'The appearance of his Things does not concern him: so much does he experience their being.'
The category which Rilke reaches for in explicating Rodin is Being: somehow, these works insist upon there own pure presence. Rodin makes Things, in the Rilkean sense of objects which represent nothing, which mean nothing – they simply, nakedly are, and their meaning is coterminous with their presence. They are 'full of themselves'. Every attempt to pass beyond a Thing to its meaning rebounds unerringly to its stubborn, radiant facticity. To be sure, this appearance of Things in Rilke’s Aesthetic may have been directly related to the emergence of a world of copies and counterfeits, as he himself intimates in some of his letters.
It is not that Giacometti’s sculptures are, by contrast, 'symbolic', referring us to a meaning which they merely embody or illustrate. Yet they do seem to point elsewhere, to invite us to pass on. Or they can appear like emissaries from teh unknown. The two key essays which I think help us understand this are John Berger’s and Jean Genet’s.
For John Berger, Giacometti’s figures seem always to look at us down a narrow corridor – no matter how close we are. If we walk down this corridor to meet them we remove ourselves from Life. Genet, curiously, had a not dissimilar experience:
“The beauty of Giacometti’s sculptures seems to reside in this incessant, uninterrupted oscillation from the remotest distance to the closest familiarity: this oscillation never ends, and that is how it can be said that the sculptures are in motion.”
The very act of approaching them causes them to recede, to shrink back into the unknown. As we come near, their strange familiarity becomes simply strange. Uncanny.
At this point, one thinks of the logic of anamorphosis. The most well-known example of actual anamorphosis in painting is the elongated skull at the bottom of Holbein’s Ambassadors. In order properly to see this skull we must place ourselves at an oblique to the image, remove ourselves from the customary frame. And when we truly see a Giacometti sculpture do we not stand at an oblique to life, do we not remove ourselves from its frame, in order to meet these elongated figures in the place that they abide? The elongation of these figures is brought about by a field of attraction emanating from a place radically eccentric to our everyday lives. Both Berger and Genet identify this place with Death and the Dead, with the terror and beauty of the negative.
“It appears now that Giacometti made these figures during his lifetime, for himself, as observers of his future absence, his death, his becoming unknowable.” (Berger)
“Giacometti does not work for his contemporaries, nor for the generations to come: he makes statues that ultimately delight the dead.” (Genet)
“Each statue seems to withdraw – or to advance – into a darkness so remote and dense that it merges with death […] I had the moving spectacle of a man who never made mistakes but who invariably got lost. He kept sinking deeper into impossible, ineluctable regions. His work is still shadowed and blinded by them.” (Genet)
There is no 'morbid' fixation with Death, with Death as object; rather Death is the only place from which life can truly be known and measured. At this point Rilke’s words, who sensed that Death was receding from us, are apt:
Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us but never truly acknowledged, forever surpassing and violating the meaning of life – it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for its meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that that the distance between it and the life-centre inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere In the void…
In another letter he states: “Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated.” He would, I think, have approved of Giacometti's emissaries.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Plinths
A recent post on Spurious makes a passing reference to those great plinths we find in some Giacometti sculptures.
A huge immobile mass, on which stands precarious figures. The slender figures, warped by an obscure anamorphosis, have been salvaged from the darkness, retrieved and figured. But something has slipped from the sculptor's grasp. It is as if we are being presented with, in the plinth, the weight of a materiality which has escaped figuration. The plinth becomes the very figuration of what cannot be figured.
The context in which this is mentioned is what Spurious names the ‘dark side of what is known’, that which we become aware of, however, only in the act of trying to know, or to represent:
Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood
Thus in Giacometti, this resistant X comes to bulk larger and larger in his sculptures. the gravity (in both senses) of what has been left behind looms larger that what has been brought back.
I thought, by contrast of Rodin, whose figures often seem by contrast to have been won, triumphantly, from the inertia of matter, or as if matter has found the form for which it was striving, Rodin has done violence to the material under his hand it but also pulled from it its own implicit forms. Rodin’s figures seem to complete the matter out of which, struggling, they arise.
In each case, the 'rift' between figure and ground is different. This rift is both aesthetic in consequence and, I suppose, ontological in implication.
See also Young Hegelian's comments, here. [I intend to update this post later]
A huge immobile mass, on which stands precarious figures. The slender figures, warped by an obscure anamorphosis, have been salvaged from the darkness, retrieved and figured. But something has slipped from the sculptor's grasp. It is as if we are being presented with, in the plinth, the weight of a materiality which has escaped figuration. The plinth becomes the very figuration of what cannot be figured.
The context in which this is mentioned is what Spurious names the ‘dark side of what is known’, that which we become aware of, however, only in the act of trying to know, or to represent:
Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood
Thus in Giacometti, this resistant X comes to bulk larger and larger in his sculptures. the gravity (in both senses) of what has been left behind looms larger that what has been brought back.
I thought, by contrast of Rodin, whose figures often seem by contrast to have been won, triumphantly, from the inertia of matter, or as if matter has found the form for which it was striving, Rodin has done violence to the material under his hand it but also pulled from it its own implicit forms. Rodin’s figures seem to complete the matter out of which, struggling, they arise.
In each case, the 'rift' between figure and ground is different. This rift is both aesthetic in consequence and, I suppose, ontological in implication.
See also Young Hegelian's comments, here. [I intend to update this post later]
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Decaffeinated Differences
I mentioned earlier that a trivial anecdote about a student not finding Starbucks in Italy had recently, courtesy of various links, boosted my hits fourfold. Again, the original post concerned not Starbucks as such, but had to do with a certain myopic conception of Otherness: an idea that if you venture abroad you will find slight, diverting and often quaint variations on the Same/ familiar. It is the ‘Le Big Mac’ version of cultural difference, as articulated vis-a-vis Europe in Pulp Fiction:
‘It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different’.
The John Travolta character, who articulates this ‘theory’, goes on to point out a number of such ‘little differences’ including ‘Le Big Mac’- same burger but with a wee Gallic addition, essential sameness but with a little topping of ‘French-icity’. It could equally be ‘Italianicity’ or whatever, just some little twist, flavour or style to be registered and consumed before moving on. The idea here is of the Europeans, or whoever, perversely adding some small nuance or inversion or behavioural shift in order to differentiate themselves from what is, after all, the Norm, the U.S. This was indeed brought home to me, again, by one of my American students who reckoned that the British drove on the left hand side of the road ‘just to be different from the U.S’. - History and cultural humility are thereby dispatched with the speed of a stray thought, and the way in which reality is experienced is mistaken for a property of the thing itself. For the tourist, ‘Experience’ in the sense of novelty and momentary shocks are libidinal goals in their own right and do not have to cede the initiative to the labour of knowledge. Nor can they, if the tourist is to ‘fit it all in’. Of course, this idea of cultural difference is hardly peculiar to the U.S. One finds something similar, perhaps, in the Time Out city guides, in which the same basic template is, like a 'cookie cutter', imposed on each place in turn – from Salford to Sao Paulo - Clubbing, Bars and Cafes, Gay Area and so on, regardless of whether cafes or homosexuality have the same meaning, status, structural place etc in those other cultures. Meanwhile, whatever excremental remainders don’t correspond to this invariable pattern can be left to the locals or the academics.
The tourists needn’t worry, however. In the centre of Dublin, not too far from Trinity College, there's a ruined vaguely Celtic looking monument, a fragment of Ancient Ireland miraculously poking through the urban fabric, reproaching the Present with the repressed Otherness of the dark past. Except it is nothing of the kind. A local historian, Lorcan Collins, tells me that it was constructed quite recently, presumably to meet the expectant gaze of visitors, for whom Ireland is still haunted by semi-Pagan energies, a place full of ruins and inconsolable melancholy, albeit covered over by bluff and blarney.
Thus, as if parodying the received version of the Hegelian dialectic, wherein things gradually approach their Concept, each place visited will gradually and obligingly approximate to the tourist's Misconception of it, and the Culturally Myopic will turn out after all to have been the most far-sighted visionaries.
n.b., just to clarify, there are of course no Time Out guides to Sao Paulo or to Salford.
‘It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different’.
The John Travolta character, who articulates this ‘theory’, goes on to point out a number of such ‘little differences’ including ‘Le Big Mac’- same burger but with a wee Gallic addition, essential sameness but with a little topping of ‘French-icity’. It could equally be ‘Italianicity’ or whatever, just some little twist, flavour or style to be registered and consumed before moving on. The idea here is of the Europeans, or whoever, perversely adding some small nuance or inversion or behavioural shift in order to differentiate themselves from what is, after all, the Norm, the U.S. This was indeed brought home to me, again, by one of my American students who reckoned that the British drove on the left hand side of the road ‘just to be different from the U.S’. - History and cultural humility are thereby dispatched with the speed of a stray thought, and the way in which reality is experienced is mistaken for a property of the thing itself. For the tourist, ‘Experience’ in the sense of novelty and momentary shocks are libidinal goals in their own right and do not have to cede the initiative to the labour of knowledge. Nor can they, if the tourist is to ‘fit it all in’. Of course, this idea of cultural difference is hardly peculiar to the U.S. One finds something similar, perhaps, in the Time Out city guides, in which the same basic template is, like a 'cookie cutter', imposed on each place in turn – from Salford to Sao Paulo - Clubbing, Bars and Cafes, Gay Area and so on, regardless of whether cafes or homosexuality have the same meaning, status, structural place etc in those other cultures. Meanwhile, whatever excremental remainders don’t correspond to this invariable pattern can be left to the locals or the academics.
The tourists needn’t worry, however. In the centre of Dublin, not too far from Trinity College, there's a ruined vaguely Celtic looking monument, a fragment of Ancient Ireland miraculously poking through the urban fabric, reproaching the Present with the repressed Otherness of the dark past. Except it is nothing of the kind. A local historian, Lorcan Collins, tells me that it was constructed quite recently, presumably to meet the expectant gaze of visitors, for whom Ireland is still haunted by semi-Pagan energies, a place full of ruins and inconsolable melancholy, albeit covered over by bluff and blarney.
Thus, as if parodying the received version of the Hegelian dialectic, wherein things gradually approach their Concept, each place visited will gradually and obligingly approximate to the tourist's Misconception of it, and the Culturally Myopic will turn out after all to have been the most far-sighted visionaries.
n.b., just to clarify, there are of course no Time Out guides to Sao Paulo or to Salford.
On Form II
I forgot to add in the previous post that Hegel's Aesthetics can be found online here.
Also, In fact, the most fascinating of Hegel’s reflections on the concept of the concept occurs a little further on in the Aesthetics (p.22) in a discussion of the Idea of the Beautiful, where he speaks of the need to think beyond the ‘the emptiness, which clings to the Platonic idea’. The Platonic Idea is ‘empty’ in that it seems to have no describable positive content. It is an immobile Standard, never fully present in individual phenomenon but against which any individual beautiful thing can be judged and found wanting. For Hegel, however, the relation between universal and particular is altogether more immanent:
‘..in accordance with its own Concept, it [Idea of the Beautiful] has to develop into a totality of specifications, and it itself, like its exposition, contains the necessity of its particularizations and of their progress and transition into one another; on the other hand, the particularizations, to which a transition has been made, carry in themselves the universality and essentiality of the concept.’
Again, Hegel seems to imply that the concept is, so to speak, the blueprint for its own unfolding, or at least contains that blueprint. It ‘contains the necessity of its particularisations’. This ‘syntax' of particularisation, the necessary lines and branches mapped out by the Particulars, these constitute the concept, so that the question of the ‘relation’ between Particular and conceptual Universal is suddenly reframed. Is this formulation of the relation between particulars and universals not itself an aesthetic one?
What I mean by that last remark is that the 'aesthetic' is one name for what's happening when particulars do not simply & indifferently 'illustrate' some greater whole but, instead, the whole just is the constellation formed by the particulars.
Friday, August 27, 2004
On Form
From the last (but one) post: "[fascism is] a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way."
A couple of thoughts on the concept of ‘form’: on the one hand 'form' refers to something merely apparent, as when we say ‘x took the form of y’ - for example, if someone were to say, ‘his anti-Semitism took the form of a violent animosity towards all things Israeli’. Here ‘form’ is an inessential appearance. On the other hand, 'form' refers to something like the inner structure, the essential workings – we might say ‘all Shakespeare’s sonnets have the same form despite the differences in content’ Or one thinks of the Heideggerian argument that Communism and Capitalist Democracy have the same form (the same technological hubris) despite stated ideological differences. Thus, on the one hand form refers to semblance, on the other hand to ‘essence’, or inner structure. One meaning seems to flip over into its exact opposite. The response to this ambivalence is not to concede that these are simply two different meanings, two different notions, but rather to ask what it is about the notion of form that produces this split. The ‘disposition’ toward these two contradictory meanings must in some sense be folded back into the notion itself.
The above might well be extended to thinking about Concepts in general. The sense that the ‘unfolding’ of the concept is internal to the concept itself can be related to this statement from Hegel:
The concept is the universal which maintains itself in its particulars (Aesthetics I, p.13)
Note the force of that ‘maintains’: isn’t the implication that the concept lives only in and through its ‘particularizations’, that it sustains and 'explicates' itself through these particulars, rather than being some rigid and invariable template. The Concept is nothing more than the very logic of this unfolding. This would in turn cause us to rethink Adorno’s philosophical ‘credo’quoted by me in another post:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
(Young Hegelian has some interesting thoughts on the above, here.)
A couple of thoughts on the concept of ‘form’: on the one hand 'form' refers to something merely apparent, as when we say ‘x took the form of y’ - for example, if someone were to say, ‘his anti-Semitism took the form of a violent animosity towards all things Israeli’. Here ‘form’ is an inessential appearance. On the other hand, 'form' refers to something like the inner structure, the essential workings – we might say ‘all Shakespeare’s sonnets have the same form despite the differences in content’ Or one thinks of the Heideggerian argument that Communism and Capitalist Democracy have the same form (the same technological hubris) despite stated ideological differences. Thus, on the one hand form refers to semblance, on the other hand to ‘essence’, or inner structure. One meaning seems to flip over into its exact opposite. The response to this ambivalence is not to concede that these are simply two different meanings, two different notions, but rather to ask what it is about the notion of form that produces this split. The ‘disposition’ toward these two contradictory meanings must in some sense be folded back into the notion itself.
The above might well be extended to thinking about Concepts in general. The sense that the ‘unfolding’ of the concept is internal to the concept itself can be related to this statement from Hegel:
The concept is the universal which maintains itself in its particulars (Aesthetics I, p.13)
Note the force of that ‘maintains’: isn’t the implication that the concept lives only in and through its ‘particularizations’, that it sustains and 'explicates' itself through these particulars, rather than being some rigid and invariable template. The Concept is nothing more than the very logic of this unfolding. This would in turn cause us to rethink Adorno’s philosophical ‘credo’quoted by me in another post:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
(Young Hegelian has some interesting thoughts on the above, here.)
Morning Reading
Just a few interesting items:
1. On Homophobia, Universalism and related issues. (check out the links - & esp. the Guardian letters)
2. Bush and lying
3. I'm with the cleaner on this one.
4. Some further thoughts on 'fascism' (Lenin's Tomb)
5. via the always interesting Wood's Lot, this interview with Jacques Derrida
6. Zizek on Timothy Garton Ash
1. On Homophobia, Universalism and related issues. (check out the links - & esp. the Guardian letters)
2. Bush and lying
3. I'm with the cleaner on this one.
4. Some further thoughts on 'fascism' (Lenin's Tomb)
5. via the always interesting Wood's Lot, this interview with Jacques Derrida
6. Zizek on Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Kamm's Tortoise
The great elephant that was Oliver Kamm’s discussion of ‘Fascism and the Left’ turns out to have been standing on nothing more substantial than the following fragile tortoise:
The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national [An utterly rebarbative hyphenation] radical Third Way."
The idea that Fascism is primarily a ‘form of thought’ [a form of thought??], i.e., that it is primarily a matter of ideas, is - to say the least - highly contentious/ culpably incomplete; the irony, of course, is that it is just this idea, a frankly idealist one, that a Left analysis would want to contest and, I would argue, it just this error that a left analysis is able to correct. Even in its own terms (which are false) it is dubious – if Fascism preached the need for ‘rebirth’ one surely needs to qualify this by pointing out that this typically took the rhetorical form of a ‘return to roots’, pseudo-atavistic appeals to ‘Blut und Boden’ and so on. (For some reason Shelley’s proto-fascist lines “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” just popped into my head.)
Kamm continues: ‘The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism.’ And the redundancy of it is that it is unusably broad, yokes together inherently diverse phenomena and fails completely to address the historical specificity of fascism; perhaps worse, it makes fascism itself sound rather innocuous. Of course, all this could also be seen, depending on your point of view as a ‘value’, in that emptying fascism of precise intellectual and historical content also frees it up for all kinds of rhetorical and polemical trickery.
The second point I intended making was that Kamm, in his eagerness to glue together an argument, had quoted without comment an embarrassing piece of whimsy by one Jeffrey Ketland, who refers casually to ‘the post-modern literature’ as if this were an uncontroversial and understood canon, rather than a watery pseudo-conceptual solution in which Foucault’s thinking can be painlessly dissolved. . Anyway, it now seems that a number of Kamm’s correspondents, including his own brother, have alerted him to the fact that Ketland may not have been rowing with both oars in the water (the one oar being knowledge, the other analytical rigour). What I will add is that the phrase quoted by Ketland regarding Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of the Iranian revolution (‘political spirituality’) is exactly the phrase that appears if you type ‘Foucault’ and ‘Iranian revolution’ into Google. Now this may well be a coincidence, as might the fact that Ketland makes no attempt to allude to the original context of this phrase. For those of you genuinely interested in the matter (as opposed to those seeking only polemical returns on their cursory reading investment) see Foucault, 'A quoi revent les Iraniens?' in Dits et Ecrits (1978) and the interview translated as 'Questions of Method' , in (I think) the 'Power' volume of Penguin’s Essential Works. Anyway, restored to its context the phrase has nothing to do with anything that is specifically Islamic, quite the contrary, and is meant, I think, have a faintly provocative ring to it. Frankly, I don’t care if Ketland is a ‘philosopher’ -whatever rubric/ title he goes under isn’t prepotent enough to lend his argument any legitimacy.
Kamm however has an even more egregiously vapid interlocutor up his sleeve, one who has wisely remained anonymous after less than wisely offering the following pearl:
‘Just like the fascists, the New Left also work on the basis of assertion and resolution - there is no truth, so we must allow people to define their own and follow through the results.’
The ‘assertion’ with which this worthless proposition ends is ascribable to neither the New Left nor to Fascism. Fascism is hardly renowned for epistemological relativism and epistemological relativism has no one political consequence (on thinks of Richard Rorty’s liberalism), but in any case, the ‘New Left’ are not defined by such a stance, so it matters little.
So there we are, Kamm’s tortoise is belly up and, for what its worth, only historical materialism can stand it back on its feet. The following thoughts on fascism are by one of its victims, Walter Benjamin, who was sure also that historical materialism could ‘win every time’ in thinking about mankind’s protracted endgame. These musings represent not an exhaustive definition (of course), but an eloquent and arresting starting point, and a view of the fascist catastrophe as it appeared to a man ‘singled out by history at a moment of danger’:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fiihrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
Benjamin knew that one should not do fascism the courtesy of taking it at its word (its 'ideas').
(For a critique of ideas based theories of fascism, see the text cited at the end of this post).
27/8 Actually, if one examines Eatwell's words, notice that the ‘forging of national unity’ is primary and the ‘thought’ of ‘social rebirth’ etc is only instrumental in procuring that goal. Thus the ideology of fascism (in this definition) serves an end external to itself. How this sheds light on the SWP is not clear.
Red Ink
This article on the potential 'ban' on red ink in certain American universities is a good example of a rudimentary semiotic error. Anyway, it reminded me, quite arbitrarily, of one of Zizek's nice little jokes:
In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."
In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."
(Zizek goes on: Is this not how ideology functions? We "feel free", now as then, when we lack the language - "the red ink" - to articulate our unfreedom. It is the basic task of critical art and culture to provide the red ink. )
Vending Machine
Why, I am asked by a reader, do I have such disdain for journalists. I don't, but let me clarify. There are some very good political and literary journalists – see the links column. One the other hand, I do think there is more than a grain of truth in the words of Georg Lukacs:
The specialised ‘virtuoso ‘, the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties [..] This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.
[See here - scroll down]
So, not journalists qua journalists, but journalists qua apogee of capitalist reification, vending machines of their own processed emotions and opinions.
n.b. I wonder whether, potentially, the weblog opens up a space outside the logic of journalism (- where is not merely an adjunct to journalism (e.g. Pollard) or a failed aspirant.)
(Adorno, comments thus on the Lukacs passage:
Under a priori saleeability the living has made itself, as something living, a thing, equipment. [..] All that is left are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will, deviod of anything personal.)
The specialised ‘virtuoso ‘, the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties [..] This phenomenon can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification.
[See here - scroll down]
So, not journalists qua journalists, but journalists qua apogee of capitalist reification, vending machines of their own processed emotions and opinions.
n.b. I wonder whether, potentially, the weblog opens up a space outside the logic of journalism (- where is not merely an adjunct to journalism (e.g. Pollard) or a failed aspirant.)
(Adorno, comments thus on the Lukacs passage:
Under a priori saleeability the living has made itself, as something living, a thing, equipment. [..] All that is left are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will, deviod of anything personal.)
Team of Substitutes
What Glueboot says here is spot on:
football... have been reading football message boards for work recently. I find it strange that when a player is a member of a certain team the fans love him and when he leaves they no longer care. It seems that the people do not exist, just the signifier of the team name with transient bodies moving in and out. The driving force behind the movement of players is shifts in capital... 'I have more money so I will buy the better players,' little to do with the actual home city of the team. All the emotion of it comes from the fans... their emotion driven by the capital that shifts the transient bodies between different signifiers. Is football real? I think maybe not.
All I would add is that that the logic at work here - of transient, substitutable bodies bearing larger symbolic mandates; the abstract and determining logic of capital replacing any sense of local attachment etc, the atavistic and necessary libidinal glue (the fans' "emotion") - is hardly peculiar to football. Indeed, if you tinker with the above a fraction you could have quite a nice little social allegory.
n.b., The 'symbolic mandate' of the 'team name' is most obviously incarnate in 'the shirt', as when you say 'he's not fit to wear the shirt'. The shirt incarnates 'the team' which is never synonymous with its actual players. 'The team' is, so to speak, endlessly reincarnated in these flesh and blood individuals.
football... have been reading football message boards for work recently. I find it strange that when a player is a member of a certain team the fans love him and when he leaves they no longer care. It seems that the people do not exist, just the signifier of the team name with transient bodies moving in and out. The driving force behind the movement of players is shifts in capital... 'I have more money so I will buy the better players,' little to do with the actual home city of the team. All the emotion of it comes from the fans... their emotion driven by the capital that shifts the transient bodies between different signifiers. Is football real? I think maybe not.
All I would add is that that the logic at work here - of transient, substitutable bodies bearing larger symbolic mandates; the abstract and determining logic of capital replacing any sense of local attachment etc, the atavistic and necessary libidinal glue (the fans' "emotion") - is hardly peculiar to football. Indeed, if you tinker with the above a fraction you could have quite a nice little social allegory.
n.b., The 'symbolic mandate' of the 'team name' is most obviously incarnate in 'the shirt', as when you say 'he's not fit to wear the shirt'. The shirt incarnates 'the team' which is never synonymous with its actual players. 'The team' is, so to speak, endlessly reincarnated in these flesh and blood individuals.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
One more cup of coffee for the road
Recently some stray anecdote (here) about one of my students lamenting the absence of Starbucks in Italy has been posted on various (often unrelated) sites, leaping through cyberspace like an overcaffeinated meme, sending my ‘hits’ though the (albeit bungalow level) roof. This has completely scrambled the site profile, creating a sudden illusion of immense popularity, and brought me to the verge of removing said anecdote. It is perhaps a little sad that this random piece of chit-chat has become the most read (?) item on my web log. One can only hope these thousands of casual drop-ins managed to comb through the stuff on Guy Debord which preceded the story and are now taking to the streets mouthing Situationist slogans. Anyway, perhaps more sadly predictable is the lengthy discussion of this bit of gossip on Crooked Timbre, which immediately turned into a debate as to the pros and cons of Starbucks, with one contributor vigorously pleading the giant corporation’s case, arguing that the whole issue was inextricably bound up with perceptions of America. At this point I was compelled to intervene:
May I remind you also that the original post did not constitute an attack on Starbucks, making the direction taken by the subsequent discussion somewhat revealing. The eagerness to ‘defend’ what in any case was not been attacked would seem to smack of paranoia.
In fact, it wasn’t simply ‘paranoia’ that curved the discussion in this direction, it was a pre-existing set of preconceptions and conflations, the most obvious being the buttoning of the signifier ‘Starbucks’ to ‘America’ as signified. I quote: “Starbucks’ fame is inseparably intertwined with its Americanness and people’s impression of what an American brand will offer them.” that someone should feel she has something invested, personally, in defending a mutinational corporations is......... well, just file under ‘Example of successful ideological interpellation.' Thank you for your time.
May I remind you also that the original post did not constitute an attack on Starbucks, making the direction taken by the subsequent discussion somewhat revealing. The eagerness to ‘defend’ what in any case was not been attacked would seem to smack of paranoia.
In fact, it wasn’t simply ‘paranoia’ that curved the discussion in this direction, it was a pre-existing set of preconceptions and conflations, the most obvious being the buttoning of the signifier ‘Starbucks’ to ‘America’ as signified. I quote: “Starbucks’ fame is inseparably intertwined with its Americanness and people’s impression of what an American brand will offer them.” that someone should feel she has something invested, personally, in defending a mutinational corporations is......... well, just file under ‘Example of successful ideological interpellation.' Thank you for your time.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Eloquent Silence
When does language speak itself as language? Curiously, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without really giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential Being . (Heidegger)
Again, absence is the highest form of presence – only when the rug is pulled from under me is its existence really disclosed in its specificity. We are suddenly, when we stammer and pause, in a position to gauge the difference language makes, the revelation that if we cannot name something there is a real sense in which we do not have it. Language, the binding force of the name, therefore brings things into our ‘owning’.
To say, for example, 'mountain' is to bring the mountain itself towards us out of the seamless continuum of the visible. Henceforth, when we look at a mountain it is silhouetted with this insubstantial word. Our gaze is afflicted with the frames of language.
'Language has been called the house of Being, it is the keeper of being present..’ Think of Wittgenstein’s famous example – the dog can anticipate its master’s return, sure, but not that its master will return in a week. And why? Because it does not have language. But this then means that in a certain sense Time - specifically here the Present, set over against the horizon of the coming week - can only appear to us (Dasein), to the language user and not to the ‘poor-in-world’ dog. The Present is in this case a kind of privative category – a cleft has opened up separating the ‘now’ from ‘a week’s time’ and the present is defined as the point of that opening up. The present = the beginning of that week interval. All this shows itself only to the language-animal.
Again, absence is the highest form of presence – only when the rug is pulled from under me is its existence really disclosed in its specificity. We are suddenly, when we stammer and pause, in a position to gauge the difference language makes, the revelation that if we cannot name something there is a real sense in which we do not have it. Language, the binding force of the name, therefore brings things into our ‘owning’.
To say, for example, 'mountain' is to bring the mountain itself towards us out of the seamless continuum of the visible. Henceforth, when we look at a mountain it is silhouetted with this insubstantial word. Our gaze is afflicted with the frames of language.
'Language has been called the house of Being, it is the keeper of being present..’ Think of Wittgenstein’s famous example – the dog can anticipate its master’s return, sure, but not that its master will return in a week. And why? Because it does not have language. But this then means that in a certain sense Time - specifically here the Present, set over against the horizon of the coming week - can only appear to us (Dasein), to the language user and not to the ‘poor-in-world’ dog. The Present is in this case a kind of privative category – a cleft has opened up separating the ‘now’ from ‘a week’s time’ and the present is defined as the point of that opening up. The present = the beginning of that week interval. All this shows itself only to the language-animal.
Antique Map
Two isolated farmsteads [..] separated by an hour’s walk across the fields, can be the best of neighbours, while two townhouses, facing each other across the street or even sharing a common wall, know no neighbourhood. Neighbouring nearness, then, does not depend on spatial-temporal relation (Heidegger)
Thoughts on Neighbourhood:
A neighbourhood can of course be defined in terms of parametrical distance (square miles) or whatever, but what constitutes it as neighbourhood is not empty physical space but a network of relations. This network of relations comes first and is then calculated using metre or miles etc. One might say: okay, this neighbourhood is four square miles, it extends as far as the lake in the southwest. And one says this as though one has now precisely fixed and defined that neighbourhood, whereas of course the neighbourhood is not and cannot be defined by these terms. We might say there is a confusion of measuring and defining. It is if the question of what defined the neighbourhood could be referred to a ‘boundary commission’ . Too often, philosophers are simply boundary commissioners. And philosophical questions are treated as boundary disputes
All objectifying knowledge [...] is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect. (Riceour)
If I understand it aright, objective (scientific) calculation and measurement take their cue from - and ultimately serve - circumspective involvement in the world. They re-present mathematically spaces (or whatever) already ‘mapped out’ through concern. A road map, for example, is the bare calibration, the empty ‘x-ray’ of our concernful dealings with a region.
Thoughts on Neighbourhood:
A neighbourhood can of course be defined in terms of parametrical distance (square miles) or whatever, but what constitutes it as neighbourhood is not empty physical space but a network of relations. This network of relations comes first and is then calculated using metre or miles etc. One might say: okay, this neighbourhood is four square miles, it extends as far as the lake in the southwest. And one says this as though one has now precisely fixed and defined that neighbourhood, whereas of course the neighbourhood is not and cannot be defined by these terms. We might say there is a confusion of measuring and defining. It is if the question of what defined the neighbourhood could be referred to a ‘boundary commission’ . Too often, philosophers are simply boundary commissioners. And philosophical questions are treated as boundary disputes
All objectifying knowledge [...] is preceded by a relation of belonging upon which we can never entirely reflect. (Riceour)
If I understand it aright, objective (scientific) calculation and measurement take their cue from - and ultimately serve - circumspective involvement in the world. They re-present mathematically spaces (or whatever) already ‘mapped out’ through concern. A road map, for example, is the bare calibration, the empty ‘x-ray’ of our concernful dealings with a region.
Open Cabinet
The perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. (Heidegger)
But how attractive of course to the subject is the notion, the picture, of such a ‘cabinet,’ a treasure hoard of sense-impressions and sovereign reflections, each one bearing with it the hallmark of ownership (I ‘have’ these impressions/ experiences). The connotations here are of the pleasure of possession; one’s thoughts and reflections are like hoarded objects, the ‘objects’ of a collection. And how disconcerting, by contrast, to think of one’s precious lumber out there in the thick of things, contaminated and disseminated in worldly contact.
And yet in truth, is it not the worldly 'contamination' that comes first? Is not the Self first of all contaminated, intricated in things and people, and could not the booty of consciousness be seen, in part, as an unmetabolised remainder mistaking itself for an Essence??
But how attractive of course to the subject is the notion, the picture, of such a ‘cabinet,’ a treasure hoard of sense-impressions and sovereign reflections, each one bearing with it the hallmark of ownership (I ‘have’ these impressions/ experiences). The connotations here are of the pleasure of possession; one’s thoughts and reflections are like hoarded objects, the ‘objects’ of a collection. And how disconcerting, by contrast, to think of one’s precious lumber out there in the thick of things, contaminated and disseminated in worldly contact.
And yet in truth, is it not the worldly 'contamination' that comes first? Is not the Self first of all contaminated, intricated in things and people, and could not the booty of consciousness be seen, in part, as an unmetabolised remainder mistaking itself for an Essence??
Monday, August 23, 2004
Left in Pieces
[slightly modified 24/8]
As this excellent article makes clear, a colophon can be as good as a concept, and a concept little more than a colophon....
The phantasmatic comb of ‘The Death of the Left’ continues to be fought over by various ideological baldies. Nonetheless, perhaps Nick Cohen’s assertion that the Left has no ‘coherent message of hope’ is little more than a truism. Can one really expect what is in reality a globally heterogeneous collection of movements to have a single ‘message’? And what exactly would ‘a message of hope' look like? When did the left (singular) have such a ‘message’? How did it fare in the marketplace of messages? But when you ask these kind of questions, you realise that trying to analyse Cohen’s argument is about as productive as trying to tune in to the Olympics on a microwave. Anyway, might not this very ‘incoherence’ be itself an interesting symptom rather than a moral failing (an always suspect argument), as this – from a John Berger piece on subcommandante Marcos - suggests:
On the one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances bythe instantaneous telecommunication of exchanges and deals, by obligatoryfree-trade zones (such as the North American Free Trade Association) andby the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market; and, on the other hand, it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the nation state - for example, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc. "A world of brokenmirrors," writes Marcos, "reflecting the useless unity of the neo-liberalpuzzle."
The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape of a pocket, and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order that are developing across the globe. The Zapatistas in southeast Mexico are one such pocket. Others, in different circumstances, have not necessarily chosen armed resistance. The many pockets do not have a common political programme as such. How could they, existing as they do in the brokenpuzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise. What they have in common is their defence of the redundant, the next-to-be-eliminated.... The seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense. This lack of sense, this absurdity, is endemic to the new order
When I think of hope and the Left I think of many things, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin for example, not necessarily ‘messages’ if by that you mean something that would fit on a billboard. But something that could indeed fit on a billboard is Antonio Gramsci’s’s: “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” One way of reading this might be that 'hope' bypasses the register of 'messages' altogether, that hope exists precisely inspite of the messages registered by the intellect. Within the available categories, within the available consensus of what is legitimate, hope is itself 'incoherent', perverse, stubborn.
n.b., At the weekend I watched the old Lubitsch film To be Or Not To Be. Those of you who have seen it will doubtless remember the episode where an affected Polish thespian is called on to impersonate the Gestapo officer Erhardt as part of a clandestine operation. He does so in an overly-theatrical way with an uber-complacent bearing and loud aggressive laughter. We assume this is a grotesque parody, until later, when the real Erdhart appears and turns out to be exactly the same as his imitation – exaggerated gestures, belligerent guffaws etc. Some things preempt parody. Well, here is a completely unrelated item.
30/8 A critical but not unsympathetic review of the Berger essay mentioned above can be found here.
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Beyond the Touchline
The words spoken in jest at the end of the previous post, turn out to have been true.
There are at least two ways of supporting a football team. One is to choose a team, according to success or style of play, or even because ‘everyone else’ does. To my mind this is precisely not supporting a football team, but supporting ‘success’, ‘popularity’ etc. The other way consists in a kind of curse inflicted on one at an early age, a throw of the die that one cannot actually remember but which in any case determines one’s allegiance forever. In this second instance, you find yourself wishing you did not support the team in question, you wish you were indifferent to how they are performing, even as your hand reaches for the T.V., just out of curiosity you understand - before curiosity turns to quiet elation or frustrated disappointment. You can tell yourself you are no longer particularly bothered about football, that your choice of this team is in any case arbitrary, that practically none of the players even come from your home town. These nice observations are useless, the protestations in vain, for all are casually refuted when, driving back from a country walk on a Saturday afternoon, you find yourself asking your friend to put the radio on.
Anyway, as with the ‘unregistered letters’ post, I invite the reader to use the above as a metaphor for/ example of any one of a number of things.
There are at least two ways of supporting a football team. One is to choose a team, according to success or style of play, or even because ‘everyone else’ does. To my mind this is precisely not supporting a football team, but supporting ‘success’, ‘popularity’ etc. The other way consists in a kind of curse inflicted on one at an early age, a throw of the die that one cannot actually remember but which in any case determines one’s allegiance forever. In this second instance, you find yourself wishing you did not support the team in question, you wish you were indifferent to how they are performing, even as your hand reaches for the T.V., just out of curiosity you understand - before curiosity turns to quiet elation or frustrated disappointment. You can tell yourself you are no longer particularly bothered about football, that your choice of this team is in any case arbitrary, that practically none of the players even come from your home town. These nice observations are useless, the protestations in vain, for all are casually refuted when, driving back from a country walk on a Saturday afternoon, you find yourself asking your friend to put the radio on.
Anyway, as with the ‘unregistered letters’ post, I invite the reader to use the above as a metaphor for/ example of any one of a number of things.
X marks the knot.
Translation. For Walter Benjamin, in moving between two languages, or standing in the second and susceptibly attuned to echoes from the first, we somehow sense a ‘pure language’ prior to both. According to some readings this ‘pure language’ is no more than a kind of necessary fiction needed to account for the very ability to translate. It enables us to measure the distances between languages and maybe between language and the reality.
Anyway, some related thoughts, occasioned by the previous post on Adorno in English:
In attempting to translate a text from say French, one of course first consults the existing translations. Say there are three of these, three ‘approximations’. None of these approximations is quite ‘it’; the variations are all failed answers, and unavoidably so.
Imagine, then, that you do not have the original text but only the 3 translations and their variations. One is able to sense the ‘conundrum’, the hard knot of the untranslatable 'X' responsible for these variations – one infers the ‘Real’ of the ur-text through the necessary failures, the ‘disturbances on the surface', of the translations.
Is this not close to being a nice metaphor for what Lacan means by the Real – that which resists being translated - not, now, into one particular language, but into language per se. Each deflected attempt to translate, to bring to Symbolic articulation, attests to a stubborn ‘X’ responsible for those very deflections.
The next post will be on football.
Anyway, some related thoughts, occasioned by the previous post on Adorno in English:
In attempting to translate a text from say French, one of course first consults the existing translations. Say there are three of these, three ‘approximations’. None of these approximations is quite ‘it’; the variations are all failed answers, and unavoidably so.
Imagine, then, that you do not have the original text but only the 3 translations and their variations. One is able to sense the ‘conundrum’, the hard knot of the untranslatable 'X' responsible for these variations – one infers the ‘Real’ of the ur-text through the necessary failures, the ‘disturbances on the surface', of the translations.
Is this not close to being a nice metaphor for what Lacan means by the Real – that which resists being translated - not, now, into one particular language, but into language per se. Each deflected attempt to translate, to bring to Symbolic articulation, attests to a stubborn ‘X’ responsible for those very deflections.
The next post will be on football.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
A Note on Adorno
As part of his response to my post on individuality, the Young Hegelian rightly remembers Adorno's words:
"No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising."
Negative Dialectics, from which this is taken currently exists in an English translation by E.B. Ashton. This has been severely crticised by, among others, Fredric Jameson for glaring errors, a seeming unfamiliarity with basic Marxist categories and so on. Anyway, I've recently discovered alternative online translations of the book, in whole or in part. See here and here.
This, from the second of these translations, is Adorno's view of Philosophy's current proper concern:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
n.b. It is not that these other translations are necessarily always better; more that moving between these three translations seems to trace a kind of negative outline of their common source. It's as if we can read backwards from the 'misses' that which they have failed to hit.
"No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising."
Negative Dialectics, from which this is taken currently exists in an English translation by E.B. Ashton. This has been severely crticised by, among others, Fredric Jameson for glaring errors, a seeming unfamiliarity with basic Marxist categories and so on. Anyway, I've recently discovered alternative online translations of the book, in whole or in part. See here and here.
This, from the second of these translations, is Adorno's view of Philosophy's current proper concern:
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.
n.b. It is not that these other translations are necessarily always better; more that moving between these three translations seems to trace a kind of negative outline of their common source. It's as if we can read backwards from the 'misses' that which they have failed to hit.
Naming Names
My grandfather was a welder in Bradford when he joined the army as a private in the Second World War. He has told me of vigorous discussions about revolutionary socialism with fellow privates. Some of them were reading Marx. The doors of history seem to have swung shut on such meetings, at least here and for the time being, but my grandfather has remained a socialist, in a way that Tony Blair et al would find merely embarrassing. The auld fella has ‘failed to move with the times’ but then, the mere drift of time is hardly a moral compass. I can remember some of the political discussions he would have with my uncle, who was then a bank clerk. A familiar charge against Socialism was that it involved inertias of bureaucracy. Capitalism, as we are told, does away with bureaucracy. My grandfather would point out that capitalism indeed had a vast bureaucracy – what are banks but the bureaucracy of capitalism by another name. In this he was uncannily (and unknowingly, I might add) close to Lenin: ‘Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employee unions.’
Perhaps, then, one of the tasks of radical thought must address this question of names. What is ‘advertising’ for example, but corporate propaganda? Certainly the term ‘advertising’ is euphemistic nonsense, a kind of linguistic decoy. In truth, we are continually assailed with messages that have a palpable design on us. We are definitely not dealing with the disinterested transparency of ‘information’. It is scarcely information at all, since it offers us nothing as to the use-value or production details of its wares, instead turning these wares into signifiers of immaterial values, attaching cultural tags to them (‘coolness’ ‘masculinity’ ‘bourgeois sophistication’ or whatever), bumping up exchange value by reference to Symbolic Value and, in short, extending a promise that it neither can nor wishes to fulfil.
Take another example. ‘Governments skim off our earned wealth through taxation; this differentiates them from businesses which have no such power’. But what is the capitalist’s surplus value but a ‘skimming off’ of the wealth the worker has created. What we must do, then, is to strip things of their familiar names, which have merged with what they name and so taken on a spurious objectivity. Truth can only be arrived at through the violent act of renaming, ‘unnatural’ to Common Sense, where common sense is just solidified ideology - historical distortions that have become ‘second nature’ and consequently forgotten. It was Proust who said: “If God and the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.” And so we might rewrite this as: If Ideology has created our present ‘reality’ by conflating things with their names, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that radical thinking opens up the world for transformation. The first baptism, however, must be to name capitalism itself – for the absence of this name systematically muffles our ability to speak meaningfully of anything else.
Perhaps, then, one of the tasks of radical thought must address this question of names. What is ‘advertising’ for example, but corporate propaganda? Certainly the term ‘advertising’ is euphemistic nonsense, a kind of linguistic decoy. In truth, we are continually assailed with messages that have a palpable design on us. We are definitely not dealing with the disinterested transparency of ‘information’. It is scarcely information at all, since it offers us nothing as to the use-value or production details of its wares, instead turning these wares into signifiers of immaterial values, attaching cultural tags to them (‘coolness’ ‘masculinity’ ‘bourgeois sophistication’ or whatever), bumping up exchange value by reference to Symbolic Value and, in short, extending a promise that it neither can nor wishes to fulfil.
Take another example. ‘Governments skim off our earned wealth through taxation; this differentiates them from businesses which have no such power’. But what is the capitalist’s surplus value but a ‘skimming off’ of the wealth the worker has created. What we must do, then, is to strip things of their familiar names, which have merged with what they name and so taken on a spurious objectivity. Truth can only be arrived at through the violent act of renaming, ‘unnatural’ to Common Sense, where common sense is just solidified ideology - historical distortions that have become ‘second nature’ and consequently forgotten. It was Proust who said: “If God and the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.” And so we might rewrite this as: If Ideology has created our present ‘reality’ by conflating things with their names, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that radical thinking opens up the world for transformation. The first baptism, however, must be to name capitalism itself – for the absence of this name systematically muffles our ability to speak meaningfully of anything else.
Friday, August 20, 2004
I is empty.
“For every person, with all his functions, society has a stand-in ready, to whom the former is in any case no more than an intrusive occupier of his workplace” (Adorno)
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.
The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.
Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.
Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.
21/8 n.b. Lenin (this one, but probably the other one as well) is right that the very idea of the 'individual' needs to be interrogated and re-thought. For a start, see Raymond Williams here.
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