'the game that nobody plays and everybody can watch'

Recommended articles for today:

1. Zizek:

'In the eyes of the US evangelical populists, the state stands for an alien power and, together with UN, is an agent of the Antichrist: it takes away the liberty of the Christian believer, relieving him of the moral responsibility of stewardship, and thus undermines the individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation – how to combine this with the unheard-of explosion the state apparatuses under Bush? No wonder large corporations are delighted to accept such evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries to regulate media mergers, to put strictures on energy companies, to strengthen air pollution regulations, to protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etc. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.'

2. John Berger, "Towards a Theory of the Visible'. A beautiful essay, containing pearls of reflection:

'What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly.'

- as well as his usual intellectual guerilla warfare against the present of late capitalism:

The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turn-over becomes the absolute priority, and, consequently, the existant has to be disregarded or ignored or suppressed.
To paint now is an act of resistance which answers a widespread need and may instigate hope.

Of course, finally the pearls and the warfare are inseperable.

3. Guardian article on Studs Terkel.

Sartre, ii

From 'Family Idiot, ii":

"The word 'mechanism' and the word 'ecstasy' - what are they" Things distinct in their very substance from the objects they pretend to designate."

This is the thought S. ascribes to Flaubert. It is in one sense an utterly child-like thought. Why should there be a fit between the molecular structure of language and the molecular stucture (this phrase is Sartre's) of the world/ reality?

Sartre's response is, it seems, that the question itself is false. Because the world itself is made by and inseparable from language. So, for example, the word 'mountain' throws into relief the mountain, retreives it from and sets it over against the indifferentiated continuum of 'background'. And the word does this because for certain human purposes it is useful, necessary, to be able to designate 'mountain'. The thing mountain and the word "mountain" exist in some kind of instrumental complex. It is not just that there is an order of things out there on the one hand, and an order of words on the other. As Sartre puts it, 'the actual is already verbal'.

Sartre; Family Idiot

'Flaubert is categorical: poetry is a silent adventure of the soul, a lived event that has nothing in common with language; more precisely, poetry takes place against language.'

Initiatially puzzled by this. Possible interpretation = poetry disturbs language, from the inside, like a wind disturbing grass or making a curtain flutter. It, poetry, is visible, like the wind, only in and through what it disrupts and displaces. Poetry, in this sense, is a kind of force of silence inside language itself - ruffling its surface, upsetting syntactical fluency, breaking up frozen metaphors...

Alternatively, Sartre thinks that for Flaubert language is always a kind of foreign substance introduced into one's being, eccentric to the haeccity of the self, a socially defined material imposed on the tender soul. The silence of poetry is the rebellion of this mute soul against the foreign power which has invaded and colonised it. The affirmation of the silence within language and against language is the affirmation of what can not be assimilated to this foreign body introduced into our souls. The soul is only visible in the warp or anamorphosis it introduces into the symbolic order of language. The soul is no more than this anamophosis.

'Seeing someone we know..'

"Even the simple act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formulated about him.. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously with the sound of his voice as if he were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions that we recognise and to which we listen." Proust

In effect, the person becomes a convenient and naturalised sign of the notions we have about them; those notions are suddenly congealed and localised in their face, like a meaning tucks itself into a word, so that the word appears to vanish into it.

Sometimes, of course, in 'seeing someone we know' a detail will appear, or confront us, so at odds with this picture, that we will disavow it as insignificant or 'out of character'. In fact, this little 'punctum' represents the ambushing of the imaginary by the real.

We think in names

Reading Schulz this evening, struck by an elementary thought about language. The phrase was this (although it could have been almost any): ".. with old pots and pans stacked on top of one another." When we read such words, we of course understand them at once, unthinkingly. Yet we do so without having to visualise a particular pot, a particular pan. It is though what the mind grasps, in a cursory and impatient way, is simply the idea of these things - without colour, volume, height, or any tangible qualities at all. And it is as though such ideas become 'more real' than tangible and discrete things, which matter only as illustrations or examples of such ideas.

Needless to say, this is hardly an original thought, and after some reflection and digging around, I realised that I was probably dimly inspired by this passage from Hegel:

"Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image evn: the name alone, if we understand it, is the unimagined simple representation. We think in names."

A further quote from the author discovered on an old index card

"We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''

Giovannni Pico Della Mirandola

Jericho

For some reason I was thinking tonight of years spent in Oxford, and in particular a converted public house in Jericho where I once lived, rapt in secret studies. Near the house was a delicatessen called, I think, Nellies, and almost every day I would pop in there for baclava or coffee, and chat briefly with the proprietor, 'Mr Nellie' as we used to call him, who seemed to be from Iran or somewhere, and was always effortlessly happy and content, so it seemed. And sometimes, when I was snowed under with work, I would stroll past this humble shop and see it warmly lit and familiar, and think how lovely it would be to lead the simple life of such a shopkeeper, sat reading on quiet days, or engaging customers in idle conversation. At times, it served as an elementary fantasy of comfort and secure and easy existence, undisturbed by uncertainty, ensconced one's own little fiefdom, a petit-bourgeois fantasy perhaps, but a fantasy thrown up and made appealing only in relation to the then instability and uncertainty of life, the burdens of work and laborious days leading who knows where. And so today, this little wish-image, swam towards me again: the yellow light in the window of the deli glimpsed in passing on a winter's night, the reassuring rhythms of Mr Nellie's comfortable life, the joys of possession. Like that inexplicable feeling one has, somtimes, passing a house at night and seeing through the window, what cannot appear but as some utterly desirable domestic scene, some place of inviolable refuge and contentment, like those house windows found only on Christmas cards.

I am currently wretchedly busy, hence this moment of nostalgic indulgence. And hence the absence of substantial posts.

Derrida: Avenir

Courtesy of Wood's Lot, one of Derrida's last speeches. It speaks of a vision of Europe..

This Europe, as a proud descendant of the Enlightenment past and a harbinger of the new Enlightenment to come, would show the world what it means to base politics on something more sophisticated than simplistic binary oppositions. In this Europe it would be possible to criticise Israeli policy, especially that pursued by Ariel Sharon and backed by George Bush, without being accused of anti-semitism. In this Europe, supporting the Palestinians in their legitimate struggle for rights, land and a state would not mean supporting suicide bombing or agreeing with the anti-semitic propaganda that is rehabilitating (with sad success) the outrageous lie that is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this Europe it would be usual to worry both about rising anti-semitism and rising Islamophobia...

In this Europe it would be possible to criticise the policies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz without being accused of sympathy for Saddam Hussein and his regime. In this Europe no one would be called anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic for allying himself with those Americans, Israelis or Palestinians who bravely speak out against their own leaders, often far more vehemently than we do in Europe.

Placebo World

I was travelling on the Northern Line earlier today, propped up near the door, reading a book. Anyway, an American gentleman politely pointed out that I was stood infront of the 'open door' button. 'Oh don't worry,' I reassured him, 'The door opens anyway - the button is a totally functionless placebo, designed to give you the illusion of agency.' 'Ah yes', he quipped, we've got something similar back in my home state. It's called a voting machine.'

Of course, when I left the carriage, I pressed the button nonetheless.

Walnuts and nutshells

The Guardian has an article picking up on some of the fallout from the Derrida obituaries. It quotes, presumably for a laugh, the views of A.C. Grayling. P., who is French, commented"This grayling, he appears, albeit on this slim evidence, to be a conceited numbskull happy to reproduce the small accretions of doxa deposited in his walnut-like brain" (i'm paraphrasing). Other quotes, however, from Glendinning and Eaglestone, are not too wide of the mark:

Well, it is very difficult to summarise Derrida's thought," says Glendinning. "It, like any serious and penetrating thought, even resists summary - any philosophy that can be summed up in a nutshell belongs in one. People are troubled by a form of critique which challenges our most cherished assumptions - and so they want a caricature."

Eaglestone also points out the impatience of the modern world, the lack of time for anything complicated, and even suggests an uglier motivation, "a thoroughgoing English anti-intellectualism which leads to academics and intellectuals being despised, so any charge will stick." Modern thinkers challenge received ideas, such as the assumption that genes alone determine character, or that art can only be good for you. They are not afraid to tackle institutions on both the left and the right, which has left them with few friends. "People don't like to have their certainties questioned," says Eaglestone. "Sadly that's the academic's job."

Let me also, belatedly, recommend this post on Derrida.

Even his honesty is dishonest.

Lacan on the peculiarly human capacity to lie through telling the truth. Similarly, honesty as dishonesty:

He tells F. candidly about his recent romantic disappointment. He says how hurt he was, and not just hurt but stunned, as from a blow to the head. But he tells F. this only as a way of warding F. away, for he hopes that F. will be uncomfortable with such candour, such guardless intimacy, and therefore back off and give him more space. This space is what he desires, and the candour only serves to procure it. Unflinching honesty coincides with complete dishonesty. The open heart is a ring of barbed wire.

'The alien being must be in me'

".. I too have a pronounced capacity for metamorphosising myself, which no one notices. How often must I have imitated Max. Yesterday evening on the way home, if I had seen myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky. The alien being must be in me, then, so distinctly and invisible as the hidden object in a picture puzzle, when, too, one would not find anything if one did not know that it is there."

K., diaries, 30th Sept. 1911.

A dimension of ourselves forever escapes us like the reverse of the mirror. K.'s parable of the man with a hole cut in the back of his skull so that all can see in but him.

The self, shot through with forms, gestures borrowed from the Other, or staging its being for the other, like Sartre's Flaubert (see previous). Suddenly aware, like K., of being already colonised by this Other, compromised, outside oneself in the image that others have of you, right from the begining. Right from the onset, when language, foreign, enters the soul, infiltrates and partitions the body's plenitude, introduces absence; arises, indeed, only through the need to call back what is absent, to refer to what is absent, in terms borrowed from the Other. But the awareness that this 'I' which resists the Other, which seems to escape it albeit by a hair's breadth, comes after it, a necessary mirage and our most precious possession.

A note found on an old index card..

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), Oratio de dignitate hominis (Oration on the Dignity of Man).

Pico retells the story of Genesis as an explanation of human desire. God completed the universe without Man in it, each thing in its assigned place and according to its proper and invariant nature. Trees are content to be trees, likewise stones, clouds. They do not desire to be anything else. Then, looking at it all, God "longed for there to be someone to think about the reason for such a vast work, to love its beauty, to wonder at its greatness." The creation was entire onto and of itself, with no empty position in the Chain of Being for another creature. But God made Man "of indeterminate form." Man alone has no pre-determined nature fixing his actions, thoughts, and desires; Pico's God tells Adam, "You are the moulder and maker of yourself; you may sculpt yourself into whatever shape you prefer" . In Pico's thought, infinitely unsatisfied desire is at the core of the human person.

Image 2.

Caught in the image that others have of him, the child tries to enact, to act out this image, to become it, in order to elicit parental approval. He/ she learns to perform for that audience called his parents.

Of course, we can never wholly be sure that we have correctly understood this image that others entertain of us, that we have answered the question ‘what do they want from me? What do they want me to be?” the image that others have of the child is therefore a experienced as a kind of interrogation which the child must endure and answer.

Sartre, Family Idiot:

“Others can reach him through speech; they affirm in him alien phrases that designate him from the outside [such a good boy, so bright, so promising, that boy will come to nothing] and implant themselves in his head; he cannot make them his own…”
“.. the little boy is crushed by the weight of strange phrases that designate him, is informed by these phrases that in the eyes of others he has an other reality, which they take for his true reality. For them he is a person with fixed characteristics. He tries to be this person, to act it out.. expressing his desires and his pain in a certain style he thinks is expected of him.. in the object he is for others he recognizes an ontological primacy over the subject he is for himself. He (the child) thinks he really is this unknown being his parents have discovered.. he tries to represent it, not only to flatter them but to open himself to his objective reality, so that this reality, evoked by his miming and beseeching gestures, should slip into him and fill him with its density. In sum, he tries to incarnate his other self, to lend his living and suffering body to this collection of abstract determinations. But he recognizes that he will never be for himself what he is, perhaps, for others” He can never coincide with the ‘Gustave’ he is for others

Image 1.

‘What is at stake is the specific function of the image and its eminently historical character. There are a couple of important details here. First, man is the only being who is interested in images as such. Animals are only interested in images to the extent that they are fooled. You can fool a bird with an image of another bird, in order to trap it. But when the animal realizes its dealing with an image, it loses interest completely. Now man is the animal who is interested in images when he has recognized them as such. That is why he’s interested in painting and why he goes to the cinema [..] He is interested in images after he has recognized they are not real beings.”

From Georgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonagh (MIT: London, 2002).

“At the level of the Imaginary, Lacan locates the emergence of the ego in the gesture of the precipitous identification with the external, alienated mirror-image which provides the idealized unity of the Self as opposed to the child’s actual helplessness and lack of coordination”

Concept and example

The concept: a statement that undermines the very position from which it is enunciated.

The example: "Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities.. without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability.?"

As Samuel Beckett once wrote, 'Uptherepublic'

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).