the real. It’s here we come back to Time.
Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd together and press hard one upon the other without any pause.
[…] Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too early or too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant?
What is so surprising is to find here, in the words of a provincial schoolteacher, an exact mirror of that other Saturnine Jewish writer Walter Benjamin's meditations; stripped of politics, yes, but insisting like Benjamin, on the discarded, the unfulfilled, the aborted and neglected - that which can find no place in official narratives, histories, canons, which has suffered the neglect or condescension of posterity, that which is, as it were incomplete, patiently awaiting the intervention of the Not-yet, the onset of some unimaginable zero summer.
And this little gem, which might serve as bit of messianic graffiti:
Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps.
(The Fictions of Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska, Picador, 1988) . A limited gallery of Schulz's drawings can be found here.
More recent and apparently more reliable translations of Schulz are now available here, part of an ambitious online project.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Dead Again
Give me a pound for every obituary for the Left penned over the last 100 years, and I’d doubtless be a very rich capitalist. The latest fatal announcement comes from Nick Cohen, in an article mixing perverse tristesse with perverse relief. Its one of those ‘with-bitter-honesty-reluctantly-and-in-the-face-of-sadness’ articles, which is of course a sure index of Truth. For those of you who don’t know, ‘brutal candour’ is Cohen’s patented style, it differentiates him from other commodities in the journalistic marketplace and so helps to sell papers.
Like some ghost of his own previous self, Cohen has come back to earth with some uncomfortable truths for us, in short: ‘The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race’. Not just here and in England, it would seem, but, 'ineluctably', anywhere in the world. Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war. In these paltry runes, the global death of radical thought is legible.
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.
Like some ghost of his own previous self, Cohen has come back to earth with some uncomfortable truths for us, in short: ‘The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race’. Not just here and in England, it would seem, but, 'ineluctably', anywhere in the world. Resourcefully, the concept of this great world-historical shift has been cobbled together from a handful of current media events – reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, the visit of an obnoxious Muslim cleric to the UK, and of course the morally insolvent decision of the Left (along with the majority of Europe) to oppose an imperialist (sorry ‘anti-Fascist’) war. In these paltry runes, the global death of radical thought is legible.
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.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
Proust, Motorcycles and Tail Fins
One of the curious characteristics of Proust’s insufferable bourgeois prig Mme Verdurin is that she does not laugh; she rather ‘makes a sign that she is laughing’ – it consists of a whole 'symbolical dumb show' of raising the hands to the face, while using the rocking body as a metronome. Why this curious gesture, this substitution of the signifier for the thing signified? A disdain for the body, perhaps, from whose guttural dark interior the laugh issues? A sense of ‘etiquette’, where etiquette requires that all behaviour submit itself to a socially agreed code, to an externalised language of signs from which spontaneous emotion has been expunged? What was once directly lived (laughter) has moved away into its representation, and if it has moved away into a representation, then one of the conditions of a representation is that it is repeatable and/ or exchangeable. It can circulate, it can be copied. It can, if necessary be sold. My laugh, like my death, belongs ineluctably to me; Mme verdurin’s sign of laughter, by contrast, can be anyone’s.
Next a brief anecdote from the Radically Inept Blogspot:
'I remember growing up in North Carolina that a lot of my friends and neighbors would take the time and spend the money to make their cars and motorcycles louder. When I would ask what the purpose of this was, they would tell me it was a demonstration of 'power'. The idea supposedly was that louder was more powerful. But, these cars could not out perform the Mercedez Benz 450 SLs, or various Porches that I had seen around, and these cars were 'quiet'. The loud motorcycles did not out perform the BMWs, and late the Hondas, which were far quieter. But that didn't seem to matter, they'd pay the money and buy glass packed thrusters or other device just to increase the volume with no appeciable increase in performance - louder was cool.'
Not the manifestation of actual power, but a sign of power. The empty signifier is more important, more desired, than the thing itself. Why? A signifier solicits, and is defined only in relation to, the Other. One signifies to and for Others, so that this ‘power’ which they desired was really a desire for Others' desire. But those Others also desired the Other’s desire. And so, the endless circularity of a world of empty signifiers .
One thinks also of Baudrillard writing about tail fins on cars:
'There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins.. the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relation to that victory (indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome [..] Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. [..] It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord'
The fins bear no functional, real relation to speed. They signify speed, according to a certain fantasy, floating around in the social imaginary, of what speed is. Just as, in the previous example, we were dealing with a fantasy of power – not an individual’s fantasy but a collective and buyable fantasy. In short, then, a world where things are dematerialised, turned into signifiers, signifiers of an imaginary world which has replaced the real; and, simultaneously, a world where ideological fantasies - of speed, power etc - are directly materialised in objects and images.
Next a brief anecdote from the Radically Inept Blogspot:
'I remember growing up in North Carolina that a lot of my friends and neighbors would take the time and spend the money to make their cars and motorcycles louder. When I would ask what the purpose of this was, they would tell me it was a demonstration of 'power'. The idea supposedly was that louder was more powerful. But, these cars could not out perform the Mercedez Benz 450 SLs, or various Porches that I had seen around, and these cars were 'quiet'. The loud motorcycles did not out perform the BMWs, and late the Hondas, which were far quieter. But that didn't seem to matter, they'd pay the money and buy glass packed thrusters or other device just to increase the volume with no appeciable increase in performance - louder was cool.'
Not the manifestation of actual power, but a sign of power. The empty signifier is more important, more desired, than the thing itself. Why? A signifier solicits, and is defined only in relation to, the Other. One signifies to and for Others, so that this ‘power’ which they desired was really a desire for Others' desire. But those Others also desired the Other’s desire. And so, the endless circularity of a world of empty signifiers .
One thinks also of Baudrillard writing about tail fins on cars:
'There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins.. the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relation to that victory (indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome [..] Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. [..] It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord'
The fins bear no functional, real relation to speed. They signify speed, according to a certain fantasy, floating around in the social imaginary, of what speed is. Just as, in the previous example, we were dealing with a fantasy of power – not an individual’s fantasy but a collective and buyable fantasy. In short, then, a world where things are dematerialised, turned into signifiers, signifiers of an imaginary world which has replaced the real; and, simultaneously, a world where ideological fantasies - of speed, power etc - are directly materialised in objects and images.
Friday, August 13, 2004
A note on Hegel's Aesthetics
‘Catholicism is heavy in symbolism’ [it is said], esp. as compared to Protestantism. But in another sense it is more accurate to say that Catholicism is heavy in literalism – e.g., the wine and bread literally become flesh and blood. Only Protestantism re-codes these as symbols, forbidding as sacrilegious any premature reconciliation between mundane and divine, reproaching the older religion for its naïve literalism. This observation is indebted to Hegel's Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 324:
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.
Catholicism, then, knows immediate presence rather than symbolism. And, conversely, does this not entail that we ought to incorporate into our definition the Symbolic a suspension of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some immediate presence has departed; the symbol is always the index of an absence and a departure. Symbols, therefore, are always ‘haunted’.
What Hegel here says about the distinction between Catholicsm and Protestantism in fact runs through the whole first volume of his brilliant (A brilliance which is difficult to overestimate) Aesthetics: the distinction between immediate presence and defered or Symbolic presence. One can also see how Zizek might relate it to Lacan: for in a way it concerns our entrance into the realm of the 'Symbolic'. Children, we might say, start off as 'Catholics' and are forced to renounce this native faith and convert, under the duress of the paternal law, to 'Protestantism'.
The other relevant example here is Hegel's descriptions of (p. 325). of the Zoroastrian religion: Light is not a symbol of the Good; light is the Good:
Without explicitly separating this Divinity from light, as if light were a mere expression and image or symbol.
Not, then, a 'mere' (symbolic) 'expression'. In this sense, such religions do not worship ‘graven images’ since we are precisely not dealing with an image at all. Again, then, the image or symbol is a kind of leftover – it is the surplus remaining when existence (the sensuous immediacy thereof) and meaning are severed. Once the Absolute withdraws into uncategorizable abstraction the symbols are left clattering, only alluding to that which is now forever elsewhere.
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.
Catholicism, then, knows immediate presence rather than symbolism. And, conversely, does this not entail that we ought to incorporate into our definition the Symbolic a suspension of ‘immediate presence’. The very occurrence of symbolism is here, paradoxically, an indication that some immediate presence has departed; the symbol is always the index of an absence and a departure. Symbols, therefore, are always ‘haunted’.
What Hegel here says about the distinction between Catholicsm and Protestantism in fact runs through the whole first volume of his brilliant (A brilliance which is difficult to overestimate) Aesthetics: the distinction between immediate presence and defered or Symbolic presence. One can also see how Zizek might relate it to Lacan: for in a way it concerns our entrance into the realm of the 'Symbolic'. Children, we might say, start off as 'Catholics' and are forced to renounce this native faith and convert, under the duress of the paternal law, to 'Protestantism'.
The other relevant example here is Hegel's descriptions of (p. 325). of the Zoroastrian religion: Light is not a symbol of the Good; light is the Good:
Without explicitly separating this Divinity from light, as if light were a mere expression and image or symbol.
Not, then, a 'mere' (symbolic) 'expression'. In this sense, such religions do not worship ‘graven images’ since we are precisely not dealing with an image at all. Again, then, the image or symbol is a kind of leftover – it is the surplus remaining when existence (the sensuous immediacy thereof) and meaning are severed. Once the Absolute withdraws into uncategorizable abstraction the symbols are left clattering, only alluding to that which is now forever elsewhere.
Money Talks
The following is true, despite fitting all too easily into my pessimistic view of contemporary academia. Students at my university occasionally complain about their grades, which is of course fair enough. The grounds for complaint, however, are often rather revealing. A Professor reports the following exchange:
Student: “I don’t understand why I haven’t got an A”
Professor: “Well [I paraphrase] your work wasn’t A grade standard.”
Student: “but I really need to get a good grade for this course.”
Professor: “And is that a good reason?”
Student: “I suppose not.”
Professor: “So why Should I give you an A?”
Student: “Well, at the end of the day, my parents pay your wages.”
Yes, money talks. And it talks utter gibberish.
Student: “I don’t understand why I haven’t got an A”
Professor: “Well [I paraphrase] your work wasn’t A grade standard.”
Student: “but I really need to get a good grade for this course.”
Professor: “And is that a good reason?”
Student: “I suppose not.”
Professor: “So why Should I give you an A?”
Student: “Well, at the end of the day, my parents pay your wages.”
Yes, money talks. And it talks utter gibberish.
Once Upon a Time in the West.
Once upon a time, in the age of critical thought, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were terms that situated a group or individual with respect to capitalism. One’s politics were defined by a basic decision with respect to the economic system in which we lived and its political and cultural logic. But as capitalism penetrated every geographical and psychological crevice, so - in Hegelian fashion - its name disappeared from public space.
It goes without saying that there is now no room within the licensed spectrum of debate for any alternative to capitalism.
There is a sad comedy, too deep for laughter, in the groups and individuals who today refer to themselves or are referred to as ‘left’. Examples can be found even in the ‘blogworld’. Johann Hari, consumer of voyeuristic junk and an ideological gadfly who has settled on the corpus delecti of Noam Chomsky’s writings, positions himself on the Left. The ‘redoubtable’ Kamm and his bedfellow Stephen Pollard likewise. Inexorably, the political spectrum shrinks, whilst the name ‘left’ is retained perhaps through some lingering nostalgia for the idea of dissent, a love of certain lexical antiquities still in circulation even though the world to which they belonged has passed away.
In the U.S. of course, the task has been easier, so that today, the terms mapping out the political spectrum are ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which of course denote two pragmatic perspectives within capitalism, pushing capitalism itself outside the horizon of debate. The term ‘liberal’ rent from its original meaning, now refers to little more than a certain attitude to ‘permissiveness’ and ‘tolerance of the Other’. And indeed, even this lame term has long since taken on a pejorative ring. (Moreover, commentators who are resolutely and obviously on the Left - eg Chomsky- get referred to as ‘liberals’, since the available language, like some autistic Adam, is incapable of naming them). Similarly, ‘conservative’ has become a misnomer. It has nothing to do with the authority of tradition and distrust of abstraction, since all it wishes to ‘conserve’ is the abstract logic of capital and the capitalist-fundamentalist pursuit of profit.
The ideology of capitalism is, among other things, precisely this anamorphosis whereby language is bent and malformed in such a way that the system in which we live and breath disappears as an object of critical thought.
It goes without saying that there is now no room within the licensed spectrum of debate for any alternative to capitalism.
There is a sad comedy, too deep for laughter, in the groups and individuals who today refer to themselves or are referred to as ‘left’. Examples can be found even in the ‘blogworld’. Johann Hari, consumer of voyeuristic junk and an ideological gadfly who has settled on the corpus delecti of Noam Chomsky’s writings, positions himself on the Left. The ‘redoubtable’ Kamm and his bedfellow Stephen Pollard likewise. Inexorably, the political spectrum shrinks, whilst the name ‘left’ is retained perhaps through some lingering nostalgia for the idea of dissent, a love of certain lexical antiquities still in circulation even though the world to which they belonged has passed away.
In the U.S. of course, the task has been easier, so that today, the terms mapping out the political spectrum are ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, which of course denote two pragmatic perspectives within capitalism, pushing capitalism itself outside the horizon of debate. The term ‘liberal’ rent from its original meaning, now refers to little more than a certain attitude to ‘permissiveness’ and ‘tolerance of the Other’. And indeed, even this lame term has long since taken on a pejorative ring. (Moreover, commentators who are resolutely and obviously on the Left - eg Chomsky- get referred to as ‘liberals’, since the available language, like some autistic Adam, is incapable of naming them). Similarly, ‘conservative’ has become a misnomer. It has nothing to do with the authority of tradition and distrust of abstraction, since all it wishes to ‘conserve’ is the abstract logic of capital and the capitalist-fundamentalist pursuit of profit.
The ideology of capitalism is, among other things, precisely this anamorphosis whereby language is bent and malformed in such a way that the system in which we live and breath disappears as an object of critical thought.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Bicycle Rider
One night walking back along Karlova
I was nearly knocked down by a bicycle rider
Lean with a black cap and goggles
What he was doing, Racing at night
Down those bone-shaking cobbles,
God nor man might know.
The above is excerpted from a short poem I wrote about something that indeed happened to me in Prague. Imagine, then, my uncanny shock on reading this poem:
While time is running away on Prikopy street
Like a racing cyclist who thinkgs he can overtake death's machine
You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go backwards
If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy.
The poem is "The Clock in the Old Jewish Ghetto" by Vitezslau Nezval (1900 - 1958) . With certain passages from Rilke and (of course) Kafka, the music of Janacek and, perhaps, the taste of a herbal liquor called Besherovka, this poem distills the essence of 'Prague', by which of course I mean my Prague, little more than a name, a pale flare over marshes, one of those Proustian names charged with the quiet dream of another life.
I was nearly knocked down by a bicycle rider
Lean with a black cap and goggles
What he was doing, Racing at night
Down those bone-shaking cobbles,
God nor man might know.
The above is excerpted from a short poem I wrote about something that indeed happened to me in Prague. Imagine, then, my uncanny shock on reading this poem:
While time is running away on Prikopy street
Like a racing cyclist who thinkgs he can overtake death's machine
You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go backwards
If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy.
The poem is "The Clock in the Old Jewish Ghetto" by Vitezslau Nezval (1900 - 1958) . With certain passages from Rilke and (of course) Kafka, the music of Janacek and, perhaps, the taste of a herbal liquor called Besherovka, this poem distills the essence of 'Prague', by which of course I mean my Prague, little more than a name, a pale flare over marshes, one of those Proustian names charged with the quiet dream of another life.
Ear to the Wall
A couple of essays - John Berger's brief and slightly cryptic tribute to his friend Cartier-Bresson; and Edward Said's late musings. Also, from Berger's reevaluation of Francis Bacon (he had previously penned a rather dismissive piece hilariously entitled 'Francis Bacon and Walt Disney'), this:
The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.
On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.
The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.
On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.
On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.
The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.
On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.
The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.
On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.
On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.
Zizek's neck & Other matters
We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when, all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation, "our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer looking at ourselves." It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship.
Thus, the alien gaze, which as Zizek demonstrates need not be that of an actual empirical person, disturbs the satisfying fullness of our self-image. The gaze of the Other refers precisely to the fact that I am seen from a point which is outside me and that I can never occupy or control. A part of my image ‘belongs’ to the Other and the object that I am for Others is not the me as I am for myself.
I was reminded of the above, curiously enough, by two blogsites, previously mentioned – ‘Biased BBC’ and ‘No Pasaran’ , of no interest in themselves save as symptoms of some yet-unnamed malaise. At ‘Biased BBC’ one finds that many contributors are Americans objecting to how Bush is represented by the BBC, relying on their trusty (and in some cases only) friend Google to nitpick and sift hours of irrelevant dross. So, why should a Bushite U.S. citizen, who does not even pay a licence fee, bother about this? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the Americans at No Pasaran seek to ridicule the French’s opposition to the Iraq war etc. In both cases, they see the ‘growth on their neck’.
In other words, the BBC - or the Le Monde or whoever - represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.
It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.
Incidentally, in a rather different context, Yeats has some lines on the ‘gaze of the Other’ which catch exactly what is at stake:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyesCasts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
Yeats, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’
Thus, the alien gaze, which as Zizek demonstrates need not be that of an actual empirical person, disturbs the satisfying fullness of our self-image. The gaze of the Other refers precisely to the fact that I am seen from a point which is outside me and that I can never occupy or control. A part of my image ‘belongs’ to the Other and the object that I am for Others is not the me as I am for myself.
I was reminded of the above, curiously enough, by two blogsites, previously mentioned – ‘Biased BBC’ and ‘No Pasaran’ , of no interest in themselves save as symptoms of some yet-unnamed malaise. At ‘Biased BBC’ one finds that many contributors are Americans objecting to how Bush is represented by the BBC, relying on their trusty (and in some cases only) friend Google to nitpick and sift hours of irrelevant dross. So, why should a Bushite U.S. citizen, who does not even pay a licence fee, bother about this? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the Americans at No Pasaran seek to ridicule the French’s opposition to the Iraq war etc. In both cases, they see the ‘growth on their neck’.
In other words, the BBC - or the Le Monde or whoever - represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.
It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.
Incidentally, in a rather different context, Yeats has some lines on the ‘gaze of the Other’ which catch exactly what is at stake:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyesCasts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
Yeats, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Life: An Unheard of Luxury
Guy Debord, courtesy of here:
'We may fairly say of the present organization of society that, no matter what angle it is viewed from, it simply cannot afford life. For one thing, it is generally admitted that all the basic necessities of life, whether the life of trees or the life of human beings, are far beyond the means of our economic system. A lifestyle that in the past would have seemed simple, not to say ascetic, is an unheard-of-luxury today, in a world where simply to breathe fresh air and to enjoy peace and quiet is practically impossible anywhere. At the same time -- and certainly more importantly -- the technical means that this society has chosen to develop are those that enable it to dispense more and more thoroughly with living activity and individual initiative (and hence with those practical skills that once underpinned the proletarian project). It does without them so easily already, in fact, that it cannot see the need for them at all: the production of robots is naturally (or, rather, unnaturally) accompanied by the development of an environment suitable only for robots.''
And courtesy of The Young Hegelian, this little snapshot of life in L.A.:
'Next to the condom dispensers, loo visitors will usually find racks of post cards touting trendy consumer goods. More often than not, they will have an advert speaking in their ear whilst urinating (I'm afraid I can only speak for the gents, however). They are activated by motion sensors as one draws near the urinal.'
'We may fairly say of the present organization of society that, no matter what angle it is viewed from, it simply cannot afford life. For one thing, it is generally admitted that all the basic necessities of life, whether the life of trees or the life of human beings, are far beyond the means of our economic system. A lifestyle that in the past would have seemed simple, not to say ascetic, is an unheard-of-luxury today, in a world where simply to breathe fresh air and to enjoy peace and quiet is practically impossible anywhere. At the same time -- and certainly more importantly -- the technical means that this society has chosen to develop are those that enable it to dispense more and more thoroughly with living activity and individual initiative (and hence with those practical skills that once underpinned the proletarian project). It does without them so easily already, in fact, that it cannot see the need for them at all: the production of robots is naturally (or, rather, unnaturally) accompanied by the development of an environment suitable only for robots.''
And courtesy of The Young Hegelian, this little snapshot of life in L.A.:
'Next to the condom dispensers, loo visitors will usually find racks of post cards touting trendy consumer goods. More often than not, they will have an advert speaking in their ear whilst urinating (I'm afraid I can only speak for the gents, however). They are activated by motion sensors as one draws near the urinal.'
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Charlottenstrasse
After some tinkering, this blog has firmly reverted to ‘Charlotte Street’, a partial explanation of this title is now to found in the right hand margin. The quote is from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Some of you may prefer the Kaiser and Wilkins translation:
‘.. and if he had not know that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other.’
‘.. and if he had not know that he lived in Charlotte Street, a quiet street but still a city street, he might have believed that his window gave on a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other.’
c.f. Zizek, ‘Desert of the Real’:
[In the Matrix] the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
The ‘matrix computer programme could indeed be read as the symbolic order itself [even though it isn't really] – the codes and articulations without which the world collapses into an undifferentiated continuum, taking with it the tremulous compass of the ‘I’ .
[In the Matrix] the material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome to the desert of the real."
The ‘matrix computer programme could indeed be read as the symbolic order itself [even though it isn't really] – the codes and articulations without which the world collapses into an undifferentiated continuum, taking with it the tremulous compass of the ‘I’ .
Perhaps the clearest exposition of the Lacanian ‘Real’, though, is provided by Bruce Fink:
Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere.. It is a sort of smooth seamless surface [..] The division of the real into separate zones, distinct features and contrasting structures is a result of the symbolic order, which, in a manner of speaking, cuts into the smooth façade of the real, creating divisions, gaps, and distinguishable entities and laying the real to reast, that is, drawing or sucking it into th symbols used to describe it [..]
Cancelling out the real, the symbolic creates ‘reality’, reality as that which is named by language and can thus be thought and talked about .
Fink adds:
Language no doubt ever completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left.'
And in limit situations, at the penumbra of the Symbolic, we are uncannily aware of that residuum. It is here, at this limit, in 'Charlottenstrasse' that Kafka lives.
So, to return to Charlotte Street, house addresses do not exist ‘in the Real’, they are simply a more or less arbitrary way of partitioning it, a form of Symbolic articulation. Nonetheless, such arbitrary divisions and articulations, as Kafka saw, are the necessary infrastructure of the human subject. Indeed, this is why Kafka is barely human himself.
And so, we might 'translate' the above passage as : were it not for my ‘address’ (my registered place in the Symbolic Order, as well as my symbolic mandate) my world would collapse into the featureless greyness of the Real which subtends it. Gregor Samsa, losing his footing in the Symbolic Order (most immediately, that of the family), becoming progressively stripped of ‘world’ (in the Heideggerian sense) slides into the ‘undistinguished’ proto-world of animal or insect. His place in the Symbolic Order (his world) is so fragile that what is beyond that Order seems to seep though, like bubbles in the wallpaper. For Samsa, only the increasingly residual and delicate knowledge of his ‘place’ stands between him and the ‘desert’ of the Real.
In occasional airs his siren song sings
In occasional airs his siren song sings
With its terrible lonely elation
He flew from the world on folio wings,
His final transformation.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Paul Celan
Courtesy of Bertram Online, a recording of Paul Celan reading Todesfuge (In German). even if you only have a tiny smattering of German, as I do, this is worth listening to, partly for the curiously plaintive and unheimlich sound of Celan's voice. Scroll down the page to find the recording, where you'll also find a link to an English translation of the poem.
Hari's Game
The journalist, who, like a hypnotised chicken, was transfixed by the ‘canned boredom’ / cynically choreographed snuff theatre of Big Brother, and purported to detect therein the rumblings of the Zeitgeist, has popped up again with his case against Noam Chomsky. The charge, which I have alluded to in another post, is that Chomsky has belatedly started referring to Iraqi opinion having previously shown no interest in it. Now although this is false, in a way that requires not hours of patient labour in the British Library but a few nanoseconds with Google, there is a more elementary point:
The question he doesn’t even see fit to broach is: since when has reliable and detailed information on Iraqi public opinion been available? A curious omission that, since it’s a question that might potentially have rendered his charges meaningless and saved him the trouble of missing some quality TV. Anyway, I’ve emailed him with the query and will let you know when/ if he responds. [update; 14th/ 8. No reply - he's either ignorant, wrong or, very possibly, both].
The question he doesn’t even see fit to broach is: since when has reliable and detailed information on Iraqi public opinion been available? A curious omission that, since it’s a question that might potentially have rendered his charges meaningless and saved him the trouble of missing some quality TV. Anyway, I’ve emailed him with the query and will let you know when/ if he responds. [update; 14th/ 8. No reply - he's either ignorant, wrong or, very possibly, both].
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Pasquinades and Pneumatics
Days after declaring that he was going on holiday, Mr Oliver Kamm popped up on a Left blog message board in the dead of night to argue over the translation of the word ‘fraktion’ into English. I suppose it beats lying on the beach.
I first came across Kamm’s name a few years ago at Amazon.com. where he would write long and detailed reviews of books, or ‘screeds’, he deemed ‘worthless’ or ‘egregious’ . I did at one point wonder whether ‘Oliver Kamm’, like George Kaplan in North by North West, was simply a non-existent person, an empty name, behind which there lurked only a CIA committee for the defamation of Noam Chomsky. Anyway, a second ‘Oliver Kamm’ then appeared, claiming to be married to a Norwegian tree surgeon, apparently inhabiting the same pneumatic lexical world as his namesake, only pumped up a few notches. Lampooner Kamm ii then had some of his reviews removed, presumably after protestations from the 'lampoonee'. Not long after this, Kamm i’s output seemed to dry up entirely. Indeed, it stopped. The CIA committee had done it’s work, perhaps. I thought no more of it..
Cut to a few years later. Doing some research on the net I find that the (one time?) Marxist Norman Geras has a web-blog. Reading it, I am intrigued by a name in the links column. ‘Oliver Kamm’. I am then transported through the ether to that same inimitable world, a world of ‘canards’ and ‘tergiversations’, where people invariably ‘promulgate’ ideas, ‘screeds’ and 'tracts' roll off printing presses, states are replaced by ‘polities’ , words like ‘jemmy’ are charitably rescued from the more obscure pages of the thesaurus, and the vernacular is confined to its quarters below stairs while, above it, gentlemen engage in rhetorical spats.
Anyway, I conveniently find on Mr Kamm’s site, an explanation, albeit not by him, but by one of his court eunuchs, of his ‘self appointed task [indeed]’
“ His self-appointed task (if I may presume to have sussed it out) is to disassemble and expose the shoddy and potentially harmful political philosophy of some of our more prized intellectuals, as well as that of high-profile fringe characters, in hopes that the democratic argument will not be waylaid by proposals that a meticulous analysis and faithful memory can show to be wanting.” [by the way, what's that Latin phrase that means 'in the style of the master'?]
Yes, although I suppose for the sake of balance, I should quote another perspective on Mr Kamm's output: “a jumped-up bank clerk forever reliving the ephemeral triumphs of his youth in some sixth-form debating society.”
I first came across Kamm’s name a few years ago at Amazon.com. where he would write long and detailed reviews of books, or ‘screeds’, he deemed ‘worthless’ or ‘egregious’ . I did at one point wonder whether ‘Oliver Kamm’, like George Kaplan in North by North West, was simply a non-existent person, an empty name, behind which there lurked only a CIA committee for the defamation of Noam Chomsky. Anyway, a second ‘Oliver Kamm’ then appeared, claiming to be married to a Norwegian tree surgeon, apparently inhabiting the same pneumatic lexical world as his namesake, only pumped up a few notches. Lampooner Kamm ii then had some of his reviews removed, presumably after protestations from the 'lampoonee'. Not long after this, Kamm i’s output seemed to dry up entirely. Indeed, it stopped. The CIA committee had done it’s work, perhaps. I thought no more of it..
Cut to a few years later. Doing some research on the net I find that the (one time?) Marxist Norman Geras has a web-blog. Reading it, I am intrigued by a name in the links column. ‘Oliver Kamm’. I am then transported through the ether to that same inimitable world, a world of ‘canards’ and ‘tergiversations’, where people invariably ‘promulgate’ ideas, ‘screeds’ and 'tracts' roll off printing presses, states are replaced by ‘polities’ , words like ‘jemmy’ are charitably rescued from the more obscure pages of the thesaurus, and the vernacular is confined to its quarters below stairs while, above it, gentlemen engage in rhetorical spats.
Anyway, I conveniently find on Mr Kamm’s site, an explanation, albeit not by him, but by one of his court eunuchs, of his ‘self appointed task [indeed]’
“ His self-appointed task (if I may presume to have sussed it out) is to disassemble and expose the shoddy and potentially harmful political philosophy of some of our more prized intellectuals, as well as that of high-profile fringe characters, in hopes that the democratic argument will not be waylaid by proposals that a meticulous analysis and faithful memory can show to be wanting.” [by the way, what's that Latin phrase that means 'in the style of the master'?]
Yes, although I suppose for the sake of balance, I should quote another perspective on Mr Kamm's output: “a jumped-up bank clerk forever reliving the ephemeral triumphs of his youth in some sixth-form debating society.”
In the News
In this article, an author reflects on a certain ephemeral media event and what it 'says about Britain' , when the question he should be asking is what does it say about our culture that an article as utterly lacking in intellectual or semantic content as his own can get published, nay, has become almost the norm. The only really worthy object of thought is not such pseudo-events, but the very framework which produces them. It goes without saying that the vast majority of today’s journalism situates itself pragmatically within that frame, and is thus articled to error before it hits the 'shift' button. Meanwhile, the system frantically produces differences and novelties and with hellish monotony.
Oh, and here's the strange case of a monkey injured by some of its own droppings.
(UPDATE: coincidentally, it seems the author of the 'ephemera' article above has a blog which makes vague allusive use of revolutionary iconography, further underlining a point I made in the 'No Pasaran' post. It also contains this on Chomsky's (supposedly) belated recognition of Iraqi opinion, which has the demerit of being simply false, as the most cursory of cursory searches will demonstrate - eg, this. )
Oh, and here's the strange case of a monkey injured by some of its own droppings.
(UPDATE: coincidentally, it seems the author of the 'ephemera' article above has a blog which makes vague allusive use of revolutionary iconography, further underlining a point I made in the 'No Pasaran' post. It also contains this on Chomsky's (supposedly) belated recognition of Iraqi opinion, which has the demerit of being simply false, as the most cursory of cursory searches will demonstrate - eg, this. )
Presentiments of the Spectacle
These can be found in numerous places - disguised, not-yet clear to themselves, couched in pre-conceptual terms or conceptual terms ready-to-hand but inappropriate. Debord himself quotes Feuerbach, and here, in 1925, we find Rilke using the name 'America' to try and delineate the contours of what was happening:
To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered . . .
Rilke 1925 (See fn 15 and 16 of this article)
To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered . . .
Rilke 1925 (See fn 15 and 16 of this article)
Friday, August 06, 2004
'Old and New Europe'
Incidently, on the above (title) pseudo-conceptual distinction: Donald Rumsfeld basically used "Old Europe," to name those nations whose views were of no concern because of their reluctance to toe Washington's line. The "New Europe" was symbolized by Italy, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was at the time visiting the White House. It was, evidently, unproblematic that public opinion in Italy was overwhelmingly opposed to the war.) [This definition is indebted to Chomsky, but I forget where I read it.]
n.b., A word one frequently hears in Bushite discussions of Europe is the word 'ingratitude'. The implicit sentiment is that it is surely miraculous that the U.S. continues selflessly to serve the world when flagrant 'ingratitude' (democratic opposition) is so commonplace. The 'ingratitude' trope is also present, like some ideological meme parasitising their webspace and using it for reproductive purposes, on the 'No Pasaran' site mentioned below. Anyway, such sentiments recall nothing so much as Prospero's anger at Ariel:
I must/ Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch Sycorax, / For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Argier, / Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she did/ They would not take her life. Is not this true? (for Sycorax read 'Saddam'.)
Anyway , the only reason I mentionthe old/ new Europe distinction, is to illustrate John Berger's previously quoted words: The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms.'
n.b., A word one frequently hears in Bushite discussions of Europe is the word 'ingratitude'. The implicit sentiment is that it is surely miraculous that the U.S. continues selflessly to serve the world when flagrant 'ingratitude' (democratic opposition) is so commonplace. The 'ingratitude' trope is also present, like some ideological meme parasitising their webspace and using it for reproductive purposes, on the 'No Pasaran' site mentioned below. Anyway, such sentiments recall nothing so much as Prospero's anger at Ariel:
I must/ Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch Sycorax, / For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Argier, / Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she did/ They would not take her life. Is not this true? (for Sycorax read 'Saddam'.)
Anyway , the only reason I mentionthe old/ new Europe distinction, is to illustrate John Berger's previously quoted words: The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms.'
No Pasaran
Inevitably, in the sublime rhizomatic wiring of the internet, one gets unexpectedly rerouted. I was researching a phrase from Paul Celan’s great poem ‘Shibboleth’. The phrase, ‘no pasaran [They Shall Not Pass]’ is itself a veritable knot of radical associations. It is most famously a rallying cry from the Spanish Civil war. The poem alludes to the destruction of Austrian socialism in 1934 and Spanish republicanism. It does so in a spirit of whispered political solidarity, yet it is a nakedly private poem; or rather, it draws this very distinction - between the public/ political and the private into its own singular questioning. John Felstiner, in his priceless gloss of Celan comments:
Less well know, the French said ‘ils ne passeront pas’ when slaughter began at Verdun in February 1916. Writing in Paris, a victim of the second Great War, Celan could not help facing back, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ who sees ‘one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls them infront of its feet.’
But turn away from these lofty and thoughtful matters if you will, for a moment, for the phrase ‘no pasaran’ has been stolen by an excited gang of two-a-penny right-wing proxies . Some of them at least seem to be Americans sequestered in France, still reeling from the factum brutum of cultural and political difference. It seems that in this article, the French had the temerity to exercise their democratic rights and protest against the Iraq war when they should have been smoking gauloise cigarettes in cafes and talking about existentialism and all those postcard-shaped things they’re supposed to do. Instead they were engaging in ‘anti-American’ outrages and persisting in their stubborn refusal to leave what Donald Rumsfeld named ‘old Europe’
We have already seen (below) that the appropriation of Left symbols - symbols of liberation and equality - is a (by now) standard ploy of the advertising industry. They want to buy into its subversive glamour, the aura of dissent and radical questioning, whilst of course emptying these of any real substance. This is at least, one supposes, predicated on the recognition that the Right’s symbolic resources are pretty nugatory. Such visual adverts seek to mobilise hopes which their very existence has helped extinguish. It is another monotonous instance of the Spectacle at work, of course. And in the case of web sites like No Pasaran (who also use the icon of Che Guevara) it is the almost equally monotonous exhibition of representatives of the status quo dramatising themselves as some righteous and heroic minority fighting against a repressive establishment. This trope, so threadbare as to be unworthy of thought, seems to have a remarkably enduring life - as forms of self deception often do. Anyway, having thrown out this soiled bath water, let us revert to the words of Paul Celan:
SHIBBOLETH
Together with my stones
grown big with weeping
behind the bars,
they dragged me out into
the middle of the market,
that place
where the flag unfurls to which
I swore no kind of allegiance.
Flute,
double flute of night:
remember the dark
twin redness
of Vienna and Madrid.
Set your flag at half-mast,
memory.
At half-mast
today and for ever.
Heart:
here too reveal what you are,
here, in the midst of the market.
Call the shibboleth, call it out
into your alien homeland:
February. No Pasaran..
Unicorn:
you know about the stones,
you know about the water,
come,
I shall lead you away
to the voices
of Estremadura.
Less well know, the French said ‘ils ne passeront pas’ when slaughter began at Verdun in February 1916. Writing in Paris, a victim of the second Great War, Celan could not help facing back, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ who sees ‘one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls them infront of its feet.’
But turn away from these lofty and thoughtful matters if you will, for a moment, for the phrase ‘no pasaran’ has been stolen by an excited gang of two-a-penny right-wing proxies . Some of them at least seem to be Americans sequestered in France, still reeling from the factum brutum of cultural and political difference. It seems that in this article, the French had the temerity to exercise their democratic rights and protest against the Iraq war when they should have been smoking gauloise cigarettes in cafes and talking about existentialism and all those postcard-shaped things they’re supposed to do. Instead they were engaging in ‘anti-American’ outrages and persisting in their stubborn refusal to leave what Donald Rumsfeld named ‘old Europe’
We have already seen (below) that the appropriation of Left symbols - symbols of liberation and equality - is a (by now) standard ploy of the advertising industry. They want to buy into its subversive glamour, the aura of dissent and radical questioning, whilst of course emptying these of any real substance. This is at least, one supposes, predicated on the recognition that the Right’s symbolic resources are pretty nugatory. Such visual adverts seek to mobilise hopes which their very existence has helped extinguish. It is another monotonous instance of the Spectacle at work, of course. And in the case of web sites like No Pasaran (who also use the icon of Che Guevara) it is the almost equally monotonous exhibition of representatives of the status quo dramatising themselves as some righteous and heroic minority fighting against a repressive establishment. This trope, so threadbare as to be unworthy of thought, seems to have a remarkably enduring life - as forms of self deception often do. Anyway, having thrown out this soiled bath water, let us revert to the words of Paul Celan:
SHIBBOLETH
Together with my stones
grown big with weeping
behind the bars,
they dragged me out into
the middle of the market,
that place
where the flag unfurls to which
I swore no kind of allegiance.
Flute,
double flute of night:
remember the dark
twin redness
of Vienna and Madrid.
Set your flag at half-mast,
memory.
At half-mast
today and for ever.
Heart:
here too reveal what you are,
here, in the midst of the market.
Call the shibboleth, call it out
into your alien homeland:
February. No Pasaran..
Unicorn:
you know about the stones,
you know about the water,
come,
I shall lead you away
to the voices
of Estremadura.
Radio Noone
There is a great deal (of world-historical insight) in this little apercu from Sartre (courtesy of here via here):
'If he listens to the radio every Saturday and if he can afford to buy every week's No. 1 record he will end up with the record collection of the Other, that is to say, the collection of no-one ... Ultimately, the record collection which is no one's becomes everyone's collection - though without ceasing to be no one's.'
cf Heidegger's They. Although Sartre's example is hypothetical and a limit case, it is probably, today, not too far from being the default setting of our subjectivity. I envisage meeting Sartre's 'he' and asking 'so, is this your record collection?' to which he replies, 'technically, yes. but in a more ontological sense, it belongs to the Other.'
'If he listens to the radio every Saturday and if he can afford to buy every week's No. 1 record he will end up with the record collection of the Other, that is to say, the collection of no-one ... Ultimately, the record collection which is no one's becomes everyone's collection - though without ceasing to be no one's.'
cf Heidegger's They. Although Sartre's example is hypothetical and a limit case, it is probably, today, not too far from being the default setting of our subjectivity. I envisage meeting Sartre's 'he' and asking 'so, is this your record collection?' to which he replies, 'technically, yes. but in a more ontological sense, it belongs to the Other.'
The Hole is True
Further to my comments on Rimbaud below, I was reading Walter Benjamin’s Conversations With Brecht today, and notice that Brecht sees, shining through Le Bateau Ivre, ‘the great historical movement of which it is the expression. [..] It describes not an eccentric poet going for a walk but the flight, the escape of a man who cannot bear to live anymore inside the barriers of a class which [] was then beginning to open up even the more exotic continents to its mercantile interests.’
These conversations divulge a Brecht who is avuncular, humorous, sly, evasive, and nonchalantly insightful; a 'plumpen denker' farting and quiping and never quite revealing all. Now, although you will hear Brecht occasionally referred to as a ‘Stalinist’, we also find in these diaristic reports the playwright's comment that ‘In Russia there is a dictatorship over the proletariat’ and other such critical remarks. It should perhaps be born in mind that figures such as Brecht, charged with ‘supporting’ the Soviet Union were, firstly, in private of course much more candid and critical. Public statements were strategic. But the other key point is that it was not so much the Soviet Union they supported; rather, they were tenaciously holding onto the space they assumed it had opened up. The Russian revolution had burned a hole in the global fabric of capitalism. The fidelity of intellectuals such as Brecht was not to the Soviet Union as such but to this hole.
Of course, many would dismissively repy, as it were, 'the hole was false', no emancipatory 'space' was opened up. Consider, though, the following little example, as it appears in Zizek:
John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda — everybody can participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us.
These conversations divulge a Brecht who is avuncular, humorous, sly, evasive, and nonchalantly insightful; a 'plumpen denker' farting and quiping and never quite revealing all. Now, although you will hear Brecht occasionally referred to as a ‘Stalinist’, we also find in these diaristic reports the playwright's comment that ‘In Russia there is a dictatorship over the proletariat’ and other such critical remarks. It should perhaps be born in mind that figures such as Brecht, charged with ‘supporting’ the Soviet Union were, firstly, in private of course much more candid and critical. Public statements were strategic. But the other key point is that it was not so much the Soviet Union they supported; rather, they were tenaciously holding onto the space they assumed it had opened up. The Russian revolution had burned a hole in the global fabric of capitalism. The fidelity of intellectuals such as Brecht was not to the Soviet Union as such but to this hole.
Of course, many would dismissively repy, as it were, 'the hole was false', no emancipatory 'space' was opened up. Consider, though, the following little example, as it appears in Zizek:
John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda — everybody can participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us.
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Panegyric
Guy Debord's Panegyric is online, and well worth a look. It's no doubt been there for years, but I've only just come across it. However, I must have read it in a different translation, for the line that lodged in my head was "I have written much less than most writers, but I have drunk much more than most drinkers." In the online version, this is translated as: "I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink." For those of you interested in Debord's work, a recent book by the Italian Georgio Agamben contains an encomium to Debord and comments on his work. Agamben begins: "Debord's books constitute the clearest and most severe analysis of the miseries and slavery of a society that by now has extended its dominion over the whole planet." As Debord (I think) said: "You can't go into exile in a unified world."
Speaking of a unified world, one of my American students confided in me after a trip abroad "they don't seem to have a cafe culture in Italy, do they?" 'What?," I stammered. 'Well, I didn't see a single Starbucks all the time I was there."
As Jim Morrison might have said, 'I've been steeped in simulacra so damn long, it sure looks like the real to me."
Speaking of a unified world, one of my American students confided in me after a trip abroad "they don't seem to have a cafe culture in Italy, do they?" 'What?," I stammered. 'Well, I didn't see a single Starbucks all the time I was there."
As Jim Morrison might have said, 'I've been steeped in simulacra so damn long, it sure looks like the real to me."
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Sidney Morgenbesser
The American philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who I know about only through a university friend, has died. Stories of his quick and acerbic wit abound. My favourite is his summary judgment on Pragmatism: "Its okay in theory, but in practice it doesn't work."
His death seems rather under-reported. I heard about it at Norman Geras's blog.
His death seems rather under-reported. I heard about it at Norman Geras's blog.
From the Future
The revolutionary task of thinking (if it still has one) is not so much to see into the future - the grossest speculator can do this - but to see the present as if from the future. Adorno 's essay on Benjamin (from Prisms) makes the point -
He is driven not merely to awaken life in petrified objects - as in allegory - but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, 'ur-historical' and therefore abruptly release their significance.' & again, 'He viewed the modern age as archaic not on order to conserve the traces of a purportedly eternal truth but rather to escape the trance-like captivity of bourgeois immanence.'
This ability to see the present from elsewhere is, perhaps, impossible, but it is also necessary if one wishes to understand the world not just pragmatically and from the inside. To see the past as already historical does not imply a viewpoint outside history, however, merely one outside the present. One stares at things so intently that they wither into history. The ability to construct an 'elsewhere' whether conceptually or imaginatively is surely the primary task of any serious thinking. And no, irony - the default mode of the contemporary subject - no longer counts.
It is worth adding to Benjamin's point that not only ill the present one day be seen as past, as a 'period' with tis own ethos and historically relative prejudices, which perhaps only a few managed to really see, but that the present was once an imagined future, albieit compromised, diverted, stymied by reaction etc etc..
He is driven not merely to awaken life in petrified objects - as in allegory - but also to scrutinize living things so that they present themselves as being ancient, 'ur-historical' and therefore abruptly release their significance.' & again, 'He viewed the modern age as archaic not on order to conserve the traces of a purportedly eternal truth but rather to escape the trance-like captivity of bourgeois immanence.'
This ability to see the present from elsewhere is, perhaps, impossible, but it is also necessary if one wishes to understand the world not just pragmatically and from the inside. To see the past as already historical does not imply a viewpoint outside history, however, merely one outside the present. One stares at things so intently that they wither into history. The ability to construct an 'elsewhere' whether conceptually or imaginatively is surely the primary task of any serious thinking. And no, irony - the default mode of the contemporary subject - no longer counts.
It is worth adding to Benjamin's point that not only ill the present one day be seen as past, as a 'period' with tis own ethos and historically relative prejudices, which perhaps only a few managed to really see, but that the present was once an imagined future, albieit compromised, diverted, stymied by reaction etc etc..
The Subject as Spark.
Occasionally two quotes lodged in one's head will unexpectedly join hands. For example, this sentence from a book on Lacan by Bruce Fink - "The subject [is a] spark that flies between two signifiers .. whereby that which is other is made one's own' at once recalled this -
"I live only here and there in a small word whose vowel ('thrust' for example) I use my useless ehad in for a moment. The first and last letter are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.' (Kafka)
Ok, they may not be saying exactly the same thing. Neverthless (or perhaps because of this difference), for me the one sheds light on the other. I take Fink to mean: language is something first of all foreign, Other, part of the Symbolic Order that pre-dates and pre-forms us. The signifiers of language are a foreign substance ingrained within us. Only between and across those foreign signifiers, in the way we join them up, jump between them, connect them etc is there a subject. The subject, then, in Lacanian parlance, is this relation to the preceding Symbolic Order, it is the peculiar 'twist' with which we jump between signifiers. Kafka's 'fishlike emotion' is precisely this spark, this flicker that passes through and between signs, like an electrical current between points..
[n.b. this post may be revised to make it more intelligble]
"I live only here and there in a small word whose vowel ('thrust' for example) I use my useless ehad in for a moment. The first and last letter are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion.' (Kafka)
Ok, they may not be saying exactly the same thing. Neverthless (or perhaps because of this difference), for me the one sheds light on the other. I take Fink to mean: language is something first of all foreign, Other, part of the Symbolic Order that pre-dates and pre-forms us. The signifiers of language are a foreign substance ingrained within us. Only between and across those foreign signifiers, in the way we join them up, jump between them, connect them etc is there a subject. The subject, then, in Lacanian parlance, is this relation to the preceding Symbolic Order, it is the peculiar 'twist' with which we jump between signifiers. Kafka's 'fishlike emotion' is precisely this spark, this flicker that passes through and between signs, like an electrical current between points..
[n.b. this post may be revised to make it more intelligble]
More Hilarious Kafka
"To believe in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.'
"What is it that binds you more intimately to these inpenetrable talking, eye-blinking bodies [If i recall correctly, he is speaking about his family] than the any other thing, the penholder in your hand, for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don't belong to the same species, that's the very reason you asked the question."
It is the shape of these thoughts which so appeals, and one can see why it appealled to a dialectical thinker such as Walter Benjamin.
"What is it that binds you more intimately to these inpenetrable talking, eye-blinking bodies [If i recall correctly, he is speaking about his family] than the any other thing, the penholder in your hand, for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don't belong to the same species, that's the very reason you asked the question."
It is the shape of these thoughts which so appeals, and one can see why it appealled to a dialectical thinker such as Walter Benjamin.
Monday, August 02, 2004
Rimbaud in London
Quite a nice online translation of Illuminations. Many of the descriptions are of London, e.g.., the Thames, 'wide as an arm of the sea'.
Rimbaud as ontological nomad, centreless, passing through a series of masks and incarnations - 'I am an Other', the familiar is pre-empted by the foreign, and the only way to outmanoeuvre this foreigness is to actively embrace it, to claim it as one's project: 'becoming Other'.
In the Rimbaudian universe, one contingent alteration truns the world on its axis - 'A tap with your finger on the drum releases all sounds and begins the newharmony'. A stray detail reconfigures the whole field of experience. The self is no longer anchored.; decentred, it awaits the clinamen, the meaningless intrusion that might lend it temporary vitality or density.
Rimbaud flees to Africa, so that he might live, like T.E. LAwrence inside what is (for the European) an objective correlative of his own centreless, featureless Being - the vast anonymity of this dry continent, its utter Otherness. The desert bleaches the clothes and the mind. Rimbaud becomes a commodity trader - a mere medium, a point of exchange, a node where abstractions meet.
Rimbaud as ontological nomad, centreless, passing through a series of masks and incarnations - 'I am an Other', the familiar is pre-empted by the foreign, and the only way to outmanoeuvre this foreigness is to actively embrace it, to claim it as one's project: 'becoming Other'.
In the Rimbaudian universe, one contingent alteration truns the world on its axis - 'A tap with your finger on the drum releases all sounds and begins the newharmony'. A stray detail reconfigures the whole field of experience. The self is no longer anchored.; decentred, it awaits the clinamen, the meaningless intrusion that might lend it temporary vitality or density.
Rimbaud flees to Africa, so that he might live, like T.E. LAwrence inside what is (for the European) an objective correlative of his own centreless, featureless Being - the vast anonymity of this dry continent, its utter Otherness. The desert bleaches the clothes and the mind. Rimbaud becomes a commodity trader - a mere medium, a point of exchange, a node where abstractions meet.
Unregistered Letters
Acocdrnig to a rscheearchr at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rulset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Anyway, I'm sure this can be used to illustrate all kinds of philosophical and political points, a task which I will, if I may, pass on to you, reader.
Sunday, August 01, 2004
An Image From Hebron
The words of an Israeli soldier, cited in this article.
'That morning, a fairly big group arrived in Hebron, around 15 Jews from France. They were all religious Jews. They were in a good mood, really having a great time, and I spent my entire shift following this gang of Jews around and trying to keep them from destroying the town. They just wandered around, picked up every stone they saw, and started throwing them in Arabs' windows, and overturning whatever they came across. There's no horror story here: they didn't catch some Arab and kill him or anything like that, but what bothered me is that maybe someone told them that there's a place in the world where a Jew can take all of his rage out on Arab people, and simply do anything. Come to a Palestinian town, and do whatever he wants, and the soldiers will always be there to back him up. Because that was my job, to protect them and make sure that nothing happened to them.'
'That morning, a fairly big group arrived in Hebron, around 15 Jews from France. They were all religious Jews. They were in a good mood, really having a great time, and I spent my entire shift following this gang of Jews around and trying to keep them from destroying the town. They just wandered around, picked up every stone they saw, and started throwing them in Arabs' windows, and overturning whatever they came across. There's no horror story here: they didn't catch some Arab and kill him or anything like that, but what bothered me is that maybe someone told them that there's a place in the world where a Jew can take all of his rage out on Arab people, and simply do anything. Come to a Palestinian town, and do whatever he wants, and the soldiers will always be there to back him up. Because that was my job, to protect them and make sure that nothing happened to them.'
Friday, July 30, 2004
Night Words
Some of us will always have a soft spot for the essays of John Berger, that ol ersatz-peasant Marxist-Mystic. Came across a fairly recent example of his work today, by chance, on the tyranny of the New World Order:
........The next step is to reject all the tyranny's discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang's code-word, stolen from humanity [..] The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realise that the media play a crucial role, not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.
Any tyranny's manipulation of the media is an index of its fears. The present one lives in fear of the world's desperation. A fear so deep that the adjective desperate, except when it means dangerous, is never used.
Without money each daily human need becomes a pain.
Those who have filched power - and they are not all in office, so they reckon on a continuity of that power beyond presidential elections - pretend to be saving the world and offering its population the chance to become their clients. The world consumer is sacred. What they don't add is that consumers only matter because they generate profit, which is the only thing that is really sacred. This sleight of hand leads us to the crux.
The claim to be saving the world masks the plotter's assumption that a large part of the world, including most of the continent of Africa and a considerable part of South America, is irredeemable. In fact, every corner which cannot be part of their centre is irredeemable. And such a conclusion follows inevitably from the dogma that the only salvation is money, and the only global future is the one their priorities insist upon, prior ities which, with false names given to them, are in reality nothing more nor less than their benefits.
The weathered face, the narrowed eyes, the trained and visionary intensity, the weight of silence behind and between each word. One only wishes one could more often give his stinging sentiments unconditional assent.
........The next step is to reject all the tyranny's discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang's code-word, stolen from humanity [..] The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realise that the media play a crucial role, not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.
Any tyranny's manipulation of the media is an index of its fears. The present one lives in fear of the world's desperation. A fear so deep that the adjective desperate, except when it means dangerous, is never used.
Without money each daily human need becomes a pain.
Those who have filched power - and they are not all in office, so they reckon on a continuity of that power beyond presidential elections - pretend to be saving the world and offering its population the chance to become their clients. The world consumer is sacred. What they don't add is that consumers only matter because they generate profit, which is the only thing that is really sacred. This sleight of hand leads us to the crux.
The claim to be saving the world masks the plotter's assumption that a large part of the world, including most of the continent of Africa and a considerable part of South America, is irredeemable. In fact, every corner which cannot be part of their centre is irredeemable. And such a conclusion follows inevitably from the dogma that the only salvation is money, and the only global future is the one their priorities insist upon, prior ities which, with false names given to them, are in reality nothing more nor less than their benefits.
The weathered face, the narrowed eyes, the trained and visionary intensity, the weight of silence behind and between each word. One only wishes one could more often give his stinging sentiments unconditional assent.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Tibetan Prayer Wheel
Occasionally, Freud can sound surprisingly (well, vaguely) like Marx:
.If a culture has not yet got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share
But of course, they do share these commodities, only at the level of the image. As we know, modern technologies of reproduction mean that the semblance of things can be skimmed off them and sold as a commodity. Not wealth itself, not success, not jouissance, creative fulfilment etc but the electronic facsimiles thereof is what we are sold. There is indeed a world where people are happy, rich, where they experience intense sexual pleasure and careless freedom. It is not ours, but this does not matter, its windows are curtainless and we have that historically unique and sovereign freedom: the freedom to watch.
And gradually, our responses as watchers are folded back into the spectacle watched. An early example of this was canned laughter: someone else laughs on our behalf. Who is this someone? It is the technology itself, the machine. And isn’t ‘Big Brother’ amongst other things a kind of ‘canned boredom’ – we watch others being bored, as it were, on our behalf. Zizek notes that the original model for this was the phenomenon of designated mourners hired to cry at funerals in certain cultures. The purpose of this (to us) strange ritual was to externalise one’s grief, delegate it onto a kind of exterior apparatus (ie another human being). Someone else does for us. Research showed that although people watching comedy shows with canned laughter laughed less, the physiological effects were as if they had indeed laughed. Ditto with the hired mourners. The logic is partly that of the Tibetan prayer wheel: we insert a piece of paper with a prayer into a mechanical wheel, we turn the wheel and the prayer is relayed to the appropriate authority – the prayer wheel preys for us (this is another of Zizek’s examples). The logic of the Tibetan prayer wheel is increasingly that of post-modern culture as a whole - we delegate to the electronic apparatus what we previously did ourselves.
Freud continues:
It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, neither has nor deserves the chance of a lasting existence.
.If a culture has not yet got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share
But of course, they do share these commodities, only at the level of the image. As we know, modern technologies of reproduction mean that the semblance of things can be skimmed off them and sold as a commodity. Not wealth itself, not success, not jouissance, creative fulfilment etc but the electronic facsimiles thereof is what we are sold. There is indeed a world where people are happy, rich, where they experience intense sexual pleasure and careless freedom. It is not ours, but this does not matter, its windows are curtainless and we have that historically unique and sovereign freedom: the freedom to watch.
And gradually, our responses as watchers are folded back into the spectacle watched. An early example of this was canned laughter: someone else laughs on our behalf. Who is this someone? It is the technology itself, the machine. And isn’t ‘Big Brother’ amongst other things a kind of ‘canned boredom’ – we watch others being bored, as it were, on our behalf. Zizek notes that the original model for this was the phenomenon of designated mourners hired to cry at funerals in certain cultures. The purpose of this (to us) strange ritual was to externalise one’s grief, delegate it onto a kind of exterior apparatus (ie another human being). Someone else does for us. Research showed that although people watching comedy shows with canned laughter laughed less, the physiological effects were as if they had indeed laughed. Ditto with the hired mourners. The logic is partly that of the Tibetan prayer wheel: we insert a piece of paper with a prayer into a mechanical wheel, we turn the wheel and the prayer is relayed to the appropriate authority – the prayer wheel preys for us (this is another of Zizek’s examples). The logic of the Tibetan prayer wheel is increasingly that of post-modern culture as a whole - we delegate to the electronic apparatus what we previously did ourselves.
Freud continues:
It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, neither has nor deserves the chance of a lasting existence.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Symbolic Ordure ii
More thoughts on Lenin’s letter to Gorky (see below).
Ideology operates on a level prior to Belief, it is embodied in behaviour. Wired into the way we are forced to live there are silent imperatives, unspoken propositions about the world. Working in a factory, surfing the internet, window shopping on a Saturday are already animated by the implicit nerves of the ideological. Zizek makes the point with reference to ‘commodity fetishism’. It is not a matter of incorrect conscious beliefs about commodiities, but consists in the fact that
in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, [people] are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.
The ideological illusion inheres in the practice. In some sense, therefore, the system ‘justifies itself’, immanently in its material praxis and without recourse to intellectual content.
And so to the intellectuals. If we accept the preceding argument, then the explicit ‘ideas’ produced by the intellectuals are a kind of surplus. The system, already self-justifying – receives a kind of gratuitous (secondary) rationalization though the intellectuals. But it is utterly surplus to requirements, ie, it is excrement. When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.
Ideology operates on a level prior to Belief, it is embodied in behaviour. Wired into the way we are forced to live there are silent imperatives, unspoken propositions about the world. Working in a factory, surfing the internet, window shopping on a Saturday are already animated by the implicit nerves of the ideological. Zizek makes the point with reference to ‘commodity fetishism’. It is not a matter of incorrect conscious beliefs about commodiities, but consists in the fact that
in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, [people] are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.
The ideological illusion inheres in the practice. In some sense, therefore, the system ‘justifies itself’, immanently in its material praxis and without recourse to intellectual content.
And so to the intellectuals. If we accept the preceding argument, then the explicit ‘ideas’ produced by the intellectuals are a kind of surplus. The system, already self-justifying – receives a kind of gratuitous (secondary) rationalization though the intellectuals. But it is utterly surplus to requirements, ie, it is excrement. When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.
A Psychoanalysis of Capitalism? (Or: the Boss Stole My Jouissance)
....... The employee never enjoys that surplus product: he or she 'loses' it. The work process produces him or her as an 'alienated' subject ($), simultaneously producing a loss (a). the capitlaist, as Other, enjoys that excess product, and thus teh subject finds him or herself in the unenviable situation of working for the Other's enjoyment, sacrificing him or herself for the Other's jouissance - precisely what the neurotic most abhors!
(Bruce Fink)
(Bruce Fink)
Monday, July 26, 2004
Various Reasons Why Experience is not the Litmus Test of Truth
Knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presumptions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.
Only what they do not first need to understand they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.
Repudiation of the current cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's finger tips, so to speak, but at the same time time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Symbolic Ordure
"The intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact they're not its brains, they're its shit."
(Lenin, Letter to Gorky, Sptember 15th, 1919.)
For some reason I was reminded of this quote after reading Oliver Kamm's attack on the mighty SWP.
Just to be clear, I do regard Lenin's comment as having intellectual - and not merely scatalogical - content. The point, presumably, is that intellectuals entertain the illusion that they are in the engine room of society (and that ideas precede and determine social organisation). The truth is that they are (more often) a kind of inessential by-product, spontaneously secreted, as it were, by the social machinery, but misrecognising themselves as the very fuel by which it runs.
(Lenin, Letter to Gorky, Sptember 15th, 1919.)
For some reason I was reminded of this quote after reading Oliver Kamm's attack on the mighty SWP.
Just to be clear, I do regard Lenin's comment as having intellectual - and not merely scatalogical - content. The point, presumably, is that intellectuals entertain the illusion that they are in the engine room of society (and that ideas precede and determine social organisation). The truth is that they are (more often) a kind of inessential by-product, spontaneously secreted, as it were, by the social machinery, but misrecognising themselves as the very fuel by which it runs.
The Long Sunday
I initially considered naming this blog 'The Long Sunday', as in this line from the hilarious Franz Kafka:
"You are reserved for a great Monday. Fine, but Sunday will never end." (Diary, 2 November 1921).
[Probably should have, all things considered]
Another of his uproarious one liners: "Some deny misery by pointing to the sun; others deny the sun by pointing to misery."
"You are reserved for a great Monday. Fine, but Sunday will never end." (Diary, 2 November 1921).
[Probably should have, all things considered]
Another of his uproarious one liners: "Some deny misery by pointing to the sun; others deny the sun by pointing to misery."
Friday, July 23, 2004
Cabala the Ghetto Demon
Speaking of the Cabala brought to mind the Ted Hughes poem ‘Folktale’, which deals with his relation to Assia Wevill:
She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.
[…]
So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found.
. The way I read it, what he desires in Wevill is (to use a Lacanian formulation) that which was ‘in her more than herself’, her agalma, her secret treasure. She is the object of his desire, yes, but the cause of his desire is this secret thing, which, of course she does not in fact possess; conversely, he embodies for her a certain kind of English reserve and decorum. And each ‘ransacks’ the other for this secret, like the child opening the kinderegg. But what, specifically, is ‘Cabala the ghetto demon’?
One first needs to know a little about the ‘alluring but fragile’ Wevill, originally a war-time Jewish refugee
the bizarre fate of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath. An aspiring poet and strikingly beautiful Russian-German-Jewish woman, Wevill continued a tempestuous relationship with Hughes after Plath’s suicide, bearing his child, a girl called Shura, in 1967. Two years later, depressed by Hughes’ inability to make a commitment to her, Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in her own kitchen, in a grotesque re-enactment of her rival’s death
Hughes is brutally candid about the reasons for his desire – the dark allure of Jewish suffering, the sex-appeal of Otherness, even the horror of the fate of the Jews from which Wevill figures as a miraculous escapee, and the shadow of which lends to her unusual beauty a deliciously intolerable pathos. Needless to say, as Hughes recognizes, she does not actually possess these things. She serves as their support, their sign. And in trying to access these fantasy objects, the actual empirical person is destroyed.
She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.
[…]
So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found.
. The way I read it, what he desires in Wevill is (to use a Lacanian formulation) that which was ‘in her more than herself’, her agalma, her secret treasure. She is the object of his desire, yes, but the cause of his desire is this secret thing, which, of course she does not in fact possess; conversely, he embodies for her a certain kind of English reserve and decorum. And each ‘ransacks’ the other for this secret, like the child opening the kinderegg. But what, specifically, is ‘Cabala the ghetto demon’?
One first needs to know a little about the ‘alluring but fragile’ Wevill, originally a war-time Jewish refugee
the bizarre fate of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath. An aspiring poet and strikingly beautiful Russian-German-Jewish woman, Wevill continued a tempestuous relationship with Hughes after Plath’s suicide, bearing his child, a girl called Shura, in 1967. Two years later, depressed by Hughes’ inability to make a commitment to her, Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in her own kitchen, in a grotesque re-enactment of her rival’s death
Hughes is brutally candid about the reasons for his desire – the dark allure of Jewish suffering, the sex-appeal of Otherness, even the horror of the fate of the Jews from which Wevill figures as a miraculous escapee, and the shadow of which lends to her unusual beauty a deliciously intolerable pathos. Needless to say, as Hughes recognizes, she does not actually possess these things. She serves as their support, their sign. And in trying to access these fantasy objects, the actual empirical person is destroyed.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Witness me.
Scragg sends me a text message: I am on beach lookin out 2 c [sea]. serene. It is not enough for her to experience this, she wants also to be envisaged by another. To be pictured lends her being a new density. The 'mobile' is her wee portable witness. (And of course, she now has a picture phone, another key tool for those who rather too literally take Berkeley's 'to be is to be perceived'.)
A note from the University
On teaching:
'Please be sure to make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.' Apparently some students have complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class.
The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded. Employee sues employer for being made redundant, after employer fails to point out that attendance is compulsory. Vastly overweight man sues McDonald's for not providing him with written documentation that lard-burgers are not entirely compatible with optimum athleticism. A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.
'Please be sure to make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.' Apparently some students have complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class.
The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded. Employee sues employer for being made redundant, after employer fails to point out that attendance is compulsory. Vastly overweight man sues McDonald's for not providing him with written documentation that lard-burgers are not entirely compatible with optimum athleticism. A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.
Monday, July 19, 2004
Fuel
Who could live without the dark potency of coffee? Not me
Barthes somewhere speaks of it as a kind of flint: it generates cognitive sparks, quickens the pulse and focuses the mind rather than diffusing it. After drinking a small skull-white cup of this drink, a text which had been blank is suddenly glossed with thought.
Barthes somewhere speaks of it as a kind of flint: it generates cognitive sparks, quickens the pulse and focuses the mind rather than diffusing it. After drinking a small skull-white cup of this drink, a text which had been blank is suddenly glossed with thought.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
The New is always premature (2 quotes)
It was Beethoven's quartets themselves [..] that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging the audience for Beethoven's quartets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in the quality of artists at least in the quality of minds, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is of persons capable of appreciating it.. it is essential that the work should create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work would not be posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half a century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist, if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, should launch it, where there is sufficient depth, boldly into the distant future.
&
As all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speakers appear to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. .. people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual.)
&
As all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speakers appear to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. .. people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual.)
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Ghetto for the Intellectually Malnourished
Some of you may have encountered a number of blogspots purportedly dealing with BBC bias. Among them the unimaginatively titled 'biased-bbc.blogspot. Like many such right wing cells, it dramatizes itself as some noble minority fighting a left-liberal establishment.
Now, you might think a recent report on the subject of BBC bias would arouse its interest and engagment. Instead, we get the following post:
'BBC biased towards Israel, says a recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group. That's that then. We pack up shop.'
Despite the clumsy irony, this statement speaks volumes. Why would a blog that is genuinely concerned with bias 'pack up shop' in response to a report on BBC bias? Well, see, its not their particular brand of bias is it? More bizarrely, the sure implication is that if teh BBC was biased toward Israel, the blog would be perfectly happy.
Of course, they have no genuine interest in BBC bias. What they do have an interest in is promoting a very obvious right-wing agenda under the disingenuous guise of a concern for ‘objectivity’. Anything outside a pro-conservative/ pro-republican line is vilified as a pathological deviation. What is also striking is the seeming unfamiliarity of any of their writers with elementary logic or the basic tools of media analysis. The whole enterprise is without rigour, humour or self-insight. Fortunately, it is also entirely without efficacy
Now, you might think a recent report on the subject of BBC bias would arouse its interest and engagment. Instead, we get the following post:
'BBC biased towards Israel, says a recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group. That's that then. We pack up shop.'
Despite the clumsy irony, this statement speaks volumes. Why would a blog that is genuinely concerned with bias 'pack up shop' in response to a report on BBC bias? Well, see, its not their particular brand of bias is it? More bizarrely, the sure implication is that if teh BBC was biased toward Israel, the blog would be perfectly happy.
Of course, they have no genuine interest in BBC bias. What they do have an interest in is promoting a very obvious right-wing agenda under the disingenuous guise of a concern for ‘objectivity’. Anything outside a pro-conservative/ pro-republican line is vilified as a pathological deviation. What is also striking is the seeming unfamiliarity of any of their writers with elementary logic or the basic tools of media analysis. The whole enterprise is without rigour, humour or self-insight. Fortunately, it is also entirely without efficacy
Friday, June 18, 2004
Unlawful combatants
from zizek:
'The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a 'war' operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into the very notion of a 'war on terror' — a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire. Which brings me back to the 'unlawful combatant', who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals — the US rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political Enemy excluded from the political arena.
This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer — 'ethnic-religious conflicts' which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers — and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict — the US-dominated global force — has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 'local population'.'
'The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a 'war' operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into the very notion of a 'war on terror' — a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire. Which brings me back to the 'unlawful combatant', who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals — the US rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political Enemy excluded from the political arena.
This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer — 'ethnic-religious conflicts' which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers — and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict — the US-dominated global force — has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 'local population'.'
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Pontifications
I was accused of 'pontificating' from my armchair (about Nicaragua) the other day, by one who had 'actually been there'. And so he had - armed only with the thin key of anecdotal detail he was determined to unlock the supra-empirical truth.
Anyway, i was reminded of Gustave Flaubert's 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'. One could add an entry:
'Armchairs. Pontificate from them. Or rather, accuse others of so doing.'
Anyway, i was reminded of Gustave Flaubert's 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'. One could add an entry:
'Armchairs. Pontificate from them. Or rather, accuse others of so doing.'
Monday, June 14, 2004
The Inexhaustible Wisdom of Marcel Proust.
On the subject of Received Opinion (see below), some of you might remember the cafe proprieter described in A la Recherche:
"He was in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference.. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the remarks of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere."
"He was in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference.. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the remarks of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere."
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Friday, June 11, 2004
Helpful
"It might be helpful to us to rid ourselves of the habit of hearing only what we already understand"
Received Opinion
What passes for thinking borrows its authority from the invisible network of 'recived opinion' that precedes and underwrites it. When, for example, one makes a statement about the 'fight against terrorism,' one presupposes and reposes upon that invisible network. Thus you claim authority for yourself by standing on the shoulders of 'what everyone knows'. And in so far as your authority is borrowed from that which you repose on (Opinion) you are its proxy. If however you say, like Chomsky, 'the USA must stop engaging in terrorism', you are brave enough not to rely on the invisible network of Opinion. Courageous because received opinion will of course vent its furies upon you. It is furious that 'what everybody knows' has been bypassed. Needless to say, the critique of this invisible network is the starting point of thought. Reading the mainstream newspapers is like encountering an organised campaign to prevent one reaching this starting point.
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