An arresting and poignant excerpt from an interview with Isaac Deutscher, courtesy of here:
My father was an orthodox Jew, in love with German culture, philosophy, and poetry. ... He was always wanting to read German literature and German periodicals with me. He had himself, in his youth, published essays in the Neue Freie Presse, the best-known Viennese newspaper; he had been correspondent of the Warsaw Hazefra, the first daily to appear in the Hebrew language; and he had also written a Little book in Hebrew about Spinoza, with the Latin title Amor Dei Intelectualis. Spinoza was one of his heroes; Heine the other. My father also had great respect for Lassalle, but the highest intellectual ideal for him, apart from the Hebrew writers was, of course, Goethe. I did not share my father's partiality for German poetry. I was a Polish patriot. Mickiewicz and Slowacki were dearer and closer to me. For this reason I never learned the German language thoroughly either. My father used to often say to me: 'Yes, you want to write all your fine poetry only in Polish. I know you will be a great writer one day' - for my father had a quite exaggerated idea of my literary talent, and wanted me to exercise it in a 'world language'. 'German', he would say, 'is the world language. Why should you bury all your talent in a provincial language? You have only to go beyond Auschwitz ...' - Auschwitz was just near us, on the frontier - 'you only have to go Auschwitz, and practically nobody will understand you any more, you and your fine Polish language. You really must learn German.' That was his ever-recurring theme: 'You have only to go beyond Auschwitz and you will be totally lost, my son!' Impatient as I was, I often interrupted him: 'I already know what you are going to say, father - You have only to go beyond Auschwitz, and you will be lost.' The tragic truth is that my father never went beyond Auschwitz. During the Second World War he disappeared into Auschwitz."
Thursday, January 27, 2005
General and Particular
"It is just this passing on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner accepted the particular than it reduces it to a thought station [...] Knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled."
Adorno, Minima Moralia
Adorno, Minima Moralia
Celan/ Beckett
John Felstiner, Paul Celan meets Samuel Beckett
'Celan me dépasse', Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, "Celan leaves me behind." But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett's trilogy opens with a mother's death and ends with The Unnamable's last words: "in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Six years before his suicide by drowning, Paul Celan had written this poem:
Where?
At night in crumbling rockmass.
In trouble's rubble and scree,
in slowest tumult,
the wisdom-pit named Never.
Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow — it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
Since "shadow" is masculine in German, maybe those final lines are saying, "he fights his way / deeper down, / free."'
'Celan me dépasse', Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, "Celan leaves me behind." But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett's trilogy opens with a mother's death and ends with The Unnamable's last words: "in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Six years before his suicide by drowning, Paul Celan had written this poem:
Where?
At night in crumbling rockmass.
In trouble's rubble and scree,
in slowest tumult,
the wisdom-pit named Never.
Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow — it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
Since "shadow" is masculine in German, maybe those final lines are saying, "he fights his way / deeper down, / free."'
Grandville (1803-1847)
For the importance of Grandville, see Susan Buck-Morss's excellent Dialectics of Seeing and Agamben's Stanzas.
For the importance of Grandville, see Susan Buck-Morss's excellent Dialectics of Seeing and Agamben's Stanzas.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Specious
"The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it." Adorno.
The twists and turns of a convoluted and untenable argument are frequently signs that some other content is being disavowed.
I’m obviously not alone in being rather dismayed by the contortions and confusions of the MCB over plans to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz.
What has stopped the MCB from attempting to think about Auschwitz in its particularity is, presumably, their view of the Israeli state. But whereas one might indeed, in thinking about the origins of the state of Israel, consider Auschwitz, there is absolutely no reason, in thinking about Auschwitz, to consider the actions of the state of Israel. What connects the two for some, and perhaps the MCB, is the signifier ‘Jew’. And it is precisely this conflation, used in whatever context, which should be avoided at all costs. Their is nothing "Jewish' about the actions of the Israeli state, and the 'categorical imperative' that Adorno speaks of, that Auschwitz not happen again, is universal in its address.
There is thus no reason why, in commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, we should consider the plight of the Palestinians, as the MCB suggest. And hopefully one does not need to add that what should merit our concern about the plight of the Palestinians is not the outrage that Muslims should be treated like this (many, of course, are not Muslims) but that anyone should be.
The twists and turns of a convoluted and untenable argument are frequently signs that some other content is being disavowed.
I’m obviously not alone in being rather dismayed by the contortions and confusions of the MCB over plans to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz.
What has stopped the MCB from attempting to think about Auschwitz in its particularity is, presumably, their view of the Israeli state. But whereas one might indeed, in thinking about the origins of the state of Israel, consider Auschwitz, there is absolutely no reason, in thinking about Auschwitz, to consider the actions of the state of Israel. What connects the two for some, and perhaps the MCB, is the signifier ‘Jew’. And it is precisely this conflation, used in whatever context, which should be avoided at all costs. Their is nothing "Jewish' about the actions of the Israeli state, and the 'categorical imperative' that Adorno speaks of, that Auschwitz not happen again, is universal in its address.
There is thus no reason why, in commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, we should consider the plight of the Palestinians, as the MCB suggest. And hopefully one does not need to add that what should merit our concern about the plight of the Palestinians is not the outrage that Muslims should be treated like this (many, of course, are not Muslims) but that anyone should be.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
The violence of a sign
"Who is in search of the truth? And what does the man who says "I want the truth" mean? Proust does not believe that man, nor even a supposedly pure mind, has by nature a desire for truth, a will-to-truth. We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence that impels us to such a search."
Deleuze, Proust and Signs.
"There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace."
What kind of ‘signs’ are these? Not ones that immediately bare their signified. With the Proustian sign we intuit that it signifies without knowing what it signifies, and this delay and opacity between that and what is what incites the desire for truth.
You will say this is a familiar enough Deleuzian theme: the pursuit of truth, or thinking itself, is prompted always by a shock from outside thought altogether, a shock which puzzles and 'forces' thinking, and that Deleuze has simply read this ‘into’ Proust. But I wonder whether it isn't the other way around, and whether Deleuze doesn’t, at least partly, first learn this concept from Proust, as he seems to learn or generate so many of his concepts from literature (at least before his own thinking arguably ossifies into an endlessly repeated ensemble of concerns).
n.b., the distinction between that it signifies and what it signifies is taken up in a psychoanalytic context by Jean Laplanche, and also, very productively, by Eric Santner. (One of Santner's talks is available online here)
Deleuze, Proust and Signs.
"There is always the violence of a sign that forces us into the search, that robs us of peace."
What kind of ‘signs’ are these? Not ones that immediately bare their signified. With the Proustian sign we intuit that it signifies without knowing what it signifies, and this delay and opacity between that and what is what incites the desire for truth.
You will say this is a familiar enough Deleuzian theme: the pursuit of truth, or thinking itself, is prompted always by a shock from outside thought altogether, a shock which puzzles and 'forces' thinking, and that Deleuze has simply read this ‘into’ Proust. But I wonder whether it isn't the other way around, and whether Deleuze doesn’t, at least partly, first learn this concept from Proust, as he seems to learn or generate so many of his concepts from literature (at least before his own thinking arguably ossifies into an endlessly repeated ensemble of concerns).
n.b., the distinction between that it signifies and what it signifies is taken up in a psychoanalytic context by Jean Laplanche, and also, very productively, by Eric Santner. (One of Santner's talks is available online here)
Saturday, January 22, 2005
'Theory'
The subject of 'Theory' seems to have attracted several people's attention recently, including John Holbo, philosopher Jonathan Derbyshire and polemicist Oliver Kamm. As these all mention Terry Eagleton, it might be worthwhile quoting Eagleton's opening remarks on theory from this book:
“The economist J. M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory. This is also true of literary students and critics. [..] Some students and critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work.’ The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a ‘literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it.”
What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would then be to reverse this process and to demonstrate the theoretical genealogy of the naively 'pre-theoretical' standpoint. Thus, those who are 'spontaneously attuned to the text' and with a real 'feel for literature' are retrospectively revealed to have been Liberal Humanists (or whatever) who use literature endlessly to to re-tell the same old story or to extract conclusions anticipated or even generated by their own unacknowledged 'method'.
This indeed would seem to be the starting point of Theory - the naive, immediate stance is a exposed as a lie. The anti-Theory allegation that literature should not be 'contaminated' with politics or conceptual assumptions presupposes precisely what is at issue - the claim that 'contamination' was there from the start.
__
Is to ‘theorise’ simply to reflect rigorously upon one’s assumptions – concerning both the object of study (‘literature’ for example) and the method employed – and to engage in detailed analysis only after or in conjunction with such reflection? If this is the case, then any academic discipline without ‘theory’ would scarcely be a discipline at all and the opposition to theory would be baffling.
But the objection (or ‘resistance’) to theory is seldom theory in this sense. More typically, it refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and ‘deconstruction’. If what unites these various ‘theories’ or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then ‘Theory’ would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category. I might seem odd, for example, that various theories, such as American New Criticism (Indeed, this omission might seem to reinforce Eagleton’s Keynesian point), seem to escape the anti-theory arguments altogether.
It might also seem that this concern with ‘theory’ is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism.
The repeated objection to the various theories grouped under ‘Theory’ is that they typically act as no more than a conceptual template which is ‘imposed’ on the text, and which fails to reflect or respond to the text’s specific textures and rhythms – that they fail, perhaps, to recognise the extent to which literary texts (maybe unlike other objects of study) actually dictate or re-invent the criteria by which they are experienced and assessed. This is fine, although the implicit definition of literary objects, as things with their own singular ‘grain’ and demands, is itself a theoretical conclusion and one expressed very eloquently by the eminently ‘theoretical’ Adorno (amongst many others). It’s true that there is nothing more tedious than a critic ‘discovering’ in a text, yet again, an illustration of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. But this is hardly a problem with ‘Theory’ per se, and is more an amateurish ‘application’ of theory. Besides, the older ‘pre-theoretical’ approaches can be equally guilty of this – finding in a text yet another instance of man’s tragic dignity or whatever.
__
It seems to me that while the mechanical ‘application’ of theory or the use of texts to ‘illustrate’ pre-decided theoretical concepts and conclusions is indeed a tedious and undesirable aspect of current academic work, it is not really feasible or desirable to ‘subtract’ theory and get back to some putative ‘unmediated’ relation to texts. What is needed, for one thing, is a reminder that not only can theory open up and illuminate texts in new and various ways, but also that texts can in turn question and contribute to theory. It struck me, for instance, reading Deleuze’s excellent book on Proust, that Deleuze was not simply ‘applying’ theory/ concepts to Proust’s text, wasn’t reading the work according to the logic of pre-formed concepts, but actually generating concepts out of the text itself. His conceptual armoury was being innervated and refined by the challenge of Proust’s text.
“The economist J. M. Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory. This is also true of literary students and critics. [..] Some students and critics also protest that literary theory ‘gets in between the reader and the work.’ The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a ‘literary work’ was in the first place, or how we were to read it.”
What passes as spontaneous insight and theory-free close reading is shot through with the reified or shrivelled remains of earlier theories, which have now become mere second nature and therefore invisible/unconscious. The first task of Theory would then be to reverse this process and to demonstrate the theoretical genealogy of the naively 'pre-theoretical' standpoint. Thus, those who are 'spontaneously attuned to the text' and with a real 'feel for literature' are retrospectively revealed to have been Liberal Humanists (or whatever) who use literature endlessly to to re-tell the same old story or to extract conclusions anticipated or even generated by their own unacknowledged 'method'.
This indeed would seem to be the starting point of Theory - the naive, immediate stance is a exposed as a lie. The anti-Theory allegation that literature should not be 'contaminated' with politics or conceptual assumptions presupposes precisely what is at issue - the claim that 'contamination' was there from the start.
__
Is to ‘theorise’ simply to reflect rigorously upon one’s assumptions – concerning both the object of study (‘literature’ for example) and the method employed – and to engage in detailed analysis only after or in conjunction with such reflection? If this is the case, then any academic discipline without ‘theory’ would scarcely be a discipline at all and the opposition to theory would be baffling.
But the objection (or ‘resistance’) to theory is seldom theory in this sense. More typically, it refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and ‘deconstruction’. If what unites these various ‘theories’ or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then ‘Theory’ would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category. I might seem odd, for example, that various theories, such as American New Criticism (Indeed, this omission might seem to reinforce Eagleton’s Keynesian point), seem to escape the anti-theory arguments altogether.
It might also seem that this concern with ‘theory’ is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism.
The repeated objection to the various theories grouped under ‘Theory’ is that they typically act as no more than a conceptual template which is ‘imposed’ on the text, and which fails to reflect or respond to the text’s specific textures and rhythms – that they fail, perhaps, to recognise the extent to which literary texts (maybe unlike other objects of study) actually dictate or re-invent the criteria by which they are experienced and assessed. This is fine, although the implicit definition of literary objects, as things with their own singular ‘grain’ and demands, is itself a theoretical conclusion and one expressed very eloquently by the eminently ‘theoretical’ Adorno (amongst many others). It’s true that there is nothing more tedious than a critic ‘discovering’ in a text, yet again, an illustration of Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary. But this is hardly a problem with ‘Theory’ per se, and is more an amateurish ‘application’ of theory. Besides, the older ‘pre-theoretical’ approaches can be equally guilty of this – finding in a text yet another instance of man’s tragic dignity or whatever.
__
It seems to me that while the mechanical ‘application’ of theory or the use of texts to ‘illustrate’ pre-decided theoretical concepts and conclusions is indeed a tedious and undesirable aspect of current academic work, it is not really feasible or desirable to ‘subtract’ theory and get back to some putative ‘unmediated’ relation to texts. What is needed, for one thing, is a reminder that not only can theory open up and illuminate texts in new and various ways, but also that texts can in turn question and contribute to theory. It struck me, for instance, reading Deleuze’s excellent book on Proust, that Deleuze was not simply ‘applying’ theory/ concepts to Proust’s text, wasn’t reading the work according to the logic of pre-formed concepts, but actually generating concepts out of the text itself. His conceptual armoury was being innervated and refined by the challenge of Proust’s text.
Friday, January 21, 2005
A Mouth
Gareth at Any Street Corner (who, along with several others I must get round to Blogrolling) has this extract from a new piece by John Berger, "A Mouth Speaks Out Alone":
Yes it's my mouth. Alone on the white page. Outside it's snowing. My two lips and, in the night between, a tongue. You can see it? You lip-read? You are so young. But you do lip-read.The snow is falling everywhere. On lies and on what is true. The flakes make no distinction, they land gently on both. Did you notice I said 'on what is true', not 'on the truth'. The single truth is also a lie. This is something I have learnt since it began to snow.The blizzards were forecast, but, like any winter, they took us by surprise. The President of the Republic addressed the nation. Don't ask me which nation, for, if I tell you, the paper on which I am drawn may be torn up. Here I only have the status of an emigrant. Perhaps you can see that by my lower lip. You can see a little home-sickness? The President told the people they were living through a period of transition and that in his heart he was with every one of them. A transition towards what? one might ask. Perhaps a period of eternal snow? He didn't say. He himself was lost in a drift. He smiled and went on and on; the one thing which became clearer and clearer was that he was lying. At the end he was even able to turn words which mean nothing at all - words like development and modernisation - at the end, he was even able to transform these into lies. He was on the telly, immediately following the latest reports about the snow.Whilst he was speaking, I watched his mouth. I don't claim to be an expert but a mouth is all I am, albeit a foreign mouth, so I watched with a certain interest. His is like a bladder-wrack blister. I refer to his mouth. This is the effect of thirty years of using words, speaking them, to distract attention from what is happening behind his listeners' backs. Most stooges, decoys and stool pigeons get bladder-wrack. It comes from the indifference of the lips to what they're pronouncing. Also called Pop-weed, belonging to the kelp family, in the class of Phaephyceae! Did you see the tongue touching the back of the top teeth to make the c? Examine mouths carefully. Bladder-wrack comes from a contempt for words.For example, the President of the Republic argued that if we all consumed more, there would be fewer unemployed. When I heard this I thought of my old friend, the Arse, and I made one of his noises. The snow flakes now are as large as goose feathers. You can't see across the road. In Europe there are 30 million unemployed. I, too, taste their bitterness. Each of them speaks and not one is heard. They speak to their fear in the night. To each I'd like to whisper in the dark: may I kiss you? And then do it.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
States of Exception
This morning bought Agamben’s State of Exception.
On the ‘military order’ issued by Bush on November 13, 2001:
“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from juridical oversight.”
That British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government would, you’d think, be a cause célèbre for the tabloid press. Well no, not really. Reading the papers the other day in X café, The Sun is outraged that British Guantanamo Bay detainees had been returned to the U.K ‘at tax payers expense’ and were now ‘free to walk the streets’.
Many were highly critical of objections to Israel’s ‘defence wall,’ especially the ‘absurd suggestion’ that it would be used to annex or confiscate land. Well, this is from Haaretz.
(Noteworthy: how Haaretz seems to report many developments bypassed by the British press, and which, were they reported here would doubtless have Melanie Phillips gibbering and squeaking in the streets with rage. )
n.b. Quote of the day goes to this astute analogy at Harry's Place:
"one can't be against 'capitalism' per se - it's like being against humidity or escalators." Priceless. Personally, I'm all for air-conditioning and lifts.
On the ‘military order’ issued by Bush on November 13, 2001:
“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from juridical oversight.”
That British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government would, you’d think, be a cause célèbre for the tabloid press. Well no, not really. Reading the papers the other day in X café, The Sun is outraged that British Guantanamo Bay detainees had been returned to the U.K ‘at tax payers expense’ and were now ‘free to walk the streets’.
Many were highly critical of objections to Israel’s ‘defence wall,’ especially the ‘absurd suggestion’ that it would be used to annex or confiscate land. Well, this is from Haaretz.
(Noteworthy: how Haaretz seems to report many developments bypassed by the British press, and which, were they reported here would doubtless have Melanie Phillips gibbering and squeaking in the streets with rage. )
n.b. Quote of the day goes to this astute analogy at Harry's Place:
"one can't be against 'capitalism' per se - it's like being against humidity or escalators." Priceless. Personally, I'm all for air-conditioning and lifts.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A soft indestructible automaton
Having worked out how to upload pictures, I've posted a rather deceptive photo on my profile page.
Otherwise, have recently come across Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary online. Occasionally rather predictable, but here's a selection (including a rather Beckettian definition of 'Dead', a rather Humean definition of 'Effect', and a rather interesting definition of 'symbol':
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement ofhis own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
DEAD, adj. Done with the work of breathing; done/ With all the world; the mad race run /Though to the end; the golden goal /Attained and found to be a hole!
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growthof a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together inthe same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate theother — which is no more sensible than it would be for one who hasnever seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare therabbit the cause of a dog.
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect
EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created thefuture state.
SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand forsomething else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" — things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we haveinherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved onmemorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of thedead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
Otherwise, have recently come across Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary online. Occasionally rather predictable, but here's a selection (including a rather Beckettian definition of 'Dead', a rather Humean definition of 'Effect', and a rather interesting definition of 'symbol':
CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.
CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement ofhis own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
DEAD, adj. Done with the work of breathing; done/ With all the world; the mad race run /Though to the end; the golden goal /Attained and found to be a hole!
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growthof a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together inthe same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate theother — which is no more sensible than it would be for one who hasnever seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare therabbit the cause of a dog.
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect
EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created thefuture state.
SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand forsomething else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" — things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we haveinherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved onmemorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of thedead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.
I'm, like, a grammatical factotum
(From a teaching diary:)
Leaving the building I hear this exchange:
“Do you, like, like pubs, or do you, like, like bars?” I imagined some third party interjecting: “what about cafes, cafes?.”.
The frequency of ‘like’ in the speech of your average American student is increasing at an alarming rate, slicing syntax into jerky staccato bites. ‘Like’ is in fact a remarkably multi-functional device, serving alternatively as a sort of colon, speech marks, scare quotes and so on – a kind of grammatical factotum. One of these functions is to render things hedged, tentative, as if to say “this is a lazily approximate formulation, please fill in the blanks”, or ‘I hereby disown accountability for this statement”.
This hedging, provisional approach – compromising even the most flatly factual propositions - extends also to classroom discussion, often signified by the inappropriate rider ‘that’s just my opinion’, as in:
A student expressed the view that the English drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in order to be different from the Americans. I point out that this isn’t historically the case. ‘Well’, she says ‘that’s just my opinion.’ ‘But it isn’t a matter of opinion” I reply. She becomes bemused and defensive, insisting people are entitled to an opinion on anything. It’s as if the phrase ‘that’s just my opinion’ removes a remark from the sphere of verifiability and turns it into an ‘expression of individuality’, which is of course a sacred and unquestionable good. The tentativeness of ‘that’s just my opinion’ is perhaps just intransigent subjectivism in disguise.
Leaving the building I hear this exchange:
“Do you, like, like pubs, or do you, like, like bars?” I imagined some third party interjecting: “what about cafes, cafes?.”.
The frequency of ‘like’ in the speech of your average American student is increasing at an alarming rate, slicing syntax into jerky staccato bites. ‘Like’ is in fact a remarkably multi-functional device, serving alternatively as a sort of colon, speech marks, scare quotes and so on – a kind of grammatical factotum. One of these functions is to render things hedged, tentative, as if to say “this is a lazily approximate formulation, please fill in the blanks”, or ‘I hereby disown accountability for this statement”.
This hedging, provisional approach – compromising even the most flatly factual propositions - extends also to classroom discussion, often signified by the inappropriate rider ‘that’s just my opinion’, as in:
A student expressed the view that the English drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road in order to be different from the Americans. I point out that this isn’t historically the case. ‘Well’, she says ‘that’s just my opinion.’ ‘But it isn’t a matter of opinion” I reply. She becomes bemused and defensive, insisting people are entitled to an opinion on anything. It’s as if the phrase ‘that’s just my opinion’ removes a remark from the sphere of verifiability and turns it into an ‘expression of individuality’, which is of course a sacred and unquestionable good. The tentativeness of ‘that’s just my opinion’ is perhaps just intransigent subjectivism in disguise.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Today's Readings
from Haaretz an interesting and revealing discussion on "To what extent should Orthodox Judaism shape the state of Israel?"
Looking at the Radical Philosophy website, I noticed the following: Lecercle on Badiou, plus something by Peter Hallward on singularity and on Critchley/ Badiou.
Meanwhile, seems that Schopenhauer wrote an appendix to my notes on rhetoric (see below).
Stephan Collini on Christopher Hitchens, concludes in near Proustian syntax with:
But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other 'I told you so's. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn't go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.
Looking at the Radical Philosophy website, I noticed the following: Lecercle on Badiou, plus something by Peter Hallward on singularity and on Critchley/ Badiou.
Meanwhile, seems that Schopenhauer wrote an appendix to my notes on rhetoric (see below).
Stephan Collini on Christopher Hitchens, concludes in near Proustian syntax with:
But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other 'I told you so's. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn't go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.
Economic History
"The economists have a singular mode of proceeding. There are for them only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institutions are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who also establish two kinds of religion. Every religion but their own is an invention of men, while their own religion is an emanation of God. In saying that existing conditions - the conditions of bourgeois production - are natural, the economists give it to be understood that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed conformably to the laws of nature. Thus these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any."
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
Cole under the Settee
Via the Virtual Stoa, this site has some nice extracts from Alan Bennett's Writing Home:
"1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.
7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, "And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole." Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, "Cole, not Dole." In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve".
"1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.
7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, "And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole." Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, "Cole, not Dole." In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve".
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Regardez les fleurs du Palestine
From today's Observer, a review of Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries by Suad Amiry
'Marie Jabaji has been a refugee for more than half her life. She left her home in Jaffa, which is on the coast of what is now Israel, in 1948, for what she thought was a holiday. Unfortunately, while she was away, the Israelis moved in, and took her house. Marie found herself homeless and stateless. At first, she remained in Beirut. A few years later, she made it to Ramallah, on the West Bank, where she has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly, she has never been able to forget her loss. 'This is how we do it in Jaffa,' she'll say, serving dinner. Under fire, her instinct is always to stay put, because who knows what will happen if she doesn't? In 2002, when the Israeli army invaded Ramallah and began reducing the compound of the PLO leader to so much rubble, it took her worried family a while to winkle Mrs Jabaji out, in spite of the tanks that were lined up in front of her house. 'Shall I bring my purple dress?' she dithered, quietly. 'Shall we take the lemons? Shall we water the plants?'
It was during this dark time - I mean this literally; the electricity lines were often cut - that the seeds of Mrs Jabaji's unlikely fame were sown. Marie went to stay with her daughter-in-law, Suad Amiry, an architect. Trapped in the house together during the long curfew hours, Marie spent her days making marmalade. Her daughter-in-law, meanwhile, began writing emails - funny, bleak emails - to her relatives and friends. She wanted them to know what life was like in a city that was effectively a giant prison. Her friends loved these emails, and began to look forward to them. '
'Marie Jabaji has been a refugee for more than half her life. She left her home in Jaffa, which is on the coast of what is now Israel, in 1948, for what she thought was a holiday. Unfortunately, while she was away, the Israelis moved in, and took her house. Marie found herself homeless and stateless. At first, she remained in Beirut. A few years later, she made it to Ramallah, on the West Bank, where she has lived ever since. Unsurprisingly, she has never been able to forget her loss. 'This is how we do it in Jaffa,' she'll say, serving dinner. Under fire, her instinct is always to stay put, because who knows what will happen if she doesn't? In 2002, when the Israeli army invaded Ramallah and began reducing the compound of the PLO leader to so much rubble, it took her worried family a while to winkle Mrs Jabaji out, in spite of the tanks that were lined up in front of her house. 'Shall I bring my purple dress?' she dithered, quietly. 'Shall we take the lemons? Shall we water the plants?'
It was during this dark time - I mean this literally; the electricity lines were often cut - that the seeds of Mrs Jabaji's unlikely fame were sown. Marie went to stay with her daughter-in-law, Suad Amiry, an architect. Trapped in the house together during the long curfew hours, Marie spent her days making marmalade. Her daughter-in-law, meanwhile, began writing emails - funny, bleak emails - to her relatives and friends. She wanted them to know what life was like in a city that was effectively a giant prison. Her friends loved these emails, and began to look forward to them. '
The Subject of Revolution
Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary subjectivity:
“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the labouring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)
Zizek comments:
‘If we look at this argument closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxemburg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary subject does not "conduct," "direct" this process from an objective distance. He is constituted through this process, and because of this‑‑because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity‑‑we cannot "make the revolution at the right moment" without previous "premature," failed attemptshese objects have a kind of impenetrable density.’
&:
those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.
“It will be impossible to avoid the ‘premature’ conquest of state power by the proletariat precisely because these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions for the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the labouring class appears to be a political absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution)
Zizek comments:
‘If we look at this argument closely, we perceive that what is at stake in Rosa Luxemburg's argument is precisely the impossibility of metalanguage in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary subject does not "conduct," "direct" this process from an objective distance. He is constituted through this process, and because of this‑‑because the temporality of the revolution passes through subjectivity‑‑we cannot "make the revolution at the right moment" without previous "premature," failed attemptshese objects have a kind of impenetrable density.’
&:
those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.
Appendix to Notes on Rhetoric
A little appendix to the earlier notes on rhetoric - a couple you might recognise from other contexts.
The Left Rather than attacking the ‘Left’ as such, it is better to undermine the word and cause to be it ineffectual, either by constantly diluting it in ‘liberal-left’ or simply by using phrases that render it meaningless, as in ‘my fellow leftist Stephen Pollard’.
Profanity and the demotic. Used sparingly (so as not to be mistaken for some incensed half-wit), your use of the profane/ demotic is a right laugh and a sure sign that you represent robust common sense and can sniff out and debunk pretentious academics and pseudo-intilectukals. Try mixing it with more refined prose for full effect, as in “after careful and sustained reflection, I have now arrived at the inexorable conclusion that X is a clueless twat who talks counter-revolutionary shite.” “On balance and despite asseverations assuring us otherwise, it would seem that a&b who blog here [imaginary link] are, objectively, a pack of spineless bourgeois pricks.”
Always Psychologise. If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc.
Raw Nerve. If your opponent responds to you with anything like gusto/ feeling you have necessarily ‘touched a raw nerve’. This can be used against all but the most blandly neutral reply. Try saying it in various contexts, just to unsettle and bemuse e.g:
“Mark,
"I'd really like that reference for Hegel’s comments on Zoroastrian religion?”
“Ah, it touched a raw nerve did it?”
The Left Rather than attacking the ‘Left’ as such, it is better to undermine the word and cause to be it ineffectual, either by constantly diluting it in ‘liberal-left’ or simply by using phrases that render it meaningless, as in ‘my fellow leftist Stephen Pollard’.
Profanity and the demotic. Used sparingly (so as not to be mistaken for some incensed half-wit), your use of the profane/ demotic is a right laugh and a sure sign that you represent robust common sense and can sniff out and debunk pretentious academics and pseudo-intilectukals. Try mixing it with more refined prose for full effect, as in “after careful and sustained reflection, I have now arrived at the inexorable conclusion that X is a clueless twat who talks counter-revolutionary shite.” “On balance and despite asseverations assuring us otherwise, it would seem that a&b who blog here [imaginary link] are, objectively, a pack of spineless bourgeois pricks.”
Always Psychologise. If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc.
Raw Nerve. If your opponent responds to you with anything like gusto/ feeling you have necessarily ‘touched a raw nerve’. This can be used against all but the most blandly neutral reply. Try saying it in various contexts, just to unsettle and bemuse e.g:
“Mark,
"I'd really like that reference for Hegel’s comments on Zoroastrian religion?”
“Ah, it touched a raw nerve did it?”
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Adorno's Slippers
“How some things have gestures, and so modes of behaviour, inscribed in them. Slippers are designed to be slipped into without help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down.”
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discretely, yet firmly…. Things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.”
Adorno
“.. the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which ‘anybody’ must use them..”
“.. we apprehend things first and foremost as tools and only thereafter as static objects of contemplation.. Hence things may stand as shorthand for human actions, and such a point of view forms the very basis for the Sartrean evocation of the outside world as a network of frozen imperatives or a ‘hodological’ space, as objects filled with implicit life and feelings swarming about us as so many objective modes through which being is revealed.”
Jameson
The objects around us importune us with practical demands; there is programme of action immanent in things. The car door that asks to be slammed; or, for the child, the cracks in the pavement that ask not to be stepped on and so dictate a new pattern of steps and skips. These inert material things guide, direct, solicit our action, our practical activity. They divert our free activity along pre-determined grooves or behavioural tramlines, which unite us with the serial anonymity of ‘everyone else’.
(For Sartre, They speak to or direct us in this way because of the reserves of human energy or praxis stored up in them: Inert matter, once transformed and re-directed by human praxis in turn stands as an invitation to activity, a set of grooves along which our behaviour runs quiet unreflectively.)
But there are also linguistic equivalents of these material objects, pre-fashioned phrases and ready-to-hand words - such phrases are as it were the verbal equivalent of Adorno's slippers, which prepare and guide our thought in advance. Of course, we have full autonomy in this, in the same sense has one has full autonomy putting on slippers or turning on a tap.
Thus, when I read an article lamenting the presence of ‘theory driven radicals’ in our universities, I immediately recognise this phrase as one such ‘verbal slipper’. For the speaker, the ease with which a phrase such as ‘theory driven radicals’ trips of the tongue doubtless attests to his own verbal facility; in fact, it is merely facile. The ease and fluency resides, as it were outside him, in the pre-formulated efficiency of the machinery of expression.
Cf Sartre: “The inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them, to anticipate the terminology of the Critique, a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thoughts and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and this previous history of the material itself.”
Just as objects direct our action along pre-determined grooves, so language has a counter-finality deflecting our free thought and uniting us with ‘everyone else’, with the pre-agreed doxa of the They.
And it is a salutary reminder that this kind of pre-determined serial activity comes first, and is our default mode of being, and that free thought and action have to be won from this, wrested from it through sheer negation.
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discretely, yet firmly…. Things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because it is not consumed by the moment of action.”
Adorno
“.. the Sartre of the earlier work immediately links the experience of the we-subject to that of manufactured objects. There is, we might say, no personal way of opening a can, of punching a time card, of turning on a faucet: each of these objects has built into it an impersonal directive, a set of instructions as to the way in which ‘anybody’ must use them..”
“.. we apprehend things first and foremost as tools and only thereafter as static objects of contemplation.. Hence things may stand as shorthand for human actions, and such a point of view forms the very basis for the Sartrean evocation of the outside world as a network of frozen imperatives or a ‘hodological’ space, as objects filled with implicit life and feelings swarming about us as so many objective modes through which being is revealed.”
Jameson
The objects around us importune us with practical demands; there is programme of action immanent in things. The car door that asks to be slammed; or, for the child, the cracks in the pavement that ask not to be stepped on and so dictate a new pattern of steps and skips. These inert material things guide, direct, solicit our action, our practical activity. They divert our free activity along pre-determined grooves or behavioural tramlines, which unite us with the serial anonymity of ‘everyone else’.
(For Sartre, They speak to or direct us in this way because of the reserves of human energy or praxis stored up in them: Inert matter, once transformed and re-directed by human praxis in turn stands as an invitation to activity, a set of grooves along which our behaviour runs quiet unreflectively.)
But there are also linguistic equivalents of these material objects, pre-fashioned phrases and ready-to-hand words - such phrases are as it were the verbal equivalent of Adorno's slippers, which prepare and guide our thought in advance. Of course, we have full autonomy in this, in the same sense has one has full autonomy putting on slippers or turning on a tap.
Thus, when I read an article lamenting the presence of ‘theory driven radicals’ in our universities, I immediately recognise this phrase as one such ‘verbal slipper’. For the speaker, the ease with which a phrase such as ‘theory driven radicals’ trips of the tongue doubtless attests to his own verbal facility; in fact, it is merely facile. The ease and fluency resides, as it were outside him, in the pre-formulated efficiency of the machinery of expression.
Cf Sartre: “The inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them, to anticipate the terminology of the Critique, a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thoughts and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and this previous history of the material itself.”
Just as objects direct our action along pre-determined grooves, so language has a counter-finality deflecting our free thought and uniting us with ‘everyone else’, with the pre-agreed doxa of the They.
And it is a salutary reminder that this kind of pre-determined serial activity comes first, and is our default mode of being, and that free thought and action have to be won from this, wrested from it through sheer negation.
Ray's Jazz Cafe
Foyle’s Jazz café in Charing Cross Road has fine music, free wireless access and very good coffee. Indeed, here's a couple of observations from that very location:
1. Few were genuinely surprised that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq; but how curious that the allies, having a perfectly good reason for conducting the war (the principled opposition to fascism) should have chosen to confect, for public consumption, a manifestly spurious one.
2. A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world. No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
I told him that although I would support his venture I could hardly commend its originality.
N.B.
Those of you who saw in the above formula a “neatly comic comment on what the left-hand side of the World of Blogs is often like”, give yourself a pat on the back; others weren't so fortunate, and are still earnestly pondering what I was 'up to’.
1. Few were genuinely surprised that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq; but how curious that the allies, having a perfectly good reason for conducting the war (the principled opposition to fascism) should have chosen to confect, for public consumption, a manifestly spurious one.
2. A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world. No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
I told him that although I would support his venture I could hardly commend its originality.
N.B.
Those of you who saw in the above formula a “neatly comic comment on what the left-hand side of the World of Blogs is often like”, give yourself a pat on the back; others weren't so fortunate, and are still earnestly pondering what I was 'up to’.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
On Lived Experience.
More from Jameson's Marxism and Form:
“.. For Sartre orthodox Marxism practices a reduction of history and experience. This, although true, tends to prejudice the argument somewhat. For it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction, through which we substitute for the four dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby of necessity do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality other than by such reduction.
Insofar as existentialism is in its very origins a reaction against this process of abstraction, we must, we must also observe that it depends on it as a prior moment: no return to things, no return to lived experience, unless we have first abandoned them in the process of abstraction.”
Thus ‘lived experience’ – as dense, messy, vivid, and disordered - is apprehended as such only when measured against ‘abstraction,’ is thrown into relief only through and by ‘abstraction’ and therefore coloured by it in advance.
The flight into ‘lived experience’ as a reservoir of intensities and multiplicity of sensations has abstraction as its very condition of possibility, like the returning Dead who (speculates Berger) experience ‘life’ with a gratitude and sudden clarity unbeknown to the merely living.
"Lived experience" is of course itself a concept, which cannot have been simply and inertly present in lived experience, nor can the question of how we arrive at this concept be answered by lived experience.
Both these points, however, presumably render problematic the initial idea of abstract ideas, or the conceptual, ‘doing violence’ to ‘reality and experience’ since these are already leavened with the conceptual to begin with, and the very idea of them as some precious pre-conceptual grain of being is itself a conceptual product answering to certain demands within our life-world.
Needless to say, Jameson – and Sartre – know all this already, and the quotation above is little more than the preparatory work for its own surpassing
“.. For Sartre orthodox Marxism practices a reduction of history and experience. This, although true, tends to prejudice the argument somewhat. For it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction, through which we substitute for the four dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby of necessity do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality other than by such reduction.
Insofar as existentialism is in its very origins a reaction against this process of abstraction, we must, we must also observe that it depends on it as a prior moment: no return to things, no return to lived experience, unless we have first abandoned them in the process of abstraction.”
Thus ‘lived experience’ – as dense, messy, vivid, and disordered - is apprehended as such only when measured against ‘abstraction,’ is thrown into relief only through and by ‘abstraction’ and therefore coloured by it in advance.
The flight into ‘lived experience’ as a reservoir of intensities and multiplicity of sensations has abstraction as its very condition of possibility, like the returning Dead who (speculates Berger) experience ‘life’ with a gratitude and sudden clarity unbeknown to the merely living.
"Lived experience" is of course itself a concept, which cannot have been simply and inertly present in lived experience, nor can the question of how we arrive at this concept be answered by lived experience.
Both these points, however, presumably render problematic the initial idea of abstract ideas, or the conceptual, ‘doing violence’ to ‘reality and experience’ since these are already leavened with the conceptual to begin with, and the very idea of them as some precious pre-conceptual grain of being is itself a conceptual product answering to certain demands within our life-world.
Needless to say, Jameson – and Sartre – know all this already, and the quotation above is little more than the preparatory work for its own surpassing
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
On Behalf of the Other
Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason contains some brilliant little theoretical apercus in the footnotes. E.g:
“The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other. If he were insulted or struck by a Muslim, he would react as a particular individual (or as a member of a particular family). But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him; in so far as these provocations are addressed through his person to the native, a character who is as little realisable as the colonialist himself. Thus, through the two individuals, the Other relates to the Other; and both are alienated to serial unities which cannot even be realised here and which, dislocating and generalising, remove the event from itself and constitute it as the formula of the recurrence and as an archetype which exists elsewhere.”
There are many theoretical riches in this passage, but one thing that strikes me is the theatricality of the scene depicted, in a way that recalls some of Sartre’s work on the ‘Imaginary’. Sartre there remarked on how, when we see an actor playing Hamlet on stage, we do not see an actor walking from one side of the stage to the other in order to make his living. This ‘real’ and empirical level is suspended, derealised, so that we agree to see Prince Hamlet walking across the battlements at Ellsinore. The literal is ‘replaced’ and overwritten by the imaginary. The actual actor becomes the mere support, the invisible carrier of this imaginary being. Now, does not something similar happen in the case cited above: the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself. The two enact a scene, a beating, which is the local incarnation of an ‘archetype’ - the colonialist/ colonised relation; they allow this relation between two phantom Others to play itself out through them, using their enraged or suffering flesh. And in so far as the individual beaten realises that it is not him who is being beaten, but him as native, then this places him in solidarity with those Others who are addressed as ‘Native’ in the act of being beaten.
“The employee allows himself to be beaten, also in so far as he is an Other. If he were insulted or struck by a Muslim, he would react as a particular individual (or as a member of a particular family). But he feels the blows of the colonialist in so far as other men of his religion are, also, at that very minute, being beaten, like him; in so far as these provocations are addressed through his person to the native, a character who is as little realisable as the colonialist himself. Thus, through the two individuals, the Other relates to the Other; and both are alienated to serial unities which cannot even be realised here and which, dislocating and generalising, remove the event from itself and constitute it as the formula of the recurrence and as an archetype which exists elsewhere.”
There are many theoretical riches in this passage, but one thing that strikes me is the theatricality of the scene depicted, in a way that recalls some of Sartre’s work on the ‘Imaginary’. Sartre there remarked on how, when we see an actor playing Hamlet on stage, we do not see an actor walking from one side of the stage to the other in order to make his living. This ‘real’ and empirical level is suspended, derealised, so that we agree to see Prince Hamlet walking across the battlements at Ellsinore. The literal is ‘replaced’ and overwritten by the imaginary. The actual actor becomes the mere support, the invisible carrier of this imaginary being. Now, does not something similar happen in the case cited above: the colonialist beats not the empirical individual but The Native, the alien presence (Other) incarnate in him, and the empirical individual allows this alien presence to be beaten, even while suffering the blows himself. The two enact a scene, a beating, which is the local incarnation of an ‘archetype’ - the colonialist/ colonised relation; they allow this relation between two phantom Others to play itself out through them, using their enraged or suffering flesh. And in so far as the individual beaten realises that it is not him who is being beaten, but him as native, then this places him in solidarity with those Others who are addressed as ‘Native’ in the act of being beaten.
Moments of Legibility
Cited in the Arcades Project:
“The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly. Many pages in Marivaux or Rousseau contain a mysterious meaning which the first readers of these texts could not fully have deciphered.”
The intriguing suggestion here is that literary texts are ‘historical’ not only because they ‘belong’ to certain times, but because they become readable only at definite times, perhaps awaiting certain historical conditions before their meaning, or some of their meanings, shine through. What is historical here is not just the text, the text entangled in determinate historical conditions, but its conditions of legibility. Successive historical moments are like different optics through which different dimensions of a text are visible. Or perhaps particular authors are only legible at certain historical moments. Suddenly, Blake will seem urgent and necessary, or Swift will suddenly swim into view after years of comparative neglect. And of course, in such moments, it is not just that these authors or these hidden dimensions of a classic are newly readable; their new visibility comes about because they in turn seem to render legible the present moment. History turns a corner and at once John Webster’s concerns with putrefaction and soullessness are our own. The past reads us at the very moment when it becomes visible to us. Hence Walter Benjamin’s image of the lightning flash. The present has no sovereign rights over the past, unable to predict exactly when it will yield its meaning or which meanings it will yield. The present does not simply look at the past with a truth-demanding stare; it is in turn looked at, illuminated, by a gaze and a shaft of light from outside its own orbit.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Ontological Irony
Excruciating time in Wales. B’s relative, E., is an absurd Hyacinth Bucket figure, who measures everything against some imagined scale of Distinction. When she addresses me the malapropism count suddenly shoots up, as in “We’re just going to a small restaurant, nowhere very elusive”. This has little to do with me as an individual (who she’s never before met) and presumably relates to my education and qualifications. If she addresses her children in public space, in earshot of others, her remarks are in fact addressed to these others, conceived as representatives of Society. She will anxiously glance round, as if soliciting their approval. But, as she doesn’t know them, she is in fact soliciting Society’s approval by proxy. Her comments and actions are therefore addressed always to the Other – not simply the empirical others who she happens to encounter, but the big Other which they represent. Needless to say, these same empirical others may well also view everybody else as ‘representatives’ in this way, as mere incarnations of the Other, of ‘People’ (as in ‘what will people think’).
A similar mechanism is in evidence with her children and their choice of sportswear, which, they tell me, signifies ‘coolness’. It signifies this for Others, but of course these others are no less than others wearing the same sportswear in order to signify coolness to..[etc]. The ‘Other’ is always elsewhere, a kind of organising fiction which serves to link the diverse empirical individuals in empty seriality.
Cue Sartre's notion of seriality:
“For I make myself an other or the Other, and deliberately pattern my behaviour on what I imagine the Other’s to be. The ontological irony of this mode of being is, of course, that all the while I am modelling myself and my behaviour on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression, an infinite flight in all directions. [..] and in this sense seriality is a vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as ‘public opinion’ or simply ‘they. But public opinion does not exist, and it is rather the belief in it and the effects of such belief which “unite” individuals in the series."
A similar mechanism is in evidence with her children and their choice of sportswear, which, they tell me, signifies ‘coolness’. It signifies this for Others, but of course these others are no less than others wearing the same sportswear in order to signify coolness to..[etc]. The ‘Other’ is always elsewhere, a kind of organising fiction which serves to link the diverse empirical individuals in empty seriality.
Cue Sartre's notion of seriality:
“For I make myself an other or the Other, and deliberately pattern my behaviour on what I imagine the Other’s to be. The ontological irony of this mode of being is, of course, that all the while I am modelling myself and my behaviour on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression, an infinite flight in all directions. [..] and in this sense seriality is a vast optical illusion, a kind of collective hallucination projected out of individual solitude onto an imaginary being thought of as ‘public opinion’ or simply ‘they. But public opinion does not exist, and it is rather the belief in it and the effects of such belief which “unite” individuals in the series."
Prison House of Language
"There is a sense in which all sensory perception already constitutes a kind of organisation into language. Imagine the way in which, for a trained naturalist, the disorderly undergrowth of thickets and bushes pressing in upon each other sort themselves out into order, the peculiar outlines of each type of leaf standing as a visible sign and mark of their determinate species; imagine the way in which a wholly unfamiliar landscape would offer itself to such knowledgeable perception as a kind of language the words of which were not yet known, an order already making itself felt through the clear forms of the vegetation, where for the layman there would be nothing but the confused and jumbled vision of space."
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language.
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Art as custodian and promise
Today's Observer carries an article on Spanish Portraits by John Berger:
Each one of the hundred people painted is looking at the future with a question or declaration. We are walking between their life-experiences in a manner that could never happen if we were walking past photographs, however masterly the photographer. Photos are taken by surprise or take us by surprise. In photos, there is very little waiting-to-be-seen; photos are not attendant. Here, in the long gallery, there is nothing else but a waiting-to-be-seen. Therein lies the nakedness.
In relation not just to the above essay, but generally: The acuity with which Berger is attuned to history as a reservoir of untapped possibilities, promises, expectations; and the steady reproach, the nagging questions which these level at the present. What shines forth from art is not so much some endlessly renamed human nature, as if this were a trusty constant which art endlessly decks out in the fancy dress of different periods. It is rather that certain ‘possibles’ – certain promises, forms of life – are housed in art. These ‘possibles’ are contingent and frail. They indeed depend on history. They can, no matter how precious, rewarding, be lost, fall into disuse, be written of or systematically destroyed. Art is their custodian and a reminder, perhaps, of their frailty, of what is missing from our present, and a troubling augury of what might be. Art’s silent imperative for Berger is perhaps two-fold: on the one hand, the enjoinder to speak to and to hear the Dead; on the other, the command – famously issuing from Rilke’s archaic torso “change your life”.
From the interesting new blog Any Street Corner, John Berger on Susan Sontag:
Susan Sontag - quicksilver darting between past and future to shed light on the otherwise dark present -
and your conscience that travelled almost at the speed of light.
I recall playing ping-pong with you and your fast services, and your laughter, which was always about surprise.
One surprise prompting another. Twenty all. Your service.
And the flick of your wrist, which looked so young, and which long, long before had already been an example for your mind that later grasped the world.
Quicksilver, liquid metal, nickname for Mercury, keeper of eloquence and dexterity, protector of roads, deliverer of the messages we need.
Game and set to you, Quicksilver.
Each one of the hundred people painted is looking at the future with a question or declaration. We are walking between their life-experiences in a manner that could never happen if we were walking past photographs, however masterly the photographer. Photos are taken by surprise or take us by surprise. In photos, there is very little waiting-to-be-seen; photos are not attendant. Here, in the long gallery, there is nothing else but a waiting-to-be-seen. Therein lies the nakedness.
In relation not just to the above essay, but generally: The acuity with which Berger is attuned to history as a reservoir of untapped possibilities, promises, expectations; and the steady reproach, the nagging questions which these level at the present. What shines forth from art is not so much some endlessly renamed human nature, as if this were a trusty constant which art endlessly decks out in the fancy dress of different periods. It is rather that certain ‘possibles’ – certain promises, forms of life – are housed in art. These ‘possibles’ are contingent and frail. They indeed depend on history. They can, no matter how precious, rewarding, be lost, fall into disuse, be written of or systematically destroyed. Art is their custodian and a reminder, perhaps, of their frailty, of what is missing from our present, and a troubling augury of what might be. Art’s silent imperative for Berger is perhaps two-fold: on the one hand, the enjoinder to speak to and to hear the Dead; on the other, the command – famously issuing from Rilke’s archaic torso “change your life”.
From the interesting new blog Any Street Corner, John Berger on Susan Sontag:
Susan Sontag - quicksilver darting between past and future to shed light on the otherwise dark present -
and your conscience that travelled almost at the speed of light.
I recall playing ping-pong with you and your fast services, and your laughter, which was always about surprise.
One surprise prompting another. Twenty all. Your service.
And the flick of your wrist, which looked so young, and which long, long before had already been an example for your mind that later grasped the world.
Quicksilver, liquid metal, nickname for Mercury, keeper of eloquence and dexterity, protector of roads, deliverer of the messages we need.
Game and set to you, Quicksilver.
Pete's a Dud.
Laid up with flu I did little last night but watch television, including a programme on the top 50 comedians’ comedians. From the top ten I would have picked, in no particular order, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen and Bill Hicks as my top three. The winner, Peter Cook, I confess to regarding as an insufferable bore. What always struck me about Cook was his signature 'bold stare', little different in fact from the wide-eyed buttonholing stare of the coke-head, which will tolerate nothing less than cravenly complicit laughter. This stare is like an empty demand to laugh appended to whatever content Cook happens to light upon: laugh, or be a prude; laugh or be subject to the ignominy of ‘not getting it’. The stare says, defiantly prior to any utterance: “I’m in on the joke – how about you?.” It is as if, to rewrite Adorno’s dictum ‘he who has laughter on his side has no need of humour’.
"Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact."
Some of the programme’s commentators, in support of Cook, invoked the way he brought to the surface, with audible relief, all the obscene and filthy sentiments which people think silently or voice only in their living rooms. That this is ‘subversive’ or liberating however, is itself rather laughable. These things do not blow open the law but serve as its obscene support, its shadowy double, as Zizek and other have shown. There is nothing liberating or subversive about a man, describing with evident and repellent enthusiasm, kicking a woman repeatedly in the ‘cunt’ as Cook does in one of the Derek and Clive routines. And there is no reason why we should be blackmailed by laughter into obscene solidarity with such sentiments.
"Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact."
Some of the programme’s commentators, in support of Cook, invoked the way he brought to the surface, with audible relief, all the obscene and filthy sentiments which people think silently or voice only in their living rooms. That this is ‘subversive’ or liberating however, is itself rather laughable. These things do not blow open the law but serve as its obscene support, its shadowy double, as Zizek and other have shown. There is nothing liberating or subversive about a man, describing with evident and repellent enthusiasm, kicking a woman repeatedly in the ‘cunt’ as Cook does in one of the Derek and Clive routines. And there is no reason why we should be blackmailed by laughter into obscene solidarity with such sentiments.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
This and This
I have been ambushed by a cold, consequently scarcely able to think of things more productive than this:
This and this.
The concept of singularity is curiously self-contradictory. It denotes a quality of utter uniqueness. If two objects ‘have’ this quality, then what is unique about them cannot be this – i.e., having singularity. Or in other words: Object A is singular; object B is singular. Do they therefore share some quality, X? if so, then this cannot be what is singular about them.
And yet, how to designate the singular quality without using some name which renders it exchangeable? Indeed, it, whatever it is, would seem in its nature to refuse the span of a name, so that to designate it (the singular quality) is a kind of performative contradiction.
What is singular would seem in some way to be non-linguistic, and to shine forth only when, using language, we have created a kind of circumference of error around the thing in question.
Update. A reader has written to me, relating my reflections to Badiou. I am not entirely qualified to respond fully to his comments, esp. as I'm rather ill, but I reproduce them here for those interested:
re: your comments on singularity, I'd like to draw your attention to the mathematics of the contradiction you describe. It's a variation on Russell's Paradox: "The set of all sets that are not members of themselves." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox There have been several set theoretic attempts to avoid this contradiction, the most important of which is the Axiom of Separation. "Given any set A, there is a set B such that, given any set C, C is a member of B if and only if C is a member of A and P holds for C." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_separation This means that the operation P (in this case looking for, or naming, singularity) is performed only on the members of pre-existent set A, not on the set B (all singular objects) that is the result of this operation. There is an exclusion: one looks for singularity regarding qualities x, y, z, but not for singularity regarding singularity itself. Badiou has an interesting discussion of this in his Theoretical Writings (p. 178-180). He remarks on Russell's paradox that "a certain kind of confidence in the concept is thereby undermined", and concludes from the Axiom of Separation: "it means that existence always precedes the separating activity of the concept."
This and this.
The concept of singularity is curiously self-contradictory. It denotes a quality of utter uniqueness. If two objects ‘have’ this quality, then what is unique about them cannot be this – i.e., having singularity. Or in other words: Object A is singular; object B is singular. Do they therefore share some quality, X? if so, then this cannot be what is singular about them.
And yet, how to designate the singular quality without using some name which renders it exchangeable? Indeed, it, whatever it is, would seem in its nature to refuse the span of a name, so that to designate it (the singular quality) is a kind of performative contradiction.
What is singular would seem in some way to be non-linguistic, and to shine forth only when, using language, we have created a kind of circumference of error around the thing in question.
Update. A reader has written to me, relating my reflections to Badiou. I am not entirely qualified to respond fully to his comments, esp. as I'm rather ill, but I reproduce them here for those interested:
re: your comments on singularity, I'd like to draw your attention to the mathematics of the contradiction you describe. It's a variation on Russell's Paradox: "The set of all sets that are not members of themselves." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox There have been several set theoretic attempts to avoid this contradiction, the most important of which is the Axiom of Separation. "Given any set A, there is a set B such that, given any set C, C is a member of B if and only if C is a member of A and P holds for C." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_separation This means that the operation P (in this case looking for, or naming, singularity) is performed only on the members of pre-existent set A, not on the set B (all singular objects) that is the result of this operation. There is an exclusion: one looks for singularity regarding qualities x, y, z, but not for singularity regarding singularity itself. Badiou has an interesting discussion of this in his Theoretical Writings (p. 178-180). He remarks on Russell's paradox that "a certain kind of confidence in the concept is thereby undermined", and concludes from the Axiom of Separation: "it means that existence always precedes the separating activity of the concept."
Thursday, December 23, 2004
'Anti-Americanism" Revisited
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. --James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son
It would be easy to construct a ‘concept’ of ‘pro-Americanism” cobbled together from, say, some quotes from Blake, Kafka, Foucault, Kristeva and other ‘European intellectuals’. One could then claim this was a kind of ‘syndrome’, a stubborn tradition to which we’re still in thrall when we say anything that is pro-American. One could cite various contemporary pro-American statements as ‘evidence’ of this ‘syndrome’. This concept would doubtless have many polemical uses. Except, of course, it is unlikely that such a ‘concept’ would have or accrue any intellectual credibility or be seen as anything other than a rather crude device for forestalling debate.
How curious, then, that the similarly structured ‘concept’ of ‘anti-Americanism’ seems to be going from strength to strength, as in this recent essay, wherein Heidegger, Rilke and diverse others are conscripted into illustrating what is essentially foreign to them and, stripped of their particular contexts and their inherent differences, frogmarched into serving as mere examples of an ‘idea’ having as its ultimate referent and sticking place only the polemical demands of the present. The author, the instrument of ideological forces of which he seems wholly ignorant, cites the following passage from Rilke:
Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated things, mere things of appearance, sham articles.... A house in the American understanding, an American apple or an American vine has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and thoughts of our forefathers
As well as this from Heidegger:
Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.
Each of these comments [ok, so the second one doesn’t actually mention America. Let that pass] can be located in (and against) a tradition of thought; each deserves to be heard and answered in its specificity; but a ‘thinker’ able to extract from such comments no more than the anaemic and mechanical concept of ‘anti-Americanism’ resembles nothing so much as a winemaker able to extract from a grape little more than its stem. What is inessential is elevated to spurious magnitude and what is essential discarded as so much unserviceable dross.
Yes, Rilke uses ‘America’ to name – gropingly - something that he sees emerging, a new object-world, something which we might, perhaps, call the Society of the Spectacle; Heidegger was trying to conceptualise something perhaps related, although certainly not the same. And the name America was indeed, perhaps, a moment in this conceptualisation. But such comments are not ‘about’ America. One can easily jettison the name ‘America’ in understanding such comments, indeed, it is crucial to do so. Such names block access to the true object of thought. Nor can such invocations be situated, without ignorance and wilful distortion, on a smooth continuum ending in the present.
This is not to suggest (very obviously) that there are not anti-American sentiments or remarks, but surely no one believes that the current concept of Anti-Americanism is simply a way of neutrally referring to these, nor that an ‘anti-American’ sentiment is automatically a manifestation of ‘anti-Americanism’. This last is an ideological notion which I suspect will become more prevalent as it becomes polemically and politically more necessary.
Anti-Americanism, if we can use the term non-ideologically, might refer to instances where there is a false conflation between ‘America’ and some specific action of its government or, alternatively, some general concept like ‘aggression’ or ‘consumerism’. The point, however, is that any such conflation is illegitimate, favourable or unfavourable. Thus, a statement like ‘they hate America because they hate freedom’ (not an e.g. that I have invented incidentally) makes exactly the same false equation, as does a statement like this, from the anti-Frenchist ‘No Pasaran’ blog (so puerile that I refuse to link to it):
‘Why has it become so acceptable that — at elegant dinner parties — very distinguished people openly say, 'I'm not anti-American, but Bush disgusts me and makes me physically sick? He is a war criminal and a real threat to world peace.' I can only interpret such statements as being partly about Bush and partly about using him as an acceptable cover to bash America.’
The criticism that people say “America” when they really mean the Bush administration (or Starbucks, or whatever) typically sits cheek by jowl with the assumption that nobody speaks of the ‘Bush administration’ (or Starbucks, or whatever) without meaning ‘America’. Bsljukhl;kljeh
To bash America: the covert aim of so many particular arguments and objections, which are thus robbed of their force and rewritten as mere resentment. Is this – America as the object of resentment and envy - not among the most clichéd and stubborn tropes of contemporary polemics? And this ‘gaze of resentment’, far from being something which the polemicists wish to abolish is their cherished object of desire and indispensable ideological support.
__
Genuine dialogue between America and the Soviet Union will only become possible when Americans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of capitalist ideology
Rand Omidyolog
Every era of course has its Rand Omidyologs. Anyway, for some reason, I forgot to add the following to my earlier comments on an essay on ‘anti-Americanism’. I quote: “A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media's coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans.”
Let’s be clear what’s being said here: You encounter perspectives and accounts different from the one you are familiar with. They render what was familiar to you almost unrecognisable. Does this excite your interest, activate your curiosity, lead you to reappraise the familiar; does it set in motion a process of questioning? No, the very fact that these perspectives render your world unfamiliar is enough to impugn them. And all that is questioned are the (perforce malign) ‘motives’ of those responsible for disturbing your familiar picture.
And the essay ends by stipulating the terms of any future European admittance to the negotiating table: ‘Genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism’ It is, presumably, a ‘long and arduous’ process because anti-Americanism is so ingrained and inveterate that we can barely gauge its extent. Europeans are, perhaps, steeped in it even against their conscious intent or knowledge. They ‘carry it’ and reproduce it willy-nilly – scarcely subjects of their own thoughts. Much soul-searching will be needed. So, ‘Europeans’, before you venture to speak, re-examine yourself, see if any anti-American sentiments breed about your hearts, and if you sense such sentiments expurgate and correct them. You’ll be rewarded with admittance to ‘genuine dialogue’ albeit in Caeser’s terms [sorry, my mistake- the author's name is in fact Ceaser]. A blogger has drawn my attention to his own piece on 'anti-American prejudice', which he admits to being 'prone to'.
It would be easy to construct a ‘concept’ of ‘pro-Americanism” cobbled together from, say, some quotes from Blake, Kafka, Foucault, Kristeva and other ‘European intellectuals’. One could then claim this was a kind of ‘syndrome’, a stubborn tradition to which we’re still in thrall when we say anything that is pro-American. One could cite various contemporary pro-American statements as ‘evidence’ of this ‘syndrome’. This concept would doubtless have many polemical uses. Except, of course, it is unlikely that such a ‘concept’ would have or accrue any intellectual credibility or be seen as anything other than a rather crude device for forestalling debate.
How curious, then, that the similarly structured ‘concept’ of ‘anti-Americanism’ seems to be going from strength to strength, as in this recent essay, wherein Heidegger, Rilke and diverse others are conscripted into illustrating what is essentially foreign to them and, stripped of their particular contexts and their inherent differences, frogmarched into serving as mere examples of an ‘idea’ having as its ultimate referent and sticking place only the polemical demands of the present. The author, the instrument of ideological forces of which he seems wholly ignorant, cites the following passage from Rilke:
Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated things, mere things of appearance, sham articles.... A house in the American understanding, an American apple or an American vine has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and thoughts of our forefathers
As well as this from Heidegger:
Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.
Each of these comments [ok, so the second one doesn’t actually mention America. Let that pass] can be located in (and against) a tradition of thought; each deserves to be heard and answered in its specificity; but a ‘thinker’ able to extract from such comments no more than the anaemic and mechanical concept of ‘anti-Americanism’ resembles nothing so much as a winemaker able to extract from a grape little more than its stem. What is inessential is elevated to spurious magnitude and what is essential discarded as so much unserviceable dross.
Yes, Rilke uses ‘America’ to name – gropingly - something that he sees emerging, a new object-world, something which we might, perhaps, call the Society of the Spectacle; Heidegger was trying to conceptualise something perhaps related, although certainly not the same. And the name America was indeed, perhaps, a moment in this conceptualisation. But such comments are not ‘about’ America. One can easily jettison the name ‘America’ in understanding such comments, indeed, it is crucial to do so. Such names block access to the true object of thought. Nor can such invocations be situated, without ignorance and wilful distortion, on a smooth continuum ending in the present.
This is not to suggest (very obviously) that there are not anti-American sentiments or remarks, but surely no one believes that the current concept of Anti-Americanism is simply a way of neutrally referring to these, nor that an ‘anti-American’ sentiment is automatically a manifestation of ‘anti-Americanism’. This last is an ideological notion which I suspect will become more prevalent as it becomes polemically and politically more necessary.
Anti-Americanism, if we can use the term non-ideologically, might refer to instances where there is a false conflation between ‘America’ and some specific action of its government or, alternatively, some general concept like ‘aggression’ or ‘consumerism’. The point, however, is that any such conflation is illegitimate, favourable or unfavourable. Thus, a statement like ‘they hate America because they hate freedom’ (not an e.g. that I have invented incidentally) makes exactly the same false equation, as does a statement like this, from the anti-Frenchist ‘No Pasaran’ blog (so puerile that I refuse to link to it):
‘Why has it become so acceptable that — at elegant dinner parties — very distinguished people openly say, 'I'm not anti-American, but Bush disgusts me and makes me physically sick? He is a war criminal and a real threat to world peace.' I can only interpret such statements as being partly about Bush and partly about using him as an acceptable cover to bash America.’
The criticism that people say “America” when they really mean the Bush administration (or Starbucks, or whatever) typically sits cheek by jowl with the assumption that nobody speaks of the ‘Bush administration’ (or Starbucks, or whatever) without meaning ‘America’. Bsljukhl;kljeh
To bash America: the covert aim of so many particular arguments and objections, which are thus robbed of their force and rewritten as mere resentment. Is this – America as the object of resentment and envy - not among the most clichéd and stubborn tropes of contemporary polemics? And this ‘gaze of resentment’, far from being something which the polemicists wish to abolish is their cherished object of desire and indispensable ideological support.
__
Genuine dialogue between America and the Soviet Union will only become possible when Americans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of capitalist ideology
Rand Omidyolog
Every era of course has its Rand Omidyologs. Anyway, for some reason, I forgot to add the following to my earlier comments on an essay on ‘anti-Americanism’. I quote: “A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media's coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans.”
Let’s be clear what’s being said here: You encounter perspectives and accounts different from the one you are familiar with. They render what was familiar to you almost unrecognisable. Does this excite your interest, activate your curiosity, lead you to reappraise the familiar; does it set in motion a process of questioning? No, the very fact that these perspectives render your world unfamiliar is enough to impugn them. And all that is questioned are the (perforce malign) ‘motives’ of those responsible for disturbing your familiar picture.
And the essay ends by stipulating the terms of any future European admittance to the negotiating table: ‘Genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism’ It is, presumably, a ‘long and arduous’ process because anti-Americanism is so ingrained and inveterate that we can barely gauge its extent. Europeans are, perhaps, steeped in it even against their conscious intent or knowledge. They ‘carry it’ and reproduce it willy-nilly – scarcely subjects of their own thoughts. Much soul-searching will be needed. So, ‘Europeans’, before you venture to speak, re-examine yourself, see if any anti-American sentiments breed about your hearts, and if you sense such sentiments expurgate and correct them. You’ll be rewarded with admittance to ‘genuine dialogue’ albeit in Caeser’s terms [sorry, my mistake- the author's name is in fact Ceaser]. A blogger has drawn my attention to his own piece on 'anti-American prejudice', which he admits to being 'prone to'.
Monday, December 20, 2004
Tarrying with the Negative
Fredic Jameson on, respectively, Schiller, Breton & the Surrealists, Herbert Marcuse:
"..it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom, in three such profoundly different moments in history: its reinvention by the historian playwright, dreaming the heroic gestures of political eloquence in his tiny feudal city-state open to the fields, stimulated by the news of revolutionary victories there where in a few years the shock of Napoleanic armies will cause the earth to tremble; by the poet, stalking his magical fun-park for the neon omens of objective chance, behind the hallucinatory rebus of the street scene never ceasing to hear the pop gun volleys of the vicious, never ending military pacification of colonial empire; by the philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing - from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of the freeways and the ominous stape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, and as it were from beyond them, in the future - the almost extinct form of the utopian idea."
Well, it pleases me too, partly as a counter-truth to the ceaseless instrumentalisation of thought within academia, and the transformation of this last into a kind of corporate bureaucracy little different in kind from those other corporations which it mimics and prepares for at a formal level, despite whatever ostensibly radical contents it contains and continues to peddle. And it is perhaps worth adding, for those who dismiss Marcuse and his notion of the recuperation of critical thinking, that this has little to do with the range of opinions on offer per se; it is not the mere existence of a range of 'radical' perspectives but their function and structural position within the system, their transformation, for example, into fads, commodities, 'life-styles', or, precisely, into living illustrations of the impressive tolerance of modern liberal democracy.
"..it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom, in three such profoundly different moments in history: its reinvention by the historian playwright, dreaming the heroic gestures of political eloquence in his tiny feudal city-state open to the fields, stimulated by the news of revolutionary victories there where in a few years the shock of Napoleanic armies will cause the earth to tremble; by the poet, stalking his magical fun-park for the neon omens of objective chance, behind the hallucinatory rebus of the street scene never ceasing to hear the pop gun volleys of the vicious, never ending military pacification of colonial empire; by the philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing - from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of the freeways and the ominous stape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, and as it were from beyond them, in the future - the almost extinct form of the utopian idea."
Well, it pleases me too, partly as a counter-truth to the ceaseless instrumentalisation of thought within academia, and the transformation of this last into a kind of corporate bureaucracy little different in kind from those other corporations which it mimics and prepares for at a formal level, despite whatever ostensibly radical contents it contains and continues to peddle. And it is perhaps worth adding, for those who dismiss Marcuse and his notion of the recuperation of critical thinking, that this has little to do with the range of opinions on offer per se; it is not the mere existence of a range of 'radical' perspectives but their function and structural position within the system, their transformation, for example, into fads, commodities, 'life-styles', or, precisely, into living illustrations of the impressive tolerance of modern liberal democracy.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Freedom precedes Liberation
"Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, so sadly forgotten today, put it in a very nice way in his essay on liberation, "freedom is the condition of liberation." In order to liberate yourself you must be free.We see this today, with feminists, that the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom. The problem is not, at first, that the situation for women was bad, but [rather] that they just accepted it as a fact. Even in revolution it goes like this. If you look at the French Revolution, the shift was purely ideological. They overthrew the king when they started to perceive that position as unjustified. Look at it in an objective way. The ancienne regime was, in the second part of the 18th century, much more liberal and open than before. It's just that the implicit ethical standards changed. My big obsession with Christianity is that there is something extremely precious in this legacy that is being lost today."
Zizek
Zizek
Friday, December 17, 2004
Symbolic Order as Parasite
Those of you consulting my ‘Critical Dictionary’ will find the following definition of ‘Symbolic Authority’:
‘The king, the judge, the president, and so on, can be personally dishonest, rotten, but when they adopt the insignia of authority, they experience a kind of mystic transubstantiation.’
The distinction, very simply, is between the empirical individual and the structural and Symbolic position they occupy. From this structural position, from this Symbolic title they borrow authority. Those who genefluct to them are in fact signalling their deference to this Symbolic Position. When a student respectfully addresses a Professor on the first day of classes, they address his symbolic position as opposed to him/ her as an empirical individual. They address the Other, of which he is the bearer.
The empirical individual can experience and relate to this Symbolic title in different ways. He may identify with it utterly, as though the authority and respect appropriate to his structual symbolic position is a direct emanation of his self. (Lacan’s famous assertion that a beggar who thinks he is a king is no more or less mad than a king who thinks he is a king.)
Alternatively, the individual may experience his symbolic title as a kind of foreign body, an unwelcome burden, a constant imperative. The father who feels not quite up to the mandate of ‘father’, as if the title doesn’t fit him, as if has invaded him from the outside, clamped itself upon his substance. When someone says, by contrast, you’ve been 'such a good father', it means – ‘you have utterly met, lived up to, your symbolic mandate.’
The Symbolic mandate – king, father or whatever – is, nonetheless, whether embraced or refused, always a kind of eccentric imperative, which colonises the subject, demanding the commitment of and preying on his life substance. And this status of the Symbolic as a kind of parasite is beautifully expressed in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, part ii.
The history plays as a whole arguably concern the way in which people are interpellated by their symbolic titles, assume or fail to assume their symbolic titles, are transformed by those titles. Towards the end of part ii, Prince Hal, soon to be Henry v, first thinks his father dead, seeing the crown (the very material embodiment of his title) lying beside him on the pillow. On realising that his weary and ill father is in fact still alive, Hal comments -
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worse than gold.
The Symbolic leaches life out of the real body, the Symbolic title is like a parasite feeding on the living body.
Falstaff, by contrast, is the life substance itself, negligent of Symbolic ‘honours’. Ultimately Falstaff has to be disowned by Hal when he assumes his symbolic title of Henry V.
‘The king, the judge, the president, and so on, can be personally dishonest, rotten, but when they adopt the insignia of authority, they experience a kind of mystic transubstantiation.’
The distinction, very simply, is between the empirical individual and the structural and Symbolic position they occupy. From this structural position, from this Symbolic title they borrow authority. Those who genefluct to them are in fact signalling their deference to this Symbolic Position. When a student respectfully addresses a Professor on the first day of classes, they address his symbolic position as opposed to him/ her as an empirical individual. They address the Other, of which he is the bearer.
The empirical individual can experience and relate to this Symbolic title in different ways. He may identify with it utterly, as though the authority and respect appropriate to his structual symbolic position is a direct emanation of his self. (Lacan’s famous assertion that a beggar who thinks he is a king is no more or less mad than a king who thinks he is a king.)
Alternatively, the individual may experience his symbolic title as a kind of foreign body, an unwelcome burden, a constant imperative. The father who feels not quite up to the mandate of ‘father’, as if the title doesn’t fit him, as if has invaded him from the outside, clamped itself upon his substance. When someone says, by contrast, you’ve been 'such a good father', it means – ‘you have utterly met, lived up to, your symbolic mandate.’
The Symbolic mandate – king, father or whatever – is, nonetheless, whether embraced or refused, always a kind of eccentric imperative, which colonises the subject, demanding the commitment of and preying on his life substance. And this status of the Symbolic as a kind of parasite is beautifully expressed in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, part ii.
The history plays as a whole arguably concern the way in which people are interpellated by their symbolic titles, assume or fail to assume their symbolic titles, are transformed by those titles. Towards the end of part ii, Prince Hal, soon to be Henry v, first thinks his father dead, seeing the crown (the very material embodiment of his title) lying beside him on the pillow. On realising that his weary and ill father is in fact still alive, Hal comments -
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worse than gold.
The Symbolic leaches life out of the real body, the Symbolic title is like a parasite feeding on the living body.
Falstaff, by contrast, is the life substance itself, negligent of Symbolic ‘honours’. Ultimately Falstaff has to be disowned by Hal when he assumes his symbolic title of Henry V.
Inner/outer
'Even our physical life, and still more the world of our spiritual aims and interests, rests on the demand to carry though into objectivity what at first was there only subjectively and inwardly, and then alone to find itself satisfied in this complete existence. Now since the content of our aims and interests is present first only in the one sided form of subjectivity, and this one-sidedness is a restriction, this deficiency shows itself at the same time as an unrest, a grief, as something negative. This, as negative, has to cancel itself […] The individual in his essential nature is the totality, not the inner alone, but equally the realization of this inner through and in the outer.'
Hegel, Aesthetics.
Hegel, Aesthetics.
A Note on Yeats
Yeats despite the voiced antipathy to ‘abstraction’ is consistently attracted to geometric & quasi-algebraic formulae. One finds it especially, of course, in a Vision but it is already there in the early occultist activity. The diagram, the conceptual scaffold of reality rather than its vivid immediacy. This can be related to the Modernist tendency towards mathemes, inner structures, the unseen algebra of the sensuous.
The materialisation of the image (Imaginary) is underwritten by a prior geometry or a structure, with the resultant gap between structure and percept which is a signature trope of modernist literature and thought. Increasingly the appearance of the world and its conditions of intelligibility are at variance.
The materialisation of the image (Imaginary) is underwritten by a prior geometry or a structure, with the resultant gap between structure and percept which is a signature trope of modernist literature and thought. Increasingly the appearance of the world and its conditions of intelligibility are at variance.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
Epic World
Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
“Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.”
Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. It never migrates into some purely conceptual realm, a pure dictionary-like definition.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
In this respect, the world of Homer seems to me utterly unPlatonic - if in Plato there is first of all a realm of disembodied concepts, which then descend to and reside within this lower world, availing themselves of a transitory material envelope.
Moreover, in the Homeric there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium - things address not only our sense of sight; touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” (Iliad) is not just ‘memorize’ – it addresses the sensory experience of registering something, it also ‘metaphorizes’ the physical world in order to talk about (what we would now call) the ‘mental’, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Perhaps ‘mind’ is, indeed, more ‘transparent’, since implicitly it is intelligible through the optic of action/ being-in-the-world.
It was of course Hegel and his heirs who thought of ‘the epic’, ‘the novel' etc not simply as literary genres intelligible within the “laws” and biases of literary development, but as embodiments of Worlds, as presupposing certain historical shifts which can then, as it were, be read off from them in reverse:
Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires[1]
Vital in this regard, in Hegel and later in the criticism of people like Lukacs, was the historical truth disclosed in the novel, and the distinction between the novel as a genre and earlier forms such as the epic and the traditional story.
Jameson on Benjamin and Sartre:
The two forms [the tale and the novel] are opposed not only in their social origins (the tale springing from collective life, the novel from middle-class solitude) and in their raw materials (the tale using what everyone can recognise as common experience, the novel that which is uncommon and highly individualistic), but also and primarily in their relationship to death and to eternity.
And on Lukacs:
In the artworks of a preindustrialised, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences […..] the works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. [..]
The village, the city-state, is a whole world in itself
[1] Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 166.
Anyway, thinking about 'nostalgia' for the Epic world as a motif in Modern thought, eg Heidegger. Will try to post something on what I mean by this if I have time.
“Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.”
Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. It never migrates into some purely conceptual realm, a pure dictionary-like definition.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
In this respect, the world of Homer seems to me utterly unPlatonic - if in Plato there is first of all a realm of disembodied concepts, which then descend to and reside within this lower world, availing themselves of a transitory material envelope.
Moreover, in the Homeric there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium - things address not only our sense of sight; touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” (Iliad) is not just ‘memorize’ – it addresses the sensory experience of registering something, it also ‘metaphorizes’ the physical world in order to talk about (what we would now call) the ‘mental’, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Perhaps ‘mind’ is, indeed, more ‘transparent’, since implicitly it is intelligible through the optic of action/ being-in-the-world.
It was of course Hegel and his heirs who thought of ‘the epic’, ‘the novel' etc not simply as literary genres intelligible within the “laws” and biases of literary development, but as embodiments of Worlds, as presupposing certain historical shifts which can then, as it were, be read off from them in reverse:
Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires[1]
Vital in this regard, in Hegel and later in the criticism of people like Lukacs, was the historical truth disclosed in the novel, and the distinction between the novel as a genre and earlier forms such as the epic and the traditional story.
Jameson on Benjamin and Sartre:
The two forms [the tale and the novel] are opposed not only in their social origins (the tale springing from collective life, the novel from middle-class solitude) and in their raw materials (the tale using what everyone can recognise as common experience, the novel that which is uncommon and highly individualistic), but also and primarily in their relationship to death and to eternity.
And on Lukacs:
In the artworks of a preindustrialised, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences […..] the works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. [..]
The village, the city-state, is a whole world in itself
[1] Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 166.
Anyway, thinking about 'nostalgia' for the Epic world as a motif in Modern thought, eg Heidegger. Will try to post something on what I mean by this if I have time.
Being Invisible
Being is invisible in the following sense: although we can see that something is smooth, we can not see its ‘being smooth’. The actual quote, from Husserl, reads: “I can see colours, but not being-coloured. I can feel smoothness but not ‘being smooth’ Logical Investigations.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Being Seen
There is an essay by Berger, although I forget where, in which he suggests that a painting, a significant painting, is not so much a record of an appearance but of an act of seeing. A photo has trapped an appearance, rent it from time and context, and flattened it into something like a fact or factum brutum. The painted image is not a copy, not even a copy of the act of seeing. The painting, its rhythms, its inner constitution, the decisions that have knit it together – all these are the act or process of seeing. “Every painted image announces: ‘I have seen this’.” The photo copies ‘reality’, where reality is the world firmly and securely accommodated in and by language. To really see something involves breaking through this ‘reality’, searching beyond it, and this process is indissociable from what is before us on the canvas.
Rilke once said that everything that has truly been seen must become a poem. It must, we might put it, break through into poetry. But what is really being said here, surely, is that its ‘being seen’ is incomplete until it reaches or achieves poetry. The poem is its final and condign lodging.
Perhaps what both Berger and Rilke are talking about is the presence of a thing. The presence of a thing cannot be captured by photographic facsimile. The photo skims of precisely what is reproducible about the thing. Recognisable. That which is answerable to the Other. The painting or poem accommodates the ‘aura’ of the thing.
This seems to be the subject matter of one of Berger’s finest pieces of work, "Will it Be a Likeness", initially a radio programme performed by Berger and Simon McBurney. It is a programme about the presence and silence that adheres to things and the denial or emptying out of this presence by commerce and by the perpetual migration of reality into a series of representations; the fate of presence in an age when “everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.” The latter mentality, of universal buyability, or commodification, is given insistent voice in Berger’s essay:
‘Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.”
What exists outside this kind of language is, increasingly, pushed, under duress, into what sounds like mysticism or madness. It is bullied into silence by the absolutism of profit, or its own proper and integral silence is inundated by impatient noise.
One of the signal and enduring qualities of Berger’s prose is the protective silence it builds around itself, the cordon of silence with which it insulates itself from the insistent noise of the world, the precious Nothing which is its stony rejoinder to the fanaticism of ‘how much?’.
Rilke once said that everything that has truly been seen must become a poem. It must, we might put it, break through into poetry. But what is really being said here, surely, is that its ‘being seen’ is incomplete until it reaches or achieves poetry. The poem is its final and condign lodging.
Perhaps what both Berger and Rilke are talking about is the presence of a thing. The presence of a thing cannot be captured by photographic facsimile. The photo skims of precisely what is reproducible about the thing. Recognisable. That which is answerable to the Other. The painting or poem accommodates the ‘aura’ of the thing.
This seems to be the subject matter of one of Berger’s finest pieces of work, "Will it Be a Likeness", initially a radio programme performed by Berger and Simon McBurney. It is a programme about the presence and silence that adheres to things and the denial or emptying out of this presence by commerce and by the perpetual migration of reality into a series of representations; the fate of presence in an age when “everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.” The latter mentality, of universal buyability, or commodification, is given insistent voice in Berger’s essay:
‘Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.”
What exists outside this kind of language is, increasingly, pushed, under duress, into what sounds like mysticism or madness. It is bullied into silence by the absolutism of profit, or its own proper and integral silence is inundated by impatient noise.
One of the signal and enduring qualities of Berger’s prose is the protective silence it builds around itself, the cordon of silence with which it insulates itself from the insistent noise of the world, the precious Nothing which is its stony rejoinder to the fanaticism of ‘how much?’.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Much Ado About Nothing
Having being roped into doing a little extra teaching on Shakespeare, I found myself reading Terry Eagleton’s sparky little tract on the subject, short but good value at about 10 concepts per cubit of prose. Particularly interesting were his remarks on Nothing, from which ensued the following reflections.
There are, of course, different kinds of nothing and different ways of seeing nothing. To be shown round a new unfurnished flat involves, in a sense, seeing nothing – seeing a place with nothing in it. But if you were to return home one evening, expecting to see your computer in its familiar place on your desk, and it isn’t there, you actively see – with dizzy anxiety - an absence, a vacancy whose volume is coextensive with that of the computer. Here, Nothing is the ‘absence of’ something - it’s a disturbing refusal of being where you expect something, where your gaze instead meets with a lack, a gap in reality.
The obvious precedent of this kind of Nothing, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is of course the male child’s surprise and anxiety at seeing the female’s ‘missing’ genitals. Where he expects to see a thing, he instead encounters an absence. This produces, among other responses, castrating anxiety, the sudden spectre of a subtraction, actual and symbolic. This idea is conveniently underwritten in Elizabethan English, where ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ are slang for the male and female genitals respectively. Or at least, it is thought that ‘Nothing’ was slang for the female genitals, as when Hamlet replies to Ophelia’s ‘nothing’ with ‘that’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs’. As Eagleton jokily points out, though, when Lear asks Cordelia “what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters” we aren’t to imagine that she is replying ‘Female genitals, my lord’. Nevertheless, Cordelia’s reply perfectly fits the pattern described above. It’s a silence where Lear expects speech, a castrating absence. It ‘castrates’ his ego, for the solicitation of fawning and fulsome speech from his daughters is little more than an egotistical pageant, a flattering glass, cracked by Cordelia’s truncated response.
In Othello, the absent handkerchief is a ‘nothing’ in this sense. We have the anxiety of the eyes meeting with a gap, a blank in place of something. This nothing acts a vacuum into which Othello’s fantasies and ‘blown surmises’ are sucked. It is the task of an Iago to introduce silences, absences, tears in the fabric of the word-woven world. And it is this which then ‘motivates’ Othello’s desire – which is the desire to fill-in and re-possess these absences, these Nothings - just as the uncertainties or ambiguities of a text motivate us to go on reading – to go on and possess it, which is to say to resolve its ambiguities.
Eagleton relates all this stuff to a more basic anxiety about Nothing. Things themselves are mute, they do not have signs inscribed in their surface, but ask to be ‘completed’ by language. This muteness is unsettling, somehow pregnant with infinite meaning and utterly devoid of any at all. Reality only ‘settles down’ when covered with the radiant net of words. Words lend reality the illusion of stability, or: Language is a way of ‘muffling’ the anxiety-producing silence of the world. Thus it is the absence of words that open up ‘anxiety’, like the absence of the computer on the desk or the absence of the ‘thing’ in the imagination of the Freudian child.
There are, of course, different kinds of nothing and different ways of seeing nothing. To be shown round a new unfurnished flat involves, in a sense, seeing nothing – seeing a place with nothing in it. But if you were to return home one evening, expecting to see your computer in its familiar place on your desk, and it isn’t there, you actively see – with dizzy anxiety - an absence, a vacancy whose volume is coextensive with that of the computer. Here, Nothing is the ‘absence of’ something - it’s a disturbing refusal of being where you expect something, where your gaze instead meets with a lack, a gap in reality.
The obvious precedent of this kind of Nothing, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is of course the male child’s surprise and anxiety at seeing the female’s ‘missing’ genitals. Where he expects to see a thing, he instead encounters an absence. This produces, among other responses, castrating anxiety, the sudden spectre of a subtraction, actual and symbolic. This idea is conveniently underwritten in Elizabethan English, where ‘thing’ and ‘nothing’ are slang for the male and female genitals respectively. Or at least, it is thought that ‘Nothing’ was slang for the female genitals, as when Hamlet replies to Ophelia’s ‘nothing’ with ‘that’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs’. As Eagleton jokily points out, though, when Lear asks Cordelia “what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters” we aren’t to imagine that she is replying ‘Female genitals, my lord’. Nevertheless, Cordelia’s reply perfectly fits the pattern described above. It’s a silence where Lear expects speech, a castrating absence. It ‘castrates’ his ego, for the solicitation of fawning and fulsome speech from his daughters is little more than an egotistical pageant, a flattering glass, cracked by Cordelia’s truncated response.
In Othello, the absent handkerchief is a ‘nothing’ in this sense. We have the anxiety of the eyes meeting with a gap, a blank in place of something. This nothing acts a vacuum into which Othello’s fantasies and ‘blown surmises’ are sucked. It is the task of an Iago to introduce silences, absences, tears in the fabric of the word-woven world. And it is this which then ‘motivates’ Othello’s desire – which is the desire to fill-in and re-possess these absences, these Nothings - just as the uncertainties or ambiguities of a text motivate us to go on reading – to go on and possess it, which is to say to resolve its ambiguities.
Eagleton relates all this stuff to a more basic anxiety about Nothing. Things themselves are mute, they do not have signs inscribed in their surface, but ask to be ‘completed’ by language. This muteness is unsettling, somehow pregnant with infinite meaning and utterly devoid of any at all. Reality only ‘settles down’ when covered with the radiant net of words. Words lend reality the illusion of stability, or: Language is a way of ‘muffling’ the anxiety-producing silence of the world. Thus it is the absence of words that open up ‘anxiety’, like the absence of the computer on the desk or the absence of the ‘thing’ in the imagination of the Freudian child.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Some links
Some of you may be interested t know that William Gibson, author of neuromancer and cardinal reference point in discussions of all things cyber- has his own blog, here, which I found courtesy of here. Paul Virilio writes on cyberspace and related issues here. An interesting review of G. Agamben's latest book here. Also, rather belatedly, Terry Eagleton on 'intellectuals':
With the decline of the critical intellectual, the thinker gives way to the expert, politics yields to technocracy, and culture and education lapse into forms of social therapy. The promotion of ideas plays second fiddle to the provision of services. Art and culture become substitute forms of cohesion, participation and self-esteem in a deeply divided society. Culture is deployed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to tackle the causes of those divisions, implying that social exclusion is simply a psychological affair. That to feel bad about ourselves is the first step towards transforming our situation is thus neatly sidestepped. ...
.... University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone's feelings. Why indulge in it anyway, if what matters is not truth but self-expression? "Student-centred learning" assumes that the student's "personal experience" is to be revered rather than challenged. People are to be comforted rather than confronted. In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service. This phoney populism, as Furedi points out, is in fact a thinly veiled paternalism, assuming as it does that ordinary men and women aren't up to having their experience questioned. Rigorous discriminations are branded as "elitist" - an elitist attitude in itself, given that ordinary people have always fiercely argued the toss over the relative merits of everything from films to football clubs. Meanwhile, libraries try frantically not to look like libraries, or to let slip intimidatingly elitist words such as "book".
With the decline of the critical intellectual, the thinker gives way to the expert, politics yields to technocracy, and culture and education lapse into forms of social therapy. The promotion of ideas plays second fiddle to the provision of services. Art and culture become substitute forms of cohesion, participation and self-esteem in a deeply divided society. Culture is deployed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to tackle the causes of those divisions, implying that social exclusion is simply a psychological affair. That to feel bad about ourselves is the first step towards transforming our situation is thus neatly sidestepped. ...
.... University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone's feelings. Why indulge in it anyway, if what matters is not truth but self-expression? "Student-centred learning" assumes that the student's "personal experience" is to be revered rather than challenged. People are to be comforted rather than confronted. In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service. This phoney populism, as Furedi points out, is in fact a thinly veiled paternalism, assuming as it does that ordinary men and women aren't up to having their experience questioned. Rigorous discriminations are branded as "elitist" - an elitist attitude in itself, given that ordinary people have always fiercely argued the toss over the relative merits of everything from films to football clubs. Meanwhile, libraries try frantically not to look like libraries, or to let slip intimidatingly elitist words such as "book".
J.B.
"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."
John Berger
John Berger
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Sunday, December 05, 2004
The Ballad of Franz Kafka
He came to Prague in a fragile boat,
His hair was beetle black.
His thin ribbed body was barely afloat
And stretched and pale as if on a rack.
As white as a bone in a dying throat
He stumbled along and clutched his coat,
With a siren's song he'd learnt by rote
And a fardel of stories and fables.
The road was narrow and dimly lit,
It skirted the foot of the palace.
He simply requested a permit to live
But was greeted with laughter and malice.
Granted a visa, he trained as ascribe
And hardly slept a wink.
Thin, unloved and barely alive
He lived and breathed in paper and ink.
He rattled around in a form of speech
Old German and dead bureaucratic;
And when he got home from the office at night
He padlocked himself in his attic.
One evening he met a young woman -
A Jewish Berliner, Felice,
She smiled and stroked his thin pale hands,
He sensed an unusual peace.
'If only you'd leave your attic bower,
This tiny circle of light,
With me you could blossom into a flower
And not be a creature of night.
'You stay couped up in this small gloomy space -
It like putting yourself in detention.
But I have to keep bottled up, Felice,
For constraint is the nurse of invention.'
He began to sweat and to pace the floor,
He threw away bundles of paper.
Would he enter the strange world of daylight and flesh,
Or burn up alone like a taper?
With equivocal purpose he made for the door
Yet he ached as if on a rack;
One of his feet seemed stuck to the floor,
And the night was insect black.
As he reached the threshold and snuffed out the candle
He felt a sharp pain in his lung;
His thin pale hand never reached the handle,
Like a song of love never sung.
He staggered around, collapsed on the bed,
It felt like a metamorphosis;
Out of his mouth it spilled dark red:
He had tuberculosis.
Love had been slain - a violent thief
Had struck him and stolen his breath.
Instead of the beautiful voice of Felice
His companion from now would be Death.
Yet he felt inside him a certain relief.
He as spared the momentous decision.
Was he himself the shadowy thief?
Had he made the fatal incision?
'Too much blood has been spilled,' he wrote,
'We'll never be joined as one.
There's a dry rattle deep in my throat,' he coughed,
'I must shield myself from the sun.'
Hand in hand he danced the dry roads
With a fluttering under his ribs.
His companion's limbs were beetle black,
Like a vein of ink or a hairline crack,
And they danced to asilver nib.
In occasional airs his siren song sings,
With its terrible lonely elation.
He flew from the world on folio wings -
His final transformation.
from Pipelines, 1998.
His hair was beetle black.
His thin ribbed body was barely afloat
And stretched and pale as if on a rack.
As white as a bone in a dying throat
He stumbled along and clutched his coat,
With a siren's song he'd learnt by rote
And a fardel of stories and fables.
The road was narrow and dimly lit,
It skirted the foot of the palace.
He simply requested a permit to live
But was greeted with laughter and malice.
Granted a visa, he trained as ascribe
And hardly slept a wink.
Thin, unloved and barely alive
He lived and breathed in paper and ink.
He rattled around in a form of speech
Old German and dead bureaucratic;
And when he got home from the office at night
He padlocked himself in his attic.
One evening he met a young woman -
A Jewish Berliner, Felice,
She smiled and stroked his thin pale hands,
He sensed an unusual peace.
'If only you'd leave your attic bower,
This tiny circle of light,
With me you could blossom into a flower
And not be a creature of night.
'You stay couped up in this small gloomy space -
It like putting yourself in detention.
But I have to keep bottled up, Felice,
For constraint is the nurse of invention.'
He began to sweat and to pace the floor,
He threw away bundles of paper.
Would he enter the strange world of daylight and flesh,
Or burn up alone like a taper?
With equivocal purpose he made for the door
Yet he ached as if on a rack;
One of his feet seemed stuck to the floor,
And the night was insect black.
As he reached the threshold and snuffed out the candle
He felt a sharp pain in his lung;
His thin pale hand never reached the handle,
Like a song of love never sung.
He staggered around, collapsed on the bed,
It felt like a metamorphosis;
Out of his mouth it spilled dark red:
He had tuberculosis.
Love had been slain - a violent thief
Had struck him and stolen his breath.
Instead of the beautiful voice of Felice
His companion from now would be Death.
Yet he felt inside him a certain relief.
He as spared the momentous decision.
Was he himself the shadowy thief?
Had he made the fatal incision?
'Too much blood has been spilled,' he wrote,
'We'll never be joined as one.
There's a dry rattle deep in my throat,' he coughed,
'I must shield myself from the sun.'
Hand in hand he danced the dry roads
With a fluttering under his ribs.
His companion's limbs were beetle black,
Like a vein of ink or a hairline crack,
And they danced to asilver nib.
In occasional airs his siren song sings,
With its terrible lonely elation.
He flew from the world on folio wings -
His final transformation.
from Pipelines, 1998.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Apologies
Really too busy to post at the moment, having taken on a bit of extra work. The post below was written very hastily and will be corrected anon.
A Note On Genet.
"The memory with the quickest sting is of the toilet outside the house with the slate roof. It was my refuge. Life, which I perceived as distant and blurred through its shadow and smell [..] Life reached me as singularly sweet, tender, light,or rather lightened, stripped of its heaviness [..] Life seemed to float a bit a like a painted dream while I, in my own hole like a larva, took up a peaceful nocturnal existence, and sometimes had teh feeling that I was slowly sinking deeper, as in a sleep or a lake or a maternal bosom toward the spiritual centre of the world."
Genet
An emblematic passage; for could one not describe Genet's world as a world of light and unreality glimpsed furtively, perhaps greedily from behind a latrine wall: the combination of glimmering surfaces, glittering films and skeins, and the dark and humid interiority of the toilet. The latrine is also here the body, or a prosthetic extension thereof, the body as an engine of life and putrefaction at once, a clammy hut where the heart jet and the knocking of Death are indissociable, where customary oppositions between life and death glide into the one another. Genet inhales his own smells with the delicacy of the wine-taster, delights in the dark interior as well as the smooth exterior of the body. Flatulence and grace, balletic harmony and formless shit are not longer arranged on a ladder of aesthetic distinction.
The obscene is folded inside out and made beautiful. Beauty? It seeps out of a tube of vaseline, or flashes from a policeman's truncheon, as if promiscously indifferent to its object.
Genet compares the latrine to a confessional. There is something of the same 'economy' of release: All that is festering inside is allowed egress and recognition. The good Freudian child offers his shit as a gift, and so does the sinner offer his moral corruption to the priest. The anal child, or Genet, relishes his shit, a strange repulsive miracle, a slimy larval soul.
For Genet, the body, eroticised by the restless 'I' inside it, becomes a kind of soft prism through which the external world is perceived and received. Genet's true home is his body, his nomad's shell. The latrine, in turn, is the body's carapace. Everythign outside this febrile territory is foreign, remote, an object of curiousity or violent desire (the violence is needed to break through the screen separating him from the world of light and Others). Yet if he is detached from the world, its alien shapes and pungent colours, the inexplicable exchanges of its citizens, crouched on the beached margins, something seemingly contrary is also true; for often Genet seems the very addresee of the world - the details of the world mutely implore him to give them a voice, translate them into what will then become his style. Style gives a local habitation to the nude Things which, out there in the foreign world, transfix the vagabond poet. Genet is a magician who makes the world speak. So it can seem, at least. It is never entirely clear whether he is teasing out from the world its hitherto trapped language, or whether he is simply putting words into its mouth, as one puts flowers in a jar. He scarcely knows himself.
Genet
An emblematic passage; for could one not describe Genet's world as a world of light and unreality glimpsed furtively, perhaps greedily from behind a latrine wall: the combination of glimmering surfaces, glittering films and skeins, and the dark and humid interiority of the toilet. The latrine is also here the body, or a prosthetic extension thereof, the body as an engine of life and putrefaction at once, a clammy hut where the heart jet and the knocking of Death are indissociable, where customary oppositions between life and death glide into the one another. Genet inhales his own smells with the delicacy of the wine-taster, delights in the dark interior as well as the smooth exterior of the body. Flatulence and grace, balletic harmony and formless shit are not longer arranged on a ladder of aesthetic distinction.
The obscene is folded inside out and made beautiful. Beauty? It seeps out of a tube of vaseline, or flashes from a policeman's truncheon, as if promiscously indifferent to its object.
Genet compares the latrine to a confessional. There is something of the same 'economy' of release: All that is festering inside is allowed egress and recognition. The good Freudian child offers his shit as a gift, and so does the sinner offer his moral corruption to the priest. The anal child, or Genet, relishes his shit, a strange repulsive miracle, a slimy larval soul.
For Genet, the body, eroticised by the restless 'I' inside it, becomes a kind of soft prism through which the external world is perceived and received. Genet's true home is his body, his nomad's shell. The latrine, in turn, is the body's carapace. Everythign outside this febrile territory is foreign, remote, an object of curiousity or violent desire (the violence is needed to break through the screen separating him from the world of light and Others). Yet if he is detached from the world, its alien shapes and pungent colours, the inexplicable exchanges of its citizens, crouched on the beached margins, something seemingly contrary is also true; for often Genet seems the very addresee of the world - the details of the world mutely implore him to give them a voice, translate them into what will then become his style. Style gives a local habitation to the nude Things which, out there in the foreign world, transfix the vagabond poet. Genet is a magician who makes the world speak. So it can seem, at least. It is never entirely clear whether he is teasing out from the world its hitherto trapped language, or whether he is simply putting words into its mouth, as one puts flowers in a jar. He scarcely knows himself.
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