Note on Steiner

For some reason today I picked up a tattered copy of George Steiner's Death of Tragedy. It opens with 'We are entering on large, difficult ground'. This opening illustrates what I would call the gestural component of writing. I.e., Statements, as well as their ostensible meaning, are significant for the gestures they perform, gestures of disavowal, repudiation, self-dramatization etc. Let us take Steiner's line as an example. Of course, it has a literal meaning and can be interpreted as a bare statement of what is the case. But there is also the gestural component: it is, firstly, a gesture of 'humbling', the narrator is dramatized as a wrestler with the imponderable. It is a gesture of invitation: some modern day Virgil is offering to guide us through a hellish terrain. There is an implicit challenge: 'are you with me?' 'can you stay the course?'. This is not a book for passengers. It is a gesture of warning and a demand for readerly commitment and solidarity. There will be no easy answers, no short cuts. But of course, reader, we neither expect nor want any. We are courageous as well as suitably meek, and can look at things unflinchingly. Thus, over and above any prepositional content, the statement invites, warns, and positions both the writer and reader.

One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.

The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.

Be Evil!

Some time ago 'Lenin' made the following speculation about Fascism - 'the fascist regime says "You May!" - you may oppress, vilify, rob, abuse etc. In this way, the supporters of fascism are libidinally bound to its order.' I drew his attention to a remark of Genet's about a sojourn in Nazi Germany. At the time I couldn't remember the source, but have now found it (the beautiful Thief's Journal), so here it is:

"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.

'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."

Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:


'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'

Note on Blanchot & modern poetry

Blanchot:

'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.

Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.

The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:

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

Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.

Blanchot quotes Valery thus:

'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."

A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.

But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'

In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.

cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.

Intellectual on the Carpet

Courtesy of Glueboot:

"Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say....? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language that is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear", to "put your cards on the table." Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us- in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry- that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we will do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language." (H. Marcuse)

Indeed. And not just analytic philosophy either.

Lifers

"You see that you don't love them," says Roquentin. "You wouldn't recognize them in the street. They're only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.

In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.

There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.

[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]

Caravaggio

There is currently a lovely Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London. While looking into it, I came across Berger's essay about the painter online. It begins:

Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.

I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.

But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:

'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.



The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.

Note on Zizek

A lengthy debate here on Slavoj Zizek. The ostensible occasion for this debate was that someone had chosen to isolate a random piece of Zizek's prose as an example of 'question begging'. The passage came from Zizek's LRB article (see below). Now, my first thought was, of course a short article like this will beg (and provoke) questions, so what? Certainly the piece doesn't involve 'question begging' in the strict logical sense ("A democracy is where a democratic process of decision making etc"). But perhaps the obvious point is that 'question begging' is typically not a direct property of a text or speech but a function of the relation between speaker/ audience or text/ reader. So, at university, we had a lecturer who was keen to draw attention to how certain texts were 'true to human nature'. Now for us, with our newly worked through theoretical approach, this presupposed precisely what we were 'interrogating' (as we liked to say). But plug this same lecturer into a different context, Cambridge in the 1930's, the begged questions obediently disappear, and lecture glides effortlessly into the audiences' set of preoccupations. Similarly, unplug a liberal lecture from its intended audience and its suddenly shot through with outrageous and inexplicable assumptions that take for granted what its audience has long since debunked, discarded or at least started to unpick.

It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.

But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.

c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]

Literature: Escape & Critique

J. Derbyshire draws our attention to his review of John Berger's new book.He has a nice phrase for Berger's signature clarity: 'Berger’s prose is a stealthy miracle of precision. His painterly eye for sensuous particularity has often been remarked on and it is on frequently thrilling display here: the “right” temperature for greengages is said to be the “temperature of a small boy’s fist”'

Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?

To quote an earlier post:

[In the epic world] 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.

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.

Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)

Atopos

For some reason this blog is the no.1 google citation for 'Ranciere'*. Odd. Anyway, am currently reading an interesting little book by Ranciere wherein he discusses Rossellini's Europe 51. I'd like to post something about this book and the 'Socratic' notion of 'atopos' - this concept surely underlies R's recognition of the symbolic place of the poor in philosophical discourse. Meanwhile, here is a useful essay on JR, from which this useful summary of Ranciere's Politics:

Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.

The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.

* 17/01/06 Not any more.

No surprise

"No matter how I imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens! The realization brings with it an unforeseeable nothing which changes everything."

Bergson, The Possible and the Real

Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.

n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant

Bureaucracy ii: Objective mirage

[see previous post]

Adorno:

'.. the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down, and illuminating his face in such a way as to divide it pitilessly into bright utilizable parts and dark, disreputable areas of incompetence.'

But the light that so illuminates the candidate does not emanate from the manager. It is the Company's light, and the manager simply refracts it. He speaks with a voice, and looks with an eye trained by the the Company (no, not by training videos, but the very structure if the institution). His small talk, enquiries after your health and so on are all subordinate to testing your useability, suitability, adaptability etc. Thus, the designs of the company empty both the manager and language itelf into the merest instruments.

This is how bureacracy works. People represent and speak on behalf of The Company, but 'the company' is not localised in any individual, not even, or especially, the managing director. It is a kind of objective mirage, or working fiction. Because this objective mirage is never localised in an individual, it is always 'elsewhere,' deferred, absent.

For some revealing 'insider' reflections on bureaucracy, see State Street.

Ontological Bureaucracy

From Thomas Bernhard, Correction:

"We reject everything having to do with contracts, because we reject bureaucracy in toto, but in fact the world is only held together by a parchwork of contracts.. and in this network of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of contracts the trapped human beings are squirming. There's no way to get arounf contracts except by suicide..

To suppose that it is possible to exist without contracts or other written agreements and run away, anywhere at all, is to find ourselves soon caught again in contracts and written agreements, anyone who thinks otherwise is a madman.. It's only in childhood that we don't know what kind of trap it is in which we squirm and despair, [] ignorant that these are the nets of contracts and other written agreements made by the grown-ups, by history. If anyone were to succeed in doing away with all these contracts and other written agreements, all he'd have accomplished would be the end of the whole world.

Our entire being is tied to contracts, written agreements, assessments, no matter who we are. Still we keep trying all our lives to escape from these contracts and other written agreements, efforts as painful as they are senseless.

Bernhard seems to move in this passage from a familiar enough aversion to the impersonality of bureaucracy to a perception that it is 'part of the human condition', and that the impossible struggle against it is both necessary and utterly futile. Bernhard could almost have been describing here, in metaphorical terms, Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Order. And perhaps the impersonal, inescapable structures of the Symbolic Order, or what we might call our ontological bureaucracy, become visible only with the development of bureaucracy proper. Thus, a provisional conclusion: The historical development of Bureaucracy as a form of organisation is a precondition of the perception of a certain ontological bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy, a world where relations between people are always contractually mediated, where people speak and act on behalf of institutions, never 'in thier own voice', where these decisions seem to bear no individual watermark, does all this not alert writers and thinkers to the way in which there was always already a seam of 'bureaucracy' in intersubjective relations and at the core of the self?

Now, in considering this I first thought, as I say, of Lacan. But there was of course a more obvious first port of call, and one I came across, via the intermediary of Google, at Spurious. It is, you've already guessed, Kafka:'Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution' (Letters, 1922).

I intend to update and develop this post very soon, but am posting it in this notational form in case people want to leave comments and suggestions along these lines.

There are some ineresting reflections on this post here.

Bad Democracy

The Bush administration is apparently formulating plans to 'contain' the democratic government of Venezuela. Seems it’s not their kind of democracy: in taking decisions according to its own interests rather than those of a foreign government it's failed to understand what Democracy is about. Chavez is causing potential 'problems' - not for his own people, you understand, but for this foreign government, which is therefore trying to find ways to prevent the representatives of the Venezuelan people from carrying out their mandate. "Defying U.S., Venezuela's Chavez Embraces Socialism" a headline reads: naturally, the most important thing about a government proclaiming its political principles is not the repercussions of these principles for its own people, but the 'statement' it seemingly makes to the Superpower. Presumably any statement not affirming the principles of the Superpower is a 'defiance' of the Superpower. Anyway, the foreign power is monitoring Venezuelan democracy closely, in case it makes the wrong democratic decisions. If it does, and continues to pursue its own interests, who knows, it may have to be liberated.

Tact

There are certain writers whose style, intially carved out of nothing or against the grain of received modes of expression, has hardened into a kind of template or repertoire of riffs and formulas which they can now comfortably call on. And their thoughts, having initially struggled their way into the most appropriate form, now serve as a hoarded stockpile of private intellectual capital. Such writers are in effect tyrannised by the reified products of their former creative living self. It is as though, having invested their former energies in real thinking, they are now content to live off the interest.



Anyway, for some reason was thinking today about I talk I attended by John Berger some years ago at he Institute of Contemporary Arts. I have nothing momentous to report, other than, firstly, the visibility with which he thinks right infront of you - he wears thought on his face without disguise. Thinks, that is, as opposed to delivering polished phrases and prepared quips. To anyone who has attented a Berger talk this pained, halting delivery can be almost embarassing - great silences in which he seems to be racking his brains and the heavens itself for an answer. But if it's embarassing, its also a revelation to see someone of his age and eminence who has managed not to let his mind ossify into settled and comfortable formulas, who has nothing, absolutely nothing, of the robotic polish of those who have come to rely on their own impressive stock of finished forms.

Now, the other thing was a word that Berger hit upon in trying to think about the activity of writing: tact. Tact as in touch, tactility; but also, tact as in discretion, or not touching - knowing when to a steer clear. But, crucially, both these at once: the only way for a writer to come really close, to lay his finger on something, is to exercise a certain necessary discretion or holding back. To lay rude hands on a thing is not to touch it at all.

n.b. Berger's new book, Here Is Where We Meet seems now to be in the shops. At least, I saw it in Foyles, Charing X road.

'A fiction of constitutions'; or, colonial democracy

'our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too..." (Adorno, Negative Dialectics).

I have commented briefly before on recent attempts to identify the Left unproblematically with the values of, and the extant facts of, 'constitutional democracy', and Enlightenment principles of equality and enfranchisement. I suggested that this is tendentious revisionism: historically, the left have always been critical of these things, but- crucially - in their own name. For the left, these things failed to 'live up to their concept', and this failure was due to the political and economic situation in which we live. In short it was to do with capitalism. The left has always sought to analyse how these concepts work, or are put to work within a particular historical system.

I want to try and offer for consideration a historical situation which demonstrates some of the above. A situation where an 'enlightenment' text of equality and rights and democratic inclusion functioned actually to negate all of these things, and not because of corrupt implemention or accidents of misunderstanding

In 1801 Ireland was incorporated, by the Act of Union, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Union was, if you like, an Enlightenment document: it spoke of equality, free trade; it included Ireland within a 'democratic' constitution. Surrounding the Union there is a whole language invoking a mirroring of rights and liberties between the two countries ( Joseph Chamberlain would speak of 'equal laws, equal justice, equal opportunities, and equal prosperity.') The Union was a contract entered into freely by equal 'subjects', its logic being 'parity of treatment for the inhabitants of the two islands.’ Thus, upon diverse political geographies, a new abstract space was imposed: everywhere, equally, within it – from Cork to Carlisle - was a point of distribution or exchange, supply or consumption, legislation or bureaucratic initiative. Everywhere was now subject (at least in theory) to place-blind legislation. The Union therefore addressed that level at which Ireland and Great Britain were the 'same', the very substratum of equality beneath false hierarchies. This, of course, is the point. They were not the same and would not prematurely become so by legal fiat, by a mere 'fiction of constitutions'*.

But it isn't just that this legal fiction denied the heterogeneous reality, that it spoke of a fictional legal entity that had no concrete existence. The more important point is the actual economic and political effects produced by the new ‘constitutional democracy’ of ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".

What happens is this:

Post 1801, Irish representation now consists of a small minority grafted onto the English parliamentary system. Legislation is typically worked through in terms of the English nation: its internal situation, its external entanglements, and the pressure of domestic opinion. These are the priorities through which Ireland is 'refracted'. Politically, the Union turns out to be nothing less than a paradoxical attempt to preserve subordination through the fiction of inclusion. Something of this double logic emerges in the words of Pitt's undersecretary, Edward Cooke:

'By giving the Irish one hundred members in an assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be rendered impotent to operate in that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.'

The 'gift' of democracy is for the British simply a way of addressing 'their Irish problem’: Ireland is, in relation to the metropolis 'subversive' and must be rendered 'impotent;' there is a deficit of hegemony which must be rectified. Any potential growth in Catholic emancipation will, likewise, now take place in a context where Catholic are inevitably a marginal group. In all these instances, inclusion within the 'centre' is by that same stroke, an act of marginalisation; the granting of formal equality is the very means of increased subordination.

Economically, the effect is analogous: 'The Union threatened to expose the economy of the less developed partner to the competition of the highly developed nation on earth [...] which could not fail to benefit the more advanced country'. (Making Ireland 'extremely dependent on outside - in effect British - markets'.) Ireland is more and more integrated into a much larger system of production and exchange. The rhythms of its economy are increasingly determined by forces eccentric to Ireland itself ("The changing pattern of British demand", for example). To some extent, Ireland becomes a 'subsidiary' country, a market for 'the more cheaply produced English goods,' as well as a source of supply to that same absent centre. Marx describes post-Union Ireland as 'merely an agricultural district of England that happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle..'. The structural determinants of the Irish situation (whether 'British demand' or the economic and political logics of Empire) are now part of a system not directly present to the Irish subject, yet bearing on that subject's experience in a comprehensive fashion, from cultural consumption to the way land is farmed, from paths of career mobility to the content of political debate.

To recap, then: yes, the Union can be seen from one point of view in terms of enlightenment values, constitutional democracy and so on, but when this document is put to work in a particular context it systematically produces inequalities and oppression. The key point is that this is not some 'charade', it is not that a trompe l'oeil has been erected, behind which the dirty work is done; the Union is not simply there to hide something else. The Union is not the dissembling screen but the very underlying mechanism. It is the 'equalisation' or homogenisation of space, under one law for all, one franchise - this is the instrument of impoverisation and disempowerment.

If the legal fiction which the Union sets up, the fictive equality between ‘partners’, is precisely the vehicle of subordination, then to work inside the 'legal' or 'rational' structures of constitutional politics is to be silent about the power relations that these systematically reproduce. Needless to say, however, anyone working outside those structures can easily be condemned as an enemy of democracy, or even, to use the words of Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his writings about Ireland, a 'terrorist'.

[This post will hopefully be updated later. If anyone would like the footnotes, send me an email.]

*The reference is of course to Marx, who analysed that 'fiction of constitutions' whereby people are posited and interpellated as equal subjects, a fiction which only reinforces actual inequalities.

Note

A couple of additions to the links. Two sites produced by Cprobes: A Lacanian/ Zizekian glossary
and a page of Baudrillard links

Here, for no other reason than to fill up space, is an extract from one of the Baudrillard links:

'I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages'.

Business is Business

In response to a recent post on soaps, someone draws my attention to a frequent Eastenders cliche:

"Maybe the most heavily loaded token in the lingua franca you mention (particularly in 'Stenders) is that word 'business': 'it's only business, nothing personal'". An action is thereby put beyond question and removed from accountability in one stroke. 'Business' is indeed 'nothing personal', i.e., a neutral framework of adjudication against which personal pleas and allegiances are worthless, or magically dissolved. The autistic tautology 'business is business', like 'law is law', means there is no external standard by which it can or should be judged. To 'judge' it is merely impractical or irrational, like condemning a gust of wind. If the economy is a machine - something built by human beings - it seems to have become, somewhere along the line, an ahistorical machine.

This a-historical machine will exploit and immiserate people on our behalf and exonerate us in the process. I use and humiliate someone, skim off the fruits of their labour and then discard them, and represent it to myself as 'submiting to necessity'. 'Sorry if I hurt you, but I only did what Business required me to do; go and talk to it if you have any objections.' (Business assumes here the place of the Big Other). In using the alibi of 'business' I therefore also hide the enjoyment I derive from such acts. And this is exactly the structure of moral disavowal; indeed, the shirking of moral responsibility by referring one's actions to some 'external' and 'unalterable' framework is in a basic Kantian sense the very definition of immorality.

At the same time, this is hardly just a question of personal morality. The underlying and facilitating premise, that the framework of 'business' is 'unalterable,' is first given in the culture itself. Ultimately (via subtle dialectical mediations of course) it reposes upon the depoliticization of the economy. Marx, who is writing when such depoliticization is trying to get off the ground, is among the first to condemn it, and with caustic logic:

the error of the bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development, for a definite development of the productive forces. Instead, therefore, of regarding the politico-economic categories as abstract expressions of the real, transitory, historic social relations, Mr Proudhon, owing to a mystic inversion, regards real relations merely as reifications of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves are formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.' (The Poverty of Philosophy)

&

the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is for them the best possible one."
Capital Volume 1

That no one now speaks of 'vulgar economists' or 'bourgeois economists' is not a sign of their defeat but the almost total victory of their assumptions. Indeed, this depoliticization of the economic system in which we live, and of economic relations, is surely one of the great achievements of (we might still call) bourgeois ideology. Depoliticized, it is relegated to a place beyond question, and 'politics' is strategically confined to the machinations and polemic of the parliamentary theatre. This 'confinement' works to block cognition of the the true workings of power, the limits and pressures exerted upon Democracy by economic determinants, and the very failure of democracy to approach its Concept. To use an out of fashion word, we are denied access to the totality of relations in which parliamentary democracy is intricated, and waylaid instead by a decoy theatre. This theatre, featuring various Andrew Marrs and other impressarios, brings with it a whole time-consuming entourage of commentary and analysis, and the lillipution disputes of these 'theatre critics' serve as indubitable proof of the healthyness of the democratic process.

From Marx (see above) onwards, the tradition of the left always sought to qualify 'democracy' with 'bourgeois' or 'capitalist', and said that such qualifications are a fatal brake on and contamination of real democracy. The task has always been not simply to defend democracy that is, but to posit a democracy to come and to idenitify what, in the present, blocks its realisation. It shouldn't surprise us if those trying to uphold this tradition are accused of being its heretics and saboteurs. To stick with this tradition involves a continual commitment and effort of thought. It is quicker and more rewarding to cut your moorings and enter the Market.

And politics? As in the old joke, many prefer to look for true politics under the bright spotlight of media debate rather than in the dark engines of the economy, not because it's likely to be found under the spotlight but simply because its easier to look.

The Content of Form

Yesterday I suggested that programs like Eastenders and Coronation St. embody a certain fantasy of community, of an older form of social and economic relations - a closed community, focused only on itself, face-to-face and self-sufficient. I suggested that these features of the soap were largely imposed by the form itself rather than being thematic preoccupations. This could also have been put the other way around: if, in order for certain kinds of story to get off the ground you must construct something like a hermetic village, then this also implies that the actual everyday life of contemporary capitalism - characterised by dispersal, atomisation, spectacular 'communities' - is radically incompatible with certain kinds of storytelling and certain story-shaped experiences. Anyway, the implicit point of what I was saying, that interpretation should pass beyond the content to the form, is something I would want to underline. Now, I find a loosely related point in Jameson's Marxism and Form. He's talking about representations of the scientist's laboratory in those old 50's disaster films, wherein he sees a kind of

'collective folk dream about the life style of the scientist himself: he doesn't do real work, his renumeration is not monetary or at the very least money seems no object, there is something fascinating about his laboratory (the home workshop magnified to institutional dimensions, a combination of factory and clinic), about the way he works nights (he isn't bound by routine or the eight-hour day), his very intellectual operations themselves are caricatures of what the non-intellectual imagines brain work and book-knowledge to be. There is, moreover, the suggestion of a return to older modes of work organisation: to the more personal and psychologically satisfying world of the guilds, in which the older scientist is the master and the younger one the apprentice... What I want to convey is that none of this has anything do do with science itself, but is rather a distorted reflection of our own feelings and dreams about work alienated anf non-alienated: it is a wish-fulfillment that takes as its object a vision or ideal of what Marcuse would call 'libidinally gratifying' work. But it is of course a wish-fulfillment of a particular type, and it is this structure that is important to analyze.'

By that last sentence I take Jameson to mean that this is not just some free-floating universal wish, but a wish produced by and reflecting specific historical conditions in which work is typically impersonal and alienated, wherein one is essentially an instrument within a bureaucratic structure, implementing directives that cannot be tied to any specific individual. Whether that structure happens to be that of a private corporation or a state organisation matters little. The fantasy of work he descries is therefore like the photographic negative - a precise inversion - of this alienated world, so that the latter can as it were (and as FJ might say) be read off from it in reverse. It is not just a fantasy but the fantasy of this situation.

Now the other, perhaps rather obvious point that Jameson raises, is the relation between fantasy and ideology. The science fiction movies of which Jameson, after Sontag, speaks, are of course part and parcel of the ideology of the Cold War. This Cold War story is their ostensible 'content'. What Jameson suggests is that this ideological content is almost an alibi or rationalisation, the proverbial piece of meat thrown to the guard dog. Meanwhile, the real and deeper fantasmatic content is smuggled in, and assumes the inconspicuous semblance of the scientist's laboratory and the forms of work made possible thereby. This is a recurrent Jamesonian motif: the ideological content, in order to be binding, must have some disavowed fantasmatic kernel embedded within it.

The model or template here is taken from Freud's interpretation of dreams and the distinction between manifest and latent content. Jameson, who has given (or perhaps restored) to this distinction a political edge, is suggesting that this 'latent' fantasy typically embeds itself in form of the film/ novel etc, while the content sells us the ideological dummy. Content based analysis therefore misses the point entirely, failing to see that the content is a mere form, and that the form has a content of its own.

Zizek on Nazism and Communism

A new Zizek article, from which this:

A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.
....

Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.

Meanwhile, over at the New Statesman, Terry Eagleton reviews a nbew book on fascism:

If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.

A Note from the Great Teacher

The headlong stream is termed violent
But the riverbed hemming it in is
Termed violent by no one.

The storm that bends the birch trees
Is held to be violent. But how about the storm
That bends the backs of the road workers

More Soap: an Adorno-esque grouch

[See post below]

There are of course, within these soaps significant differences. Coronation Street at least seems to create genuine 'characters', wheras the 'characters' of Eastenders all seem to be emanations of a single ersatz-cockney Geist. And a single language speaks through them. Sure, it has a number or tricks up its sleeve. It can whisper menacingly, it can become suddenly sentimental about something that happened 'when i was a kid', but ultimately it's trapped in a single linguistic groove. And this language is one consisting almost entirely of pre-fabricated banaliites and recycled bits of received wisdom. Thus, someone can earnestly advise 'treat em mean, keep em keen' without registering the fatal damage inflicted on their ability to think. No actor can breath life into such lines; au contraire, they breathe death into the actor.

It is worthwhile pausing momentarily to consider these linguistic ready-mades, these formulaic sentiments, which are the lingua franca of Albert Sq*. They are semantic dead matter, uncoloured by interiority, sediments of experiences or thoughts now forgotten. But in using them there is a great echo of recognitiion, although an echo in which no distinct voices can be heard. This is the echo of the reassuring solidity of that 'Big Other' of received wisdom in which we live and breathe. To use such phrases is to be united with the serial anonymity of 'everyone else', whose hallmark such phrases are seen to bear.

Because the sole office of such phrases is to secure recognition, they are beyond or beneath the level of true /false. Their function is to plug the speaker in to the wiring of the Big Other. The castrating cost is the sacrifice of spontaneous free thought and individualised affect. To watch Eastenders, is to watch a community composed only of such people, whose thoughts, speech and intimate reactions are wholly reified, pre-packaged and impersonal. The world on screen may be an anachronistic village, a closed community, but it uses the debased linguistic currency which renders it wholly permeable to its millions of viewers.

Soap and spectacular nostalgia

At Oxford, there used to be a graduate discussion group, OEL, devoted to cultural theory. On a couple of occasions they invited some of the producers and writers of Eastenders in to talk about the raison d’etre of the program. As you might expect, they talked about 'social relevance', about addressing issues like abortion and domestic violence. They were, they claimed, trying to portray contemporary society. Not naturalistically, but realistically nonetheless.

Now however people might appeal to 'relevance' etc as the alibi for their enjoyment (I doubt if many do), the appeal of British TV soaps lies elsewhere. For what we eavesdrop on in these programs is not the representation of a segment of contemporary capitalist society, but a kind of quasi-feudalism. If you take the three big TV soaps, Emmerdale, Eastenders and Coronation St., we see the same thing. It is a closed community. It has no outside. Okay, occasionally there are necessary visits from the police or ambulance service. But in general, these are communities which are concentrated inward. What unifies the community is not the media spectacle - news of distant catastrophes, fictions, the snuff theatre of reality TV. Soap people have no words for these distant things over which they have no control. They are preoccupied only with their own affairs, their own relations with each other. They are their own centre, and this centre has a binding force.

There is a local ‘landlord’ or benevolent property owner who seems to employ everyone and own all the cafes and businesses. One's needs, whether for employment or for consumption, can always be met by the immediate community. The local Patriarchs always seems to have vacancies for the strangers who intermittently arrive in the community. These strangers are of course not strangers for long. Whatever comes from outside the circumference of the hermetic village is effortlessly incorporated. The stranger is soon made familiar and divested of any ties to the outside world. Time is telescoped so that within months you are an old familiar face; your secrets and intimacies have been folded inside out and made the object of communal curiosity and solicitation. Bourgeois privacy has been abolished. Relations between people are relatively transparent.

Occasionally, there is a meaningless intrusion - a car crash, a murder, a freak fire. But these little bits of blind chance or Fate take out individuals rather than eroding the ties of the hermetic village. It is ultimately robust and inperturbable. It demands only that you sever all links to external family and friends.

Now, in a nostalgia for this quasi-feudal village, the spectacle of community, is to be found the appeal of the soap. It is precisely because these qualities are not to be found in the 'real life' of the audience, because they have long ago left the fabric of the everyday, that there is enjoyment in consuming in them as image. The serial anonymity of the millions of soap viewers is a 'community' exactly opposite to the one flickering before it on the screen. If there is canned laughter to laugh on our behalf, there is here canned 'community'. Both are a weak simulacrum of the real thing, but just as canned laughter appears to have an effect like that of real laughter - people feel perceptibly more relaxed etc afterwards, so canned community deposits within the spectator the weak facsimile of affects no longer possible within their own lives.

In this nostalgia for community some would discover utopian impulses, others would decry imaginary fulfilments as ideological. Indeed, the utopian and ideological dimension of these soaps are like two sides of a sheet of paper.

Now you’ll reply that all the features that I’ve mentioned are simply necessary to plot organisation, structural necessities rather than thematic considerations. Well, of course they are – this is the point. What the audience identify with are the apparently adventitious features imposed by the logic of the form itself. Which is why the earnest and ponderous talk about 'social relevance' etc from the producers is so much bluff.

MIssing the Mark

In fact, the mark only appears after and because we have failed to hit it.

When we say something and realise 'that's not what I meant', the 'what I meant' is produced retroactively. That's to say: it's not that you first have a fully formed and intended meaning in mind which the ensuing utterance fails to embody. Au contraire, the failure to embody makes you aware of the 'what you meant.' Your 'intention' is defined and clarified by your failure to give it form. Similarly when we say of some situation or experience 'this isn't what i want', it is only via the failed experience or situation that the 'what I want' has been disclosed to me. The negation (not what I want) in a sense precedes and generates that which it negates.

The 'subjective' - our wants and intentions etc - is a deposit, a residue left behind through various misses and failures. That this residuum is then regarded as the precious and original core of our being, that we need to be in touch with, is an optical illusion we seem unable to dispense with. Hence our default causal picture: of a subject whose intentions and meanings find realisation (or not) in speech and action.

John Berger

At the South Bank Centre and the NFT in London, there's a season of events devoted to the work of John Berger. Details can be found here and here. It includes readings/>
and discussions featuring Berger himself, and also authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels. The season is named after Berger's forthcoming book, Here is Where We Meet.
[Expect light posting for a couple of days, i've a pile of things to do.]

n.b., there is a lengthy extract from Berger's forthcoming book here. An encounter with the dead.

This Post Was Written For You

There have a been a number of posts recently, here and at I Cite, among other places, on 'interpellation' or 'the call' in various versions. The versions are: Badiou's idea of the subject 'called' (and constituted) by the Truth-Event'; Heidegger's 'Call of conscience'; and lastly, Althusser's 'interpellation,' or the call of ideology.

In my previous post I did not address these different calls, and indeed may have blurred or ignored the distinction between them. I wrote:

'Hence, the call carries with it a blindness and a wager of trust. From the point of view of Common Sense, one is thus behaving utterly foolishly: leaving behind reasonable and predictable rewards for something undefined. Exactly, except this very 'common sense' point of view has been suddenly revealed as impoverished and mutinous and there is no going back to it. One has no choice but to choose fidelity to this new truth, which answers something in yourself, but also seems bigger than yourself, and will in the end perhaps destroy and recast the familar self, or, will produce a Subject.

Now, this is what Zizek has to say after a brief account of Badiou's notion of being 'called' by the Event:

'From this brief description one can already get a presentiment of what one is tempted to call, in all naivety, the intuitive power of Badiou's notion of the subject: it effectively describes the experience each of us has when he or she is fully engaged in some cause which is 'his or her own': in those precious moments, am I not fully a subject? But does not this very feature make it ideological? That is to say, the firsrt thing that strikes the eye of anyone versed in the history of French Marxism is how Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event is uncannily close to Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation.'

& Again: 'Isn't Badiou's notion of the Truth-Event uncannily close to Althusser's notion of (ideological) interpellation? Isn't the process Badiou is describing that of an individual interpellated into a subject by a Cause?

Here is Althusser:

..that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey. you there!'
Assuming the theoretical scene I have imagined taking place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognised that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that it really was him who was hailed. (Essays in Ideology, p. 163)

I'd like to try and post some sketchy thoughts on the various versions of 'the call', starting, below, with Heidegger.

Heidegger's Call

' "it" calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.'

Crucially, we understand that the Call signifies without understanding what; we grasp the fact of being addressed but not the content of that address (your country needs you! do the right thing! Stop, thief!).

And perhaps this is because in order to apprehend a specific content we must first become a different subject, i.e., in this case, attune ourselves to the frequency of the call; orientate ourselves towards the place from which the call is coming. Perhaps the Call is the call to become this different subject, a subject for whom truth could then appear.

We attune ourselves to the place of the call, but this place, however, H. suggests, is ourselves, or a place in ourselves. This is the difficulty. For it is not a place already there like the family home. it is the empty place - or void - of our inmost potential. It can only 'reached' by continued fidelity to it: that process of fidelity towards it will gradually cause it to come into being.

Now it seems to me that one thing that marks this as different from interpellation in the Althusserian sense, is that the latter involves a moment of recognition. And this moment typically comes as reassurance. The Althusserian interpellation is a jubilant 'that's me!'. This reassuring recognition has in it, surely, nothing uncanny.

In the Heideggerian call, we register the fact of the address before any content. In the Althusserian address their is an illusion of coincidence between the address and its content. There is the 'coupling' of our self to the content of the interpellation. The Heideggerian call is first of all an uncoupling. And it is the antonym of reassurance.

The Heideggerian call is not spoken by a speaker - not a policeman, not even the inner policeman. (Te footnote to my translation glosses Heidegger's words thus:
'' "Es" ruft': Here the pronoun 'es' is used quite impersonally, and does not refer back to the call itself). Heidegger:

'In its "who", the caller is definable in a worldy way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the "not at home". A commentator writes: 'This is why the one who calls through the voice of conscience is definable by nothing more concrete than the fact of its calling.') It is not an 'embodied' voice. Again, does not the Althusserian interpellation bring off the illusion that the voice is incarnate, reassuringly localised.

And perhaps also, the Heideggerian call is not a discrete event, but a constant 'bias' within us, in contestation with the more familair and persausive bias of the They: 'Conscience summons Dasein's self from its lostness in the They'. Now for Heidegger, this 'lostness' comes first. The 'subject' who emerges from and against this lostness, who is won from it, is in a sense radically New, and yet at the same time has answered a possibility which is absolutely primary.

walls have eyes

For a day or so I've been thinking, on and off and in a rather pedestrian way, about the following sentence from a post at Alphonse (read the whole thing):

'Now, from the point of view of the rats, the building doesn't exist as a building; its just more space. And from the point of view [pov] of the building, the rats are indistinguishable from the inhabitants'.

I think this passage contains a vital insight. But first, an anticipated objection. To talk about the 'point of view' of the building is, stricto sensu, meaningless. Only humans have a 'pov'. At best it is an example of pathetic fallacy. It is the stuff of imagination.

Indeed, literature is full of fabulations wherein the world of a rat or dog is opened up magically to our vision. Hitherto neglected objects and unseen dangers suddenly swim into obscene visibility, human priorities are bracketed off, replaced by a world organised around the imperatives of canine or insect existence. The familiar world is rendered suddenly alive and menacing. I remember seeing a Spanish film, Vacas, i think, in which it seemed to me that we were seeing things, somehow, from 'the point of view of Nature'. I could put it no better than that, although I realised that my formulation was, in a sense, senseless. Nonetheless, things seemed to be filmed from a point of view eccentric to the World of the human. And perhaps film lends itself to the inhuman view because, as Benjamin reminds us, we are in a sense empathising with a mechanical device, an 'inhuman contrivance' - the camera.

But these 'inhuman' points of view are by no means confined to literature and art. We are not speaking only of aesthetic estrangment techniques. Such pov lie dormant in our figures of speech, they can be found forms as diverse as scientific discourse and political journanism. When a journalist talks of the government's point of view he is not referring to the opinions of an individual or even set of individuals, he is speaking of the position appropriate to a government qua government - i.e., stemming from the kind of thing a governement is, irrespective of the psychological profiles of its members. How more/ less illogical is this compared to talking about the pov of a building? Will not a scientist like Dawkins speak of how we humans are, from a gene's point of view, merely this or that. And he will imply, or perhaps some of his acolytes will, that this is the point of view from which we ought to 'see' things. Now obviously a gene does not have a point of view in the same sense that some TV pundit does, but the notion is perfectly intelligible. Or we are told that from the point of view of evolution certain aspects of our behaviour are perverse anomolies. And so on. Nonetheless, what these examples make clear is that when we talk about a 'point of view' we are not speaking psychologically, we are not speaking about a subject who has a point of view.

What then, does it mean to talk about human beings from the 'point of view of the building' (or whatever). This is perhaps obvious and yet, as they say, blindingly so. Provisionally, I would say it means: how we figure in its [the building etc] world qua the kind of thing it is. From the pov of a building, rats and humans are, equally, a drain on its materials and resources. Implicitly, one has defined what it is to be a building, and reconfigured the world around this definition. This is the sense in which things can be 'seen' from the point of view of the building. From the 'point of view' of a rat the building is no 'building' at all but another pocket of colonisable space. Any entity carries with it a 'point of view', in the sense that this pov is our description of how thing relate to it according to the kind of thing that it is, or according to the logic of its nature. And we and our environment can be 'seen' from an infinite multiplicity of 'points of view': inanimate objects, institutions, abstract nouns (from the pov of Justice), ideological movements or whatever. To all these we can easily attribute a 'point of view'. Again, we do not need psychology or a Subject.

It seems to me that such 'points of view' are indispensable to thinking itself. The 'pathetic fallacy' of attributing points of view to non-human things - whether material artefacts, animals, or abstractions like 'Government', helps us to delimit the boundaries of our own World by seeing it from another place. Without the 'point of view of the building' etc, critical thought would be impossible.

Finally, from Derek Mahon's translation of Nerval, a related and useful reminder:

Be strong if you must, your brusque hegemony
Means fuck all to the somnolent sunflower
Or the extinct volcano.

Hideous Turpitude

Strolling home with a stash of Belgian beer, I glance up at the top-floor flat and see the light on like a wee beacon. So, B. has returned unexpectedly from Manchester. She has with her R., a genial baby faced ex-con (GBH), half Jean Genet half Ray Winstone, fluent in French, who carries a copy of La Rochefoucauld in his pocket, lurching disconsolately through the streets of Soho or Tooting, inexplicably present at various Clubs and openings, returning - as wanton as the dawn - with a sack of improbable anecdotes. Tonight he familiarises me with this delightful Verlaine translation:


In that cafe crowded with fools we stood
(Just us two) for the hideous turpitude
of liking men: they never thought, the cunts,
We shat on their dim-witted innocence
Their standard loves, their tinny golden rules
While holding to our principles and tools
We swung and parried to our hearts' content,
Veiled in a cloud our peaceful pipes had sent -
Like Zeus and Hera in their nebulous beds -
Till our two Punch's noses, glad and red,
Wiped by our fingers with delightful squeezes
Under the table jetted great white sneezes.

trans. Alistair Elliot

Heidegger's Body Parts

James Sallis

This, he said, is Heidegger's arm.

Or perhaps not. An extreme close-up, shoulder to wrist, hand out of frame (as friends who write scripts might say): how is one to know? But let us give him benefit of doubt.

He appears to be reaching for something (our speaker continues). Perhaps a book of Hegel's or Holderlin's lurking there (we may as well say it) just offscreen, or a cup of that bitter, dark Viennese coffee he prefers.

This is Heidegger's hand. Note the grooved callous on the second digit, into which the pen fits like a ladle into a gravy-boat, note how the cuticle pushes away from the nail, how the nail itself is deformed from the frequent protracted pressure of the pen.

Heidegger's face. On the planes of which considerations live like squatters and homesteaders in Westerns.

Here (you think) is a man who would understand that black bread cannot be hurried, understand the time it takes to train bears properly, a man who would always select as best the sourest cheese.

And, finally, this (our speaker says, shutting off the slide projector) is the space around Heidegger.

We sit blinking in the sudden light.
___

Essays to be written: Coffee and philosophy.

'In Hegel, you can see the way he grinds coffee into his argument--usually metaphorically. You can really follow the coffee bean throughout the history of philosophy, and come up with extraordinary developments. There's someone called Malsherbes who wrote about this. Just the relation to coffee as a miraculous opening. At one point Hegel writes about coffee and its substitute. One could trace the history of wars in terms of the coffee bean. Even literary history: who drank how much coffee? And where? What kind of a social space the cafe produces? The Viennese cafe and Wittgenstein, Thomas Bernhard, Arnold Schoenberg'.

Barthes:

'Coffee, the sober liquor, powerfully cerebral, which, unlike alchohol, increases clarity and lucidity - coffee whcih suppresses the vague and heavy poetry of the imagination's mists, which strikes a spark from what is actually and accurately seen, the flash of truth itself.'

Double

Another facet of the uncanny: the double. Why is the encounter with a double, or the idea of a double, so disturbingly uncanny?

I think the logic may be similiar to the human/ inhuman distinction. In both cases there is a doubling but at the same time an indefinable subtraction. It is because the inhuman thing is so like us that it confronts us with a lack - the indefinable human X is 'not there' and we are alarmed to come into direct contact with this lack. So how does this logic work with the double?

We again have that sense that what disturbs is nothing you can put your finger on, nothing present in any positive feature - the face, the gestures etc. The uncannyness resides not in a positivity, but in an absence. Something is missing. What? the double looks like me, acts like me even; everthing thing can be the same and yet it is not me.Here we have it, the subtracted x, the missing thing resides in this small word 'is'. The double has confiscated from me that wherein I thought my identity resided - my face, my gestures or whatever, and left me with the pure fact of my being. Thus the subtracted X is here being itself, and this, this confrontation with being divested of its trappings, is what we find uncanny.

Again, this seems to have led us back to Heidegger, and his insistence on the radical uncannyness of being - the overly, overly familiar, buried beneath the most stubborn (and necesary, to some extent) amnesia. And yet, in occasional airs, its faint voice can still be heard.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with this position, but it's at least a resting place. It can be left there for now. And I hope to say more about it anon.

n.b. Gareth, at Any Street Corner draws attention to the literary example of Saramago's The Double:

What happens when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a 38-year-old professor of history, discovers that there is a man living in the same city who is identical to him ion every physical detail, but not related by blood at all.

Calling

Continuing with the matter of the 'uncanny', one notices how often this idea appears in Heidegger, especially in relation to the 'Call', and the 'call of conscience' in particular. Conscience
calls us from our 'lostness' in the 'Everyone'. But more generally, Heidegger (Martin, not John), has some very suggestive words about the concept of 'being called':

Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. 'It' calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not some from someone else.. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.

The call is at once deeply familiar and something like an alien voice. Two literary examples follow:

When Hamlet says, in response to the ghost's story of murder, 'oh my prophetic soul', he reveals that the ghostly words resonate with or answer something already deep within. This is part of its terror. It is the terror of answering one's own deepest intuitions, of being 'true to oneself'. Needless to say, this is typically experienced as a burden, as something imposed not freely chosen. This is the tyranny, the unconditional demand of the Call: that which is truly you imposes on you the ultimate blackmail: if you do not do this, you will not be able to live with yourself. But 'yourself' in this formula is not the self of everyday life and its sundry accomodations and compromises, it is what precisely is concealed by such accomodations. The Call comes as a terrible unconcealment. It 'unconceals' the nakedness of the Subject you are in truth.

A second example, from Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan, where the Uncanny Call has a more obviously political colouration. The scene is rural Ireland at the time when the French landed at Killala in 1798 to aid the United Irishmen's rebellion. Michael is preparing to marry Delia, and the family is consumed with talk of dowries and other calculable advantages. There are reporta of an old woman wandering through the countryside. Soon enough this nameless Old Woman appears at their house. She has wandered far, they are told. And when asked what put her to wandering she replies 'too many strangers in the house'. The strangers had taken from her her 'four green fields'. When they ask her who she is she tells them: 'Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan'.She is, in other words, Ireland itself, itinerant and unrecognised amond her own kind, exiled by the English 'strangers'. At the end of the play, Michael answers the 'call' of the Old Woman and goes off to fight for Ireland. The play ends as follows:

Delia. Michael! He takes no notice. Michael! He turns towards her.
Why do you look at me like a stranger?
.....

Bridget to Peter Tell him not to go, Peter.

Peter. It's no use. He doesn't hear a word we're saying.

Bridget. Try and coax him over to the fire.

[The fire - most obvious icon of domestic securities. Once Michael has attuned himself to this other voice, this other frequency of commitment, the everyday solicitions are dumb as never before. Or, in other words, corresponding to the frequency of the calling is new mode of hearing. we must hear where it is coming from, and this renders us deaf to the solicitations of the everyday.]

....
Old Woman's voice outside. They
shall be speaking for ever, The people
shall hear them for ever.

Michael breaks away from Delia, stands for a second at the door,
then rushes out, following the Old Woman's voice. Bridget takes
Delia, who is crying silently, into her arms.

Peter to Patrick, laying a hand on his arm. Did you see an old woman
going down the path?

Patrick. I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a
queen.


So:
The Old Woman wanders unrecognised and nameless through her own land (Heimat). This land has been occupied by strangers to such an extent that strangeness has sunk back into familiarity, and familiarity - the Homeland, as it were - has become strange. Michael, in answering the strange yet familiar call of the old woman is in turn rendered strange to his family. This uncanny call leads him into the unknown, incalculable future but also reunites him with a lost object (Ireland). It is no accident that this 'lost past' is incarnate in the disembodied singing voice of the Old Woman, the voice which never quite coincides with the old woman, but which seems to speak through her. There is something spectral about the voice, as if it were not simply attached to its bearer. It is as if it were coming from another place.

The call always carries the enjoinder 'come away, come away' (Yeats's words). The call is a kind of magnetic field towards which we are drawn rather than a positive content to which we assent. Indeed, Michael makes this revealing comment about the song of the old woman:' I do not know what that song means, but tell me something I can do for you.' To use a received Lacanian distinction, he knows that the voice means something or demands something of him, without knowing what. (But also Heidegger: 'It calls without uttering anything).

This distinction between the that and what of signification is one drawn attention to by both Laplanche and, among others, Eric Santner. Hieroglyphs, for example, are radioactive with a lost significance - we can intuit its presence but cannot decode its actual content. But it is this very nimbus of significance, this inkling that something signifies which seems to exert such a powerful demand upon us. In responding to a 'call' one simply has to trust the that before one has apprehended the what. Hence, the call carries with it a blindness and a wager of trust. From the point of view of Common Sense, one is thus behaving utterly foolishly: leaving behind reasonable and predictable rewards for something undefined. Exactly, except this very 'common sense' point of view has been suddenly revealed as indigent and inauthentic (to use, for convenience, a rather out of fashion terminology) and there is no going back to it. One has no choice but to choose fidelity to this new truth, which answers something in yourself, but also seems bigger than yourself, and will in the end perhaps destroy and recast the familar self. The Call is taking you somewhere both deeply familiar and terra incognita. I seem to have arrived, for the moment, at an almost Heideggerian idea of the uncannyness of the call. For the time being, so be it. the last word can go to him:

'The call points forward to Dasein's potentiality for being, and it does this as a call which comes from uncanniness.''

update: Heidegger's Call is discussed in the comments at I Cite. Indeed, the question I've deliberately avoided above is raised there: 'of how to differentiate the call of the superego (the stupid blind injunction) from the call of the Act (as in Antigone being called) .'

no wonder it has a form like ourselves, it IS ourselves!

I've had some very interesting feedback on my Inhuman post. a number of people have reminded me of Hoffmann's intriguing Sandman tale. I hope to write more on issues related to this. In the meantime, let me draw your attention to Hoffmann's tale online here , from which comes this quotation:


'If there is a dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts in order that, laying hold of it and drawing us by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin, which otherwise we should not have trod--if, I say, there is such a power, it must assume within us a form like ourselves, nay, it must be ourselves..'

'Bonds', Feudal & post-modern

A while ago we were discussing in class the passage in King Lear where Cordelia replies to her father's demand for the expression of love with:

"I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more, nor less,".

Someone questioned whether we can still really understand or identify with this feudal notion of love as duty, as a kind of formal obligation. Cordelia's reply, the student said, surely sounds rather cold to our ears, as if Cordelia's relation to her father is analaogous to the relation between serf and lord. Its as if she's saying, I suggested, "my love does not emanate from me, but from the rules of the Symbolic Order, from the moral matrix in which, unchosen, we live. I love you via fidelity to this code". The other daughters, by contrast, make the gesture of expressing a love that is theirs.

Another student interjects with 'But isn't it really the same today". Initially,I thought this would be another 'nothing's changed, everything is universal' spiel. But not quite. The idea was rather that the 'feudal' notion was in fact the formalisation of what today is merely implicit - a kind of tyrannical superego imperative to love one's parents. Except today, the fact that it isn't formalised and defined actually increases its binding power.

i.e., with the feudal bond, in my capacity as Daughter, I understand these definite obligations and duties, I can measure and direct my love according to an explicit Symbolic regime... Where however these 'bonds' are not formalised and defined one is tyrannised by a kind of guilt. One can never know whether one is 'doing the right thing', and this guilt ('am I loving as I should?') is a more tenacious bond than the 'bond' proper.

Note, however, that in our 'postmodern' world, with the absence a pre-agreed set of Symbolic guarantees and prescriptions, there is what looks like an attempt to reverse this. Thus, I encounter this site, which quotes Cordelia words in the following context:

A "bond" does not have to refer to an intimate, all-consuming relationship. When Cordelia told her father in Shakespeare's play, King Lear, "I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more, nor less," he became furious, because he wanted her to make a flowery and exaggerated declaration of her love. Cordelia understood the deeper truth, that meaningful relationships can be defined by formal rules and boundaries.

However, among many differences between this and the older feudal code, the former has no 'transcendental guarantee'. Today, one chooses the rules by which to live, out of a recognition that there is no 'Big Other' - it doesn't exist, but we need one nonetheless. Similarly, I have seen syllabuses for classes on 'Journalism and Ethics' which state 'this course will help the student devise ethical guidelines appropriate for them'. You are bound by a rule, but this rule has been tailored to suite your 'individuality', your individual needs. In contrast, of course, earlier notions of duty and law were chillngly indifferent to your 'individual needs'. What appears the same is in fact the exact reverse.

Increasingly, then the Big Other is both reflexive and married to a prevailing ideology of 'individualism'. Here is Zizek (inevitably):

There is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the 'Big Other') to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident - how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself - have now been 'colonised' by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on.

Rule Girls' are heterosexual women who follow precise rules as to how they let themselves be seduced (accept a date only if you are asked at least three days in advance etc). Although the rules correspond to customs which used to regulate the behaviour of old-fashioned women actively pursued by old-fashioned men, the Rule Girls phenomenon does not involve a return to conservative values: women now freely choose their own rules.

But this reflexivity itself takes place within a certain horizon, one in which certain suppositions about 'choice' and 'individuality' pass unquestioned.