Random Voice from the Past 1: Thomas Carlyle

'All this dire misrery, therefore; all this of our poor workhouse workmen, of our Chartisms, Trade-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms, and the general downbreak of laissez-faire in these days, - may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of nature, saying to us: Behold! Supply and demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man, - how far from it. '

Protestation

'The author of Charlotte Street, Mark Kaplan, may well protest his innocence here, but if you scan his various posts there is often a veiled provocation or attack on some deserving victim.’

Naturally, I have no idea what he is referring to. None. All I will say is that some of my posts are themselves provoked by some particular act of imbecility or some particular instance of the journalistic cliché machine creaking and peddling it’s vacuous wares. The particular instance or act is undeserving of attention in itself, lest it be elevated to the false dignity of an object of thought. Instead it is jettisoned in moving towards some more general conclusion. This general conclusion no longer bears the traces of the particular offending item which provoked it. At least, I didn't think so. But perhaps the more canny readers can indeed read backwards from these general remarks and dimly perceive the vestigial outline of the example which occasioned them.

Deleuze, writing about Francis Bacon, suggests that the initial painterly canvas is not blank. Not for Bacon at least. It is already scribbled through with clichés and the dead weight of the history of painting. The painter must fend off this frozen scribble and win space and freedom for himself. Similarly, any piece of writing which enters the public sphere must presumably first budge and contend with the pre-existing encrusted ideas and the inertia of received opinion. It can therefore be thought to involve, where it does not simply confirm and slot into this pre-existing field, an act of low-level violence, a pre-emptive strike, or even just a sullen reproach. It is therefore entirely reassuring to me that my posts appear as challenges, incitements or whatever.

n.b. the above post is a calculated provocation and not to be taken seriously.

A NOte On Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytic theory confers on the ego the function of accommodating intelligently to reality, and regulating the drives. When libidinal motivations are prevented from emerging as conscious intentions, they assume the features of pseudo-natural causes – that is, of the Id qua blind force dominating the subject behind his back. The Id penetrates the texture of everyday language by distorting grammar and confounding the proper use of public language through false semantic identifications: in symptoms, the subject speaks a kind of ‘private language’ that is incomprehensible to the conscious ego. In other words, symptoms are fragments of the public text chained to the symbols of illicit desires excluded from public communication

G.

'It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because we are all too aware of what is continually traversing the story-line laterally. That is to say, instead of being aware of point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines. Such awareness is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.'

John Berger.

ReadySteadyBlog wonders whether a better novel than G. has won the Booker prize. I think not. Nor has a better acceptance speech been made (sorry, couldn't find the whole thing online).

interval

I may be too busy to post for a couple of days. Would for the time being just like to draw attention to the two interesting items on the Lancet study and related literature cited at Dead Men Left.

The Market Place of Ideas.

'There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other.'

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [1988], trans. Malcolm Imrie, London 1998, pp. 13–19 , Quoted in:

T.J. Clark etc, “The State, the Spectacle and September 11”, from which comes this neat encapsulation of the Spectacle:

“The notion ‘spectacle’ was intended, then, as a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumulation of capital. What it named preeminently was the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”

Unfixed

Curiously, I once considered adding to my notes on rhetoric the entry “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…”. My only advice would be, make sure it is indeed more than once. Or, indeed, even once.

Coincidentally, Norman Geras has posted a tetchy and rather odd response to a recent post of mine, alleging I have a ‘fixation’ with him. He kicks off in avuncular chuckling mode but then cedes the initiative to the underlying irritation. Finally, he offers the following counsel:

“Here's some free advice for him about his fixation. Get over it. It will long have become evident to even the slowest of minds that I do not have the 'correct' left balance of views according to a certain blogospheric clucking company.”

As they say these days, “what’s that about?”. As far as I know, I have linked to Geras’s blog perhaps four times in seven months. Or, if you prefer, probably about two dozen words in 50, 000. Generally these have been extremely brief and either neutral or favourable. Recently I linked to him only to quote a passage he had quoted himself. The last (offending) passage referred to him again briefly on route to some more general and admittedly pretty sketchy thoughts on universal moral imperatives. If this is a fixation, it is indeed an ‘exquisitely indirect’ and intermittent one, so deliciously indirect as to work almost entirely by neglect and omission.

The peculiar thing, however, is that what Geras took as an ‘exquisitely indirect’ attack on himself was, rather, a direct and unexquisite post about something else - ‘universal imperatives’ , and merely posed a couple of open-ended questions in relation to these. I referred to his and Stephen Pollard’s sites in the way that bloggers do to indicate the path whereby they arrived at a certain place. I cheekily half-nicked a phrase from Geras to use as an example. This was obviously unwise judging by the misunderstanding it has produced, a misunderstanding utterly out of proportion with its polemical object. If you surgically subtract the assumption that the post is ‘about’ Norman Geras, you’ll find it makes rather more sense (You’ll find, for example, that the open-ended questions are actually genuine questions and not circuitous accusations). So yes, Norman, I alluded to you in passing on my way somewhere else. ‘Get over it’.

Perhaps we can now lay the matter to rest with one of those diverting little normblog games guessing which bloggers constitute the nameless ‘clucking company’ alluded to above.

Incidentally, for the record, I think ‘indirection’ can indeed be an interesting device. One alludes to, gestures towards one’s interlocutor without really specifying an argument. The interlocutor, bemused and unnerved, fills in the blanks and constructs an argument of his own which he then refutes. This argument, being entirely his own invention, can be highly revealing of his preoccupations and anxieties.

Presentiments of the Spectacle, ii

"The freedom of conversation is being lost. If earlier it was a matter of course to take interest in one's partner, this is now replaced by inquiry into the price of his shoes or his umbrella. Irresistibly intruding upon any convivial exchange is the theme of the condition of life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns and sorrows of individuals, in which they might be able to help one another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theatre and had to follow the events in the stage whether one wanted to or not, had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one's thoughts and speech."

Walter Benjamin.

“The situation is complicated by the fact that less then ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means they are no longer explicit.”

Brecht.

>>

As I Walked Out Down Charlotte Place..

Mr Stephen Pollard the frequent object of Virtual ridicule, whose bizarre form I glimpsed waddling down Charlotte Place the other day, admitted some days ago to wishing Arafat dead. So, his wish is granted. Pollard also made a number of jokes at the expense of this terminally ill old man. He wished the terminally ill old man dead, invited our complicit laughter. Here I anticipate your objection: You note the rhetorical move - by refering to Arafat as a 'terminally ill old man' I am, you say, 'being emotive'. Even though I am using a more abstract category, and what I am saying is true, I am being emotive. Why? Because, you say, I am abstracting away from those particulars of Arafat which make him repugnant. Ok,

My question is, under what conditions does the invocation of a universal statement like

"Making jokes about terminally ill old men/ wishing people dead is wrong" or "Calling for people to be assasinated is wrong"

become a rhetorical ploy and when is it an instance of the stringency of the universal imperative, which demands that we include even what we intuitively hate under its rule.

When someone says, in relation to Bush, 'to call for someone's assasination is wrong' do we really believe that a call for Arafat's assasination would have provoked the same reaction? Is it really some universal principle that is being defended here, or is it GWB?

How many of us are prepared truly to follow a universal imperative all the way? How many only stick with the imperative until it crashes into some particular they do not like? If torture is universally wrong, then it is wrong to torture terrorists; if free speech is a universal right then you must defend it for the vilest racist; if you believe in the univesal imperative to love your neighbor, then this means an Israeli loving a Palestinian and viceversa.

Here is a related extract from Zizek's Organs Without Bodies [it begins with an interview with Emmanuel Levinas:

"Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher of the 'other'. Isn't history, isn't politics, the very site of the encounter with the 'other'? Isn't .. and for the Israeli, the 'other' above all the Palestinian?"

To this Levinas answered: [..] 'If your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy[..] There are people who are wrong."

[..] What Levinas is basically saying is that, in principle, respect for alterity is unconditional (the highest sort of respect), but when faced with a concrete other, one should nonetheless see if he is a friend or enemy. In short, in terms of practical politics, the respect for alterity strictly means nothing."

And yet, there is nothing in the concept of 'unconditional respect for alterity' that makes it bawk at this particular object; rather Levinas' own philosphical stringency is hijacked by his 'common sense'. Is this hijacking of the universal by the particular prejudice part of what me mean by ideology??

[n.b. A link to Norman Geras in the above seems to have led to some confusion (at least on the part of NG) and obscured the point of the post. So, for the sake of clarity, i've removed it.]

Derrida's legacy

An email received this morning draws my attention to 'some recent Zizek essays':

Henning Mankell, the Artist of the Parallax View http://www.lacan.com/zizekmankell.htm ;
Will You Laugh for Me, Please http://www.lacan.com/zizeklaugh.htm; Will She Ever Die (Leni Riefenstahl) http://www.lacan.com/zizekleni.htm; A Cup of Decaf Reality http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm

In today's THES there is a series of articles on 'Jacques Derrida's legacy'. Simon Blackburn's piece is rather smug, schoolmasterly and patronising. There is, apparently a sense in which "Derrida and his disciples are like mentors encouraging people not to read." I don't know about the unnamed 'mentors' but as far as Derrida goes, this is pretty much the exact reverse of the truth. Blackburn's article is peppered with nice everyday examples and images - speed bumps and drawers of socks - presumably there to signify 'plain common sense' and upset the unecessarily abstruse applecart of 'Theory'. Theory itself - critcal reflection on uderlying assumptions - is a way of 'avoiding the hard work' and claiming a superior vantage point. (Doesn't anyone who claims access to knowledge claim a 'superior vantage point' or am i being dense?) Derrida is subsumed under the 'pomo' rubric even as we're reminded that he's saying little new, he's both incomprehensible and simply dressing up old verities. I'm unfamiliar with Blackburn's work, but if a writer were to be judged by the strength and plausibility of his invented targets, then this invented target is very weak indeed...

Richard Rorty on the same subject is, typically, eminently and effortlessly lucid; not that I agree with him, but at least he entertains. Simon Critchley also has a piece which, as you might expect, is the most generous of the lot.

A Note on Spiritualism

Less than 100 years before Yeats a philosopher as eminent as Kant could deem spiritualism worthy of serious treatment. Adorno later dealt with ans derided it. For Kant, the problem lay in its indigent conception of the sensible/ super-sensible relation. Like Kantian philosophy, spiritualism intuits a reality/ realm ‘beyond’ what can be sensuously apprehended. But whereas for Kant, this is a radically Other realm, inaccessible to our frames and categories, to the very grain of our language, for spiritualism it is a kind of hallucinatory, ethereal version of the empirically given. ‘Reality’ is subtended, supported by a kind of pallid simulacrum of itself. The ‘ghost’ of a person, for example, is merely a second body – hazy, transluscent, perhaps, lacking a usual relation to space and substance, but a kind of body nonetheless. Thus, for the spiritualist the so-called ‘beyond’ – the impossible ‘beyond’ which subtends space and time – is little more than the ‘here and now’ with its weight and volume subtracted. What such a conception fails to register is that we are dealing with two qualitatively different dimensions.

Thus, treated as a proposition (or set thereof) spiritualism is obviously false, in the manner of a category error. But one should be concerned, however, only with rescuing its ‘moment of truth’, which is to say: its affective charge, its existential and/ or poetic possibilities, its use-value. This, rather than its epistemological solidity is why people like Yeats were drawn to it... and I intend sposting something on this shortly, as part of an ongoing piece on Yeats, as it happens.

[J.Derbyshire has disputed whether Kant was indeed dealing 'seriously' with Swedenborg and spiritualism. 'Substantial treatment' may have been preferable, but in any case, the matter is disputed, see Gregory Johnson's intro and notes to this. Zizek (inevitably) also assigns a key place to this essay in Kant's philosophy (I can't remember where - perhaps Tarrying.)

Performative and retroactive signifiers

“think of the proverbial unexpected outbursts of the beloved: ‘I love you’ which surprises even the one who utters it.”

This 'unexpected outburst' is, simultaneously, a realisation and an inauguration of a state of affairs, an event. A birth, like a note out of silence, a silence which (afterwards) we take to have been pregnant with unresolved tensions. It is, among other things, an instance of the performative magic of the signifier.

C.f. the experience of saying something which is ‘not what I meant’/ ‘I didn’t intend that’ – that is, it is not that one has a fully formed content to communicate which one then ‘fails to express’ – it is only after saying something that one realizes it is 'not what one meant'. Only once speech has missed the mark can one see the mark itself.

‘What one intended’ thus flashes into view ‘in arrears’.

Charlotte Street, W1

On October 18th 1831, four years after her husband's death, Catherine Blake died at 17 Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. In this last home, a contemporary report states, she called "continually to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now".

I am assuming that what was 'Upper Charlotte Street' is now Fitzroy street. Curiously, 17 Fitzroy st. has associations with Yeats and ocuultism (if I remember correctly) and is also very near where Lionel Johnson used to live. If anyone can confirm whether Fitzroy Street used to be 'Upper Charlotte St.' I would appreciate any info. Otherwise, I'll have to trudge to the British Library.

Yes, this is a rather obscure footnote, nevertheless..

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?

-- William Butler Yeats

60 million copies sold.

From a recent Zizek article:

'Take the literary bestsellers of U.S. Christian fundamentalism, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s “Left Behind” series of 12 novels on the upcoming end of the world that have sold more than 60 million copies. The Left Behind story begins with the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of millions of people—the saved souls whom God calls to himself in order to spare them the horrors of Armageddon. The Anti-Christ then appears, a young, slick and charismatic Romanian politician named Nicolae Carpathia, who, after being elected general secretary of the United Nations, moves U.N. headquarters to Babylon where he imposes an anti-American world government that disarms all nation-states. This ridiculous plot unfolds until the final battle when all non-Christians—Jews, Muslims, et al—are consumed in a cataclysmic fire. Imagine the outcry in the Western liberal media if a similar story written from the Muslim standpoint had become a bestseller in the Arab countries! It is not the poverty and primitivism of these novels that is breathtaking, but rather the strange overlap between the “serious” religious message and the trashiest conventions of pop culture commercialism.'

Exactly this: the combination of the modern culture industry, dominant at the level of form, and the utterly retrogade contents enclosed by such forms, consumerist trash and myopic religious literalism. Only superficially is this a 'contradiction'. The strange magnetism that these two things exert upon one another, or rather their ultimate identity, is what needs to be understood.

Or does the alchemic arithmetic of consumerist democracy simply dictate that so many millions can't be wrong?

Some interesting, critical remarks on Zizek's essay, here.

Archaic/ avant-garde

A number of modern thinkers - from Yeats to Bataille - self-consciously choose an archaic, pre-modern 'episteme'; choose it for the cognitive and imaginative sparks thereby generated, for its oppositional and aggravational force. They stubbornly cling to their point of archaic negativity in the face of the overwhelming positivity of the new life world, and attempt even to interpret the New with the creaky conceptual machinery of the Old. Bataille's cosmology - a finite, bound world of humours, energies; his insistence on categories and oppositions borrowed from the world of religious orthodoxy and feudalism. The more dubious example of Pound's resurrection of 'usury'.

Of course, one cannot 'chose' tradition. Or rather, the very fact of being 'chosen' changes and infects the thing itself. For the last thing such archaic systems were was chosen. They were the very framework within which choices were made, the very inner substance of choice. To cling to such systems, therefore, always involves an act of stubborn and eccentric defiance wholly exterior t of he systems themselves.

Tradition is precisely the inherited, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is to negate it, and those who do choose it live in an impossible place, absurd yet defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.

These writers and thinkers are not answering tradition, but answering the New by quoting and tarrying with tradition. They would defy the New but have only the Old. Using old names, old tokens of interest only to the lexical and conceptual numusmatists, they try and lay their hands on and name what is lacking in the present.

I

"True, I have notions, that is to say, determinate notions; but the I is the pure notion itself which, as notion, has come into existence. " (Hegel)

"Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever." (Kant)


You will remember that in one of the early exchanges between Iago and Roderigo in Othello Iago makes the cryptic remark "I am not what I am". It is not quite "I am not what I seem" and is the converse of the more usual (to us) radiant tautology "I am what I am". What to make of this? Typically, to say 'what you are' involves attaching a predicate to a subject: 'I am a Jew'; 'I am a writer'; 'I am a King.' The I is that about which predicates are asserted. That, for Kant, is the definition of it. But Kant's point is that none of these predicates exhausts the 'I' to which they are attached. There is always a leftover. The 'I' is that which is never fully realised in those predicates, so that these last constitutively fail to hit the mark, and this mark which they fail to hit, this mark delineated in its negativity by this failure, is the I.

If we take into account that statements of identity take the subject predicate form 'I am Y' but that the predicate never accounts for, never counts as one the 'I', then the I is not the predicate. The I is not 'what it is'. 'I am not what I am'. Iago lurks behind his predicates - 'honest Iago' , his motives even ('I am envious') - he is this pure negation, this secret naught, this silence that will never speak word. Here it is that we glimpse the modern 'I", which to the Elizabethan age is daemonic. A glint of pure negation seen in the eye of the public self.

Letter from Lilliput

Over at Olio A. Ginous's blog, Lilliput, the following post:

The 'liberal-left,' that nefarious and spectral entity, have once again been showing themselves up, this time by responding with shameless chagrin to the re-election of George W. Bush. Their cries of "how could so many people have been so wrong" reveal undisguised contempt for American democracy. Why can these people not punctually recognise their errors or, assuming they have genuine objections to Bush (as opposed to mere histrionic posturing) muffle these genuine beliefs when the 'majority' decision comes through. Needless to say, the moral failure of the Liberal Left can be gauged by this nonsensical letter received from a nameless correspondent:

"In general those alleging this contempt for the People are the same ones who showed no such deference toward public opinion when it came to the majority of Europe objecting to the war in Iraq and their governments' participation therein. No. These anti-war protesters had no moral case whatsoever, were a disgrace to the Left adn [sic!!] so on, despite their millions. Their numbers counted for nothing. Thus, their governments could ignore them with impunity, as in, for example - 'Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war.' So, had the people whose governments went to war in their name been allowed to vote on it, or had indeed the governments taken seriously popular opinion, these pro-war people would doubtless have responded 'how could so many people have been so wrong', logically as it happens, from their point of view".

Another reader writes, this time not bothering to disguise his demotic hostility:

“Yes, I called Bush a chimp – it’s called satire you humorless prick. Like all ex-leftists you turn on your ex-comrades with Oedipal hatred, for you have to deny the very possibility of a genuine and principled left, otherwise your [sic!!] flooded with the self-reproach of the turncoat.”

Goodness!

Earlier, in Gastro

Some days are smooth, unperturbed by real thought, they drift by under some unauspicious and slothful weather; one is reduced to the receptive flatness of a photographic plate, copying impressions, textual snippets, hoping these purloined letters and stray sense-data will leave a deposit in memory, will make themselves available for some future retrieval..

One reads a passage of a book and only has the energy to say, yes, that's right, I will copy it out, double it, as if to generate some weak simulacrum of thought. So, today, in Gastro, I wrote nothing at all, only copied this from Badiou:

"In politics, thinking searches within a situation for a possibility that the dominant state of things does not allow to be seen. For example: today, in Europe as elsewhere, the state of things is the market economy, competition, the private sector, the taste for money, familial comfort, the parliamentary elections, etc. A genuine political thinking will attempt to find a possibility which is not homogeneous with this state of things. A political thinking will say: here is a collective possibility; perhaps it is small and local, but its rule is not that of the dominant rule. And a political thinking will formulate this possibility, practise it, and draw all of its consequences." (Infinite Thought, p. 82).

No Comment

"A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy," Bush said alongside Chirac. "A coalition partner must perform." And then he added a grim warning for non-performers: "Over time, it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity." To whom and for what? He did not elaborate."

(New Statesman November 12th 2001)

'We are in the midst of a 'silent revolution,' in which the unwritten rules that determine the most elementary international logic are changing. Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war. Where is democracy here? Those who pose as global defenders of democracy are the ones who are effectively undermining it'.

(Zizek 2003)

'Another stunning example of U.S. double-think was the two-sided pressure it exerted on Serbia in the summer of 2003. U.S. officials demanded that Serbia deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global empire, which demands transnational judicial institutions); but they also simultaneously pressured Serbia to sign a bilateral treaty obliging it not to deliver to the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) any U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the logic of the nation-state). No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury'.

'When Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union message, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity," this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easier if freedom effectively were to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity, and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity.

(ibid.)