An earlier couple of posts on the Uncanny & the Inhuman are perhaps partly glossed by this paragraph from Zizek:
‘The paradox of moving statues, of dead objects coming alive and/or of petrified living objects, is possible only within the space of the death drive which, according to Lacan, is the space between two deaths, symbolic and real. For a human being to be ‘dead while alive’ is to be colonised by the ‘dead’ symbolic order; to be ‘alive while dead’ is to give body to the remainder of the Life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization (‘lamella’). What we are dealing with here is thus the split between A and J, between the ‘dead’ symbolic order which mortifies the body and the non-symbolic Life-substance of jouissance. '
Firstly, in what sense is the Symbolic order ‘dead’? The symbolic order of language pre-dates us and survives us; it is coldly indifferent to the span of our biological life. The Symbolic order has something obviously machine-like about it- its rules and structures are used by us, but are external to us and not dependent on us. Paradoxically, then, The Symbolic is ‘dead’ because is has a ‘life of its own’, and this is foreign to our own.
This is Bruce Fink:
‘The body is subdued; “the letter kills” the body. The living being (le vivant) – our animal nature – dies, language coming to life in its place and living us.”
Fink also cites Bergson’s phrase about language being ‘Encrusted on the living’ (a phrase with obvious relevance to his theory of comedy as those moments when the living body is rendered mechanical). This ‘encrusted’, ‘foreign’ and autonomous order stands opposed to our life-substance, it is the robust machine operating within us, so deeply intricated with our being that it is ‘inoperable’.
When James Joyce’s Stephen speaks of his relation to the English language, he also encapsulated this ‘extimacy’ of the language machine:
'His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language'.
(is the frequent uncanniness of the voice not to do with the fact that it’s never quite the invisible envelope of the Symbolic order, that it ‘holds it at bay’?)
We are thus dealing with two things here: the ‘dead symbolic order’ and that which ‘holds it at bay’, the living remainder. Are not each of these, in turn, uncanny (or is it inhuman)?
Would we not say that someone who perfectly embodied a particular Symbolic order – spoke in a smooth and pauseless grammatical fashion, someone who acted unflinchingly in accordance with the letter of some Law – was ‘robotic’, or, in a word, uncanny. This relates back, in some ways, to the previous post about ideology. Would not someone who, with poker-faced efficiency, carried out the corporate ethos or was completely keyed into the ruling letter of an organisation, strike us as a kind of replicant – as comic but scary. As uncanny?
Equally, when someone has died symbolically – their accounts have been settled, the story of their life seems to have arrived at some fitting terminus – but remains alive, like Oedipus after the catastrophe, is such a person not also uncanny. That which is ‘inappropriately alive’, that refuses to die, that ‘should’ be dead according to all Symbolic rights and prescriptions. ? In its ‘pure state’ the Life-substance, in all its blind repetitive action, is just as uncanny as the ‘pure’ Symbolic.
So according to Slav., what has been ‘opened up’ - or made visible - in both cases is the split between A and J; or perhaps, what has been shattered is the proper ‘equilibrium’ between these two. The dignity of the noble subject dissolves into its components, like the often quoted example of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where the meal dissolves into an image on the one hand and undifferentiated matter on the other. The 'magic trick' of the living subject breaks up into its two 'dead' constituents.
[add on, 1/4:
On the ‘dead’ symbolic order, I should perhaps have remarked more on the repeated rhetoric of the Symbolic ‘murdering’ the Real: it enters its ‘undifferentiated’ fabric and irreparably divides, quarters it. I remembered also this from Z.:
‘The word is a death, a murder of the thing: as soon as the reality is symbolized, caught in a symbolic network, the thing itself is more present in a word, in its concept, than in its immediate physical reality.’
But in killing or silencing the Real, the Symbolic introduces various zones and pockets of jouissance; the body is now shot through with and irradiates significance. The ‘letter’ of the Symbolic thus seems to at once ‘kill’ and create – the erasure of the Real means that our bodies are now radioactive with a new and significant life. The Symbolic as a foreign body therefore acts like a creative irritant, around which the Life-substance crystallises by way of resistance/response.
Henceforth, is there not a new ‘artificial’ life: the foreign iron (of the Symbolic) is now in our soul, lives in symbiosis with it: we are part Life-substance, part dead thing
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Foreign Food ii
I have remembered something from Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory that relates directly to the other post (and may, who knows, have been in the back of my mind all along):
‘John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weeds’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the way it behaves, the purpose it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.’
Eagleton goes on to imply that searching for the defining quality of ‘literature’ may be about as fruitful as trying to pin down the essence of weeds. Irrespective of agreement/ disagreement with this particular spin on ‘literature’, the passage usefully suggests those ways in which language ‘congeals’ social relations into things. This in turn underlines one of the principle tasks of critical thought, which is surely to unpack the social relations encoded (and concealed) in our forms of words. It also of course implies that oftentimes the philosophical chasing after essences is utterly misguided, and needs to be replaced by a more ‘sociological’ dissection of those relations and functions which have taken on, through language, the false appearance of fixity.
A somewhat separate point. The previous post on this subject was, to be honest, a bit sloppy. For example, I carelessly added a ‘not’ to Borges’ ‘included in the present classification’. And ‘not included in the present classification’ is obviously a rather more deliciously self-undermining and impossible category than I really recognised. More, hopefully, on this later.
‘John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weeds’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the way it behaves, the purpose it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it.’
Eagleton goes on to imply that searching for the defining quality of ‘literature’ may be about as fruitful as trying to pin down the essence of weeds. Irrespective of agreement/ disagreement with this particular spin on ‘literature’, the passage usefully suggests those ways in which language ‘congeals’ social relations into things. This in turn underlines one of the principle tasks of critical thought, which is surely to unpack the social relations encoded (and concealed) in our forms of words. It also of course implies that oftentimes the philosophical chasing after essences is utterly misguided, and needs to be replaced by a more ‘sociological’ dissection of those relations and functions which have taken on, through language, the false appearance of fixity.
A somewhat separate point. The previous post on this subject was, to be honest, a bit sloppy. For example, I carelessly added a ‘not’ to Borges’ ‘included in the present classification’. And ‘not included in the present classification’ is obviously a rather more deliciously self-undermining and impossible category than I really recognised. More, hopefully, on this later.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Santner on Schiavo
A reader has drawn my attention to a short piece by Eric Santner (whose interesting work I have mentioned before) in which he reflects, in an Agambenesque way, on the Terri Schiavo case and Abu Ghraib.
'In the one case we have human life violently stripped of the cover of a symbolic status/value, in the other, the intrusive imposition a symbolic status/value in the absence of sentient life. The results, however, are uncannily similar: the radical exposure of the body to the pure caprice of political power'.
'In the one case we have human life violently stripped of the cover of a symbolic status/value, in the other, the intrusive imposition a symbolic status/value in the absence of sentient life. The results, however, are uncannily similar: the radical exposure of the body to the pure caprice of political power'.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Foreign Food; or, 'not included in the present classification'
Occasionally, perhaps less so today, one encounters people who complain that they dislike ‘foreign food’, as though this were an actual cuisine with definable positive qualities. Or people refer to ‘weeds’ as if these had positive botanical properties, like mosses or shrubs.
The template for this usage can be found in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia*, wherein animals are classified in various mutually heterogeneous ways, one of which is ‘not included in the present classification’. It is as if ‘not included in the present classification’ names a certain contingent of the animal kingdom, analogous to ‘omnivorous bipeds’ or ‘marsupials’.
Language has this capacity to give ontological consistency to that which is merely an effect of our system of classification. Language lends to ‘weeds’ or ‘foreign food’ a bogus appearance of identity. Language congeals relations into ‘things.’ These can then be assigned predicates, like ‘foreign food is greasy’ or ‘Weeds are unattractive,’ which are, strictly speaking, meaningless and themselves ‘predicated’ upon a basic misrecognition.
Sometimes, though, this trick of language is harder to spot, since it springs not from a particular pseudo-category like ‘weeds’ but from the use of an already meaningful category. So, for example, there are certain people who defensively reach for the word 'post-modernism,' or sometimes ‘poststructuralism’ when they encounter a theoretical or philosophical language unfamiliar to them, an idiom irreducible to common sense.In these contexts, ‘post-modernism’ functions like ‘foreign food’, having no positive content and simply expressing the speaker's distance from, or negative relation to the thing in question. That which ‘is not included in the present classification’ (i.e., the recognisable canon of received usage), is lent an ontological consistency of its own, and the term ‘post-modern’ designates this.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that:
1. There’s a precise philosophical term (perhaps a few) for the phenomenon I’m talking about, and wondered if anyone could remind me of it.
2. The gist of the above post creates a number of elementary problems, not least is that some would say that all ‘ontological consistency’ is merely an effect of our (Symbolic) system of classification. If this is so, how to address the specificity of the phenomenon I’m referring to, if you believe it has specificity.
3. There are of course, many many political examples of such usages. Various forms of racism immediately spring to mind. Initially, the purpose of the post was to try and identify and comment on some of these, but I’ve run out of steam, partly ‘cos I’m getting hungry, so I invite suggestions and examples from the armies of scribes and commentators, all dwelling 'outside the familiar canon of recieved ideas', who I assume read this blog.
*Before anyone says 'owt, it turns out I misremembered the Borges quote, but am forced to use my version as the whole post rests on it.
The template for this usage can be found in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia*, wherein animals are classified in various mutually heterogeneous ways, one of which is ‘not included in the present classification’. It is as if ‘not included in the present classification’ names a certain contingent of the animal kingdom, analogous to ‘omnivorous bipeds’ or ‘marsupials’.
Language has this capacity to give ontological consistency to that which is merely an effect of our system of classification. Language lends to ‘weeds’ or ‘foreign food’ a bogus appearance of identity. Language congeals relations into ‘things.’ These can then be assigned predicates, like ‘foreign food is greasy’ or ‘Weeds are unattractive,’ which are, strictly speaking, meaningless and themselves ‘predicated’ upon a basic misrecognition.
Sometimes, though, this trick of language is harder to spot, since it springs not from a particular pseudo-category like ‘weeds’ but from the use of an already meaningful category. So, for example, there are certain people who defensively reach for the word 'post-modernism,' or sometimes ‘poststructuralism’ when they encounter a theoretical or philosophical language unfamiliar to them, an idiom irreducible to common sense.In these contexts, ‘post-modernism’ functions like ‘foreign food’, having no positive content and simply expressing the speaker's distance from, or negative relation to the thing in question. That which ‘is not included in the present classification’ (i.e., the recognisable canon of received usage), is lent an ontological consistency of its own, and the term ‘post-modern’ designates this.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that:
1. There’s a precise philosophical term (perhaps a few) for the phenomenon I’m talking about, and wondered if anyone could remind me of it.
2. The gist of the above post creates a number of elementary problems, not least is that some would say that all ‘ontological consistency’ is merely an effect of our (Symbolic) system of classification. If this is so, how to address the specificity of the phenomenon I’m referring to, if you believe it has specificity.
3. There are of course, many many political examples of such usages. Various forms of racism immediately spring to mind. Initially, the purpose of the post was to try and identify and comment on some of these, but I’ve run out of steam, partly ‘cos I’m getting hungry, so I invite suggestions and examples from the armies of scribes and commentators, all dwelling 'outside the familiar canon of recieved ideas', who I assume read this blog.
*Before anyone says 'owt, it turns out I misremembered the Borges quote, but am forced to use my version as the whole post rests on it.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Berger Talk
An intriguing and occasionally inspiring talk with John Berger earlier this evening, and one I would urge everyone to listen to. He was interviewed By Philip Dodd, who I once thought a vainglorious media goon, but who did ask some pertinent and searching questions (or questions that invited Berger to search). At one point he put to Berger the old Brechtian adage about starting with the bad new things rather than the good old things. Dodd suspected that Berger tarried with and loved the latter. 'The Europe you are drawn to is the good old Europe' prompted Dodd, to which Berger replied: "I suspect that you are a little right, although I would like to be with Brecht."
Berger spoke with inviting and eloquent precision of our provincialism not in space but in time, historically - this little province of history called the Present which we tend to imagine is the whole of space and time.
Berger's eloquence is of a certain sort. There is little connivance, embellishment, virtuoso's display. It is as if he is not so much trained on the language he is using, and trying to formulate 'memorable' and arresting phrases, but rather he is trained so intently on what he is thinking about that the words obey the call of this thinking.
He spoke of the influence (too dilute and familiar a word) of D.H. Lawrence; not at the level of literary 'technique,' for as Berger said: ' a writer can exercise profound influence on your imagination and your nerve without him necessarily exercising a stylistic influence.
Many have commented on the mixture in Berger of the mystic and the materialist. Dodd broached this issue. Berger mentioned Jacob Bohme, in whom a similar mystic materialism is discovered: 'In order to talk about metaphysics he uses material which is completely material and sensuous. Smell colour light.". The mystical adheres to and can only be found within the material. A lovely apercu, Berger talks about drawing a reindeer, and the drawer 'obeying the visible rhythm of the reindeer's dance'. This 'obedience' to the visual world, this attentive mimesis, and the conviction that in this quality of attention there dwells a Sense not to be found elsewhere, is perhaps at the root of the mystical-materialism to which Dodd refers.
This relates also to the ways in which Berger describes the process of his writing. There is a playing down of intentionality, and a stress on attentiveness and reception. Speaking of his new book, he says 'This fiction imposed itself upon me', elsewhere I have heard him speak of 'listening' to voices which solicit him, of receiving from the visible world the full weight of the Unsaid.
Today, literary style is often inseparable from self-advertising, and ends up as a knowing technique which processes and imprints everything which it comes into contact. In so far as 'style' is, or has become, a marketable signature (as it can be, I think, in writers like M.Amis), Berger is style-less and eschews style.
Berger recently had published in several European newspapers and at Open Democracy a short meditatitive piece on the poor.
The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls - walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.
It came up in the course of the interview that all the English newspapers to whom Berger had offered his article had refused it. "very beautifully written, but we can't find a place for it." In my head, I repsponded angrily: 'Yes - there is no place for this because critical thinking and anything not assimilable to the currency of the marketplace has left these shores. Anything not tailored to some perceived category of consumers or designed to promote a day's 'controversy' before being consigned to oblivion cannot be granted space. If a Hari is granted column space, but a Berger refused, all hope has left Albion. I must leave here as soon as possible.'
[To find out the relevance of the picture, you'll have to listen the the program]
Berger spoke with inviting and eloquent precision of our provincialism not in space but in time, historically - this little province of history called the Present which we tend to imagine is the whole of space and time.
Berger's eloquence is of a certain sort. There is little connivance, embellishment, virtuoso's display. It is as if he is not so much trained on the language he is using, and trying to formulate 'memorable' and arresting phrases, but rather he is trained so intently on what he is thinking about that the words obey the call of this thinking.
He spoke of the influence (too dilute and familiar a word) of D.H. Lawrence; not at the level of literary 'technique,' for as Berger said: ' a writer can exercise profound influence on your imagination and your nerve without him necessarily exercising a stylistic influence.
Many have commented on the mixture in Berger of the mystic and the materialist. Dodd broached this issue. Berger mentioned Jacob Bohme, in whom a similar mystic materialism is discovered: 'In order to talk about metaphysics he uses material which is completely material and sensuous. Smell colour light.". The mystical adheres to and can only be found within the material. A lovely apercu, Berger talks about drawing a reindeer, and the drawer 'obeying the visible rhythm of the reindeer's dance'. This 'obedience' to the visual world, this attentive mimesis, and the conviction that in this quality of attention there dwells a Sense not to be found elsewhere, is perhaps at the root of the mystical-materialism to which Dodd refers.
This relates also to the ways in which Berger describes the process of his writing. There is a playing down of intentionality, and a stress on attentiveness and reception. Speaking of his new book, he says 'This fiction imposed itself upon me', elsewhere I have heard him speak of 'listening' to voices which solicit him, of receiving from the visible world the full weight of the Unsaid.
Today, literary style is often inseparable from self-advertising, and ends up as a knowing technique which processes and imprints everything which it comes into contact. In so far as 'style' is, or has become, a marketable signature (as it can be, I think, in writers like M.Amis), Berger is style-less and eschews style.
Berger recently had published in several European newspapers and at Open Democracy a short meditatitive piece on the poor.
The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls - walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.
It came up in the course of the interview that all the English newspapers to whom Berger had offered his article had refused it. "very beautifully written, but we can't find a place for it." In my head, I repsponded angrily: 'Yes - there is no place for this because critical thinking and anything not assimilable to the currency of the marketplace has left these shores. Anything not tailored to some perceived category of consumers or designed to promote a day's 'controversy' before being consigned to oblivion cannot be granted space. If a Hari is granted column space, but a Berger refused, all hope has left Albion. I must leave here as soon as possible.'
[To find out the relevance of the picture, you'll have to listen the the program]
On Overidentification
First, I suggest you read this (and comments) and these comments. Most of what I would want to say are contained therein, and what follows are just some addenda.
'Overidentification' is a kind of 'utra-orthodoxy', taking a regime more seriously that it takes itself, relentlessly implementing the letter of its Law, unconditionally following its avowed beliefs, in a way that is radically embarrassing to the regime. This of course entails the idea that the ruling ideology doesn't take itself seriously. But if the ruling ideology doesn't 'take itself seriously', then how exactly does it operate?
Here are a few thoughts:
Firstly, Zizek is arguing against the commonplace that ironic distance toward an ideology is subversive. In fact, Ideological apparatuses rely on this 'ironic distance' to function, it is the very guarantee of their success.
[1] 'Ironic distance' functions to unify the group around the object of their irony. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or company will recognize this: all, equally, make jokes - of cynical commentary, stoic acquiescence - about the company, it's rules and personnel. It's as though a 'collective subject' is thereby produced; and for all its cynical detachment, this 'collective subject' is parasitic upon the company and an effect (and support) of its organization. Needless to say, the bosses frequently 'buy into' this collective irony to get what they want.
One could take any organization, political, religious or whatever. The participants do not take the official ideology seriously, are ironically detached etc, and in this common ironic distantiation, are unified into a collectivity. Of course, on one reading, it is this very unification which is the function of the ideology. Ideology works at a level 'beneath' - and more subtle than - that of adherence to belief. The 'letter' of the ideological text is beside the point, it is the dummy sold to the adherents, who, in refusing the letter (through irony) collectively enter the Spirit of the regime. The 'fanatics', on the other hand, represent the subversion of the spirit by the letter: poker-faced attention to and enactment of the ideological letter runs counter to the geist of the ideological regime, and embarrasses it by demonstrating that it is Other than it claims to be.
[2] The second point is that the Orders will be implemented more effectively if one does not fully identify with them: 'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine. And the name for this trick of delegation is irony.
(These thoughts were in part inspired by an example I wrote about previously, and one which, while not exactly identical to what I've just been talking about, nevertheless can be used to illustrate a point. Some time ago, while casually refuting a middle-brow polemicist, I commented on the recently publicised Nixon-Kissinger exchanges. It's noted that Kissinger adopts a 'sardonic tone' when talking to his underlings about the President. I speculated as to this 'tone':
'[1] A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he's really with them- an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. [2] Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in 'Look, I'm just obeying these crazy orders, they're not mine.' I'm just an instrument.'
'Overidentification' is a kind of 'utra-orthodoxy', taking a regime more seriously that it takes itself, relentlessly implementing the letter of its Law, unconditionally following its avowed beliefs, in a way that is radically embarrassing to the regime. This of course entails the idea that the ruling ideology doesn't take itself seriously. But if the ruling ideology doesn't 'take itself seriously', then how exactly does it operate?
Here are a few thoughts:
Firstly, Zizek is arguing against the commonplace that ironic distance toward an ideology is subversive. In fact, Ideological apparatuses rely on this 'ironic distance' to function, it is the very guarantee of their success.
[1] 'Ironic distance' functions to unify the group around the object of their irony. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation or company will recognize this: all, equally, make jokes - of cynical commentary, stoic acquiescence - about the company, it's rules and personnel. It's as though a 'collective subject' is thereby produced; and for all its cynical detachment, this 'collective subject' is parasitic upon the company and an effect (and support) of its organization. Needless to say, the bosses frequently 'buy into' this collective irony to get what they want.
One could take any organization, political, religious or whatever. The participants do not take the official ideology seriously, are ironically detached etc, and in this common ironic distantiation, are unified into a collectivity. Of course, on one reading, it is this very unification which is the function of the ideology. Ideology works at a level 'beneath' - and more subtle than - that of adherence to belief. The 'letter' of the ideological text is beside the point, it is the dummy sold to the adherents, who, in refusing the letter (through irony) collectively enter the Spirit of the regime. The 'fanatics', on the other hand, represent the subversion of the spirit by the letter: poker-faced attention to and enactment of the ideological letter runs counter to the geist of the ideological regime, and embarrasses it by demonstrating that it is Other than it claims to be.
[2] The second point is that the Orders will be implemented more effectively if one does not fully identify with them: 'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine. And the name for this trick of delegation is irony.
(These thoughts were in part inspired by an example I wrote about previously, and one which, while not exactly identical to what I've just been talking about, nevertheless can be used to illustrate a point. Some time ago, while casually refuting a middle-brow polemicist, I commented on the recently publicised Nixon-Kissinger exchanges. It's noted that Kissinger adopts a 'sardonic tone' when talking to his underlings about the President. I speculated as to this 'tone':
'[1] A way, perhaps, of strategically distancing himself from the President in order to win over the underlings, pretend he's really with them- an utterly familiar little trick, used by bosses up and down the country. [2] Or do the sardonic noises serve simply to let Kissinger off the hook, as in 'Look, I'm just obeying these crazy orders, they're not mine.' I'm just an instrument.'
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Unable to Identify..
Following a post at I Cite, I've been giving some thought to the notion of 'overidentification'. Jodi has provided a wonderfully lucid definition of this concept in her comments. I hope to post something considered on this soon. I have the sense, for now, that 'identification' itself is a kind of impossible point or optical illusion, in the sense that we seem to have only incomplete identification or over-identification: as we approach full identification, this suddenly flips over into overidentification. Identification - as some median point - constitutively eludes us in our very attempt to approach it. It is a spectre floating in front of us or a mirage glimped in arrears. And is this not because we identify with that which is non-identical with itself? Anyway, none of this doubtless makes any sense at this stage. So, for the moment, here's something I found by Zizek on overidentification, using the usual pop-culture egs:
MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte.
The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'
MASH and An Officer exhibit the two versions of the perfectly functioning military subject: identification with the military machine is supported either by ironic distrust, indulgence in practical jokes and sexual escapades (MASH), or by the awareness that behind the cmel drill-sergeant there is a 'warm human person', a helping father-substitute who only feigns cruelty (in An Officer and a Gentleman), in strict analogy with the - profoundly anti-feminist - myth of a hooker who, deep in her heart, longs to be a good mother. Full Metal Jacket, on the other hand, successfully resists this ideological temptation to 'humanize' the drill sergeant or other members of the crew, and thus lays on the table the cards of the military ideological machine: the distance from it, far from signalling the limitation of the ideological machine, functions as its positive condition of possibility. What we get in the first part of the film is the military drill, the direct bodily discipline, saturated with the unique blend of a humiliating display of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing 'Happy birthday dear Jesus . . .') - in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. This part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, 'runs amok' and shoots first the drill sergeant, then himself; the radical, unmediated identification with the phantasmic superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l'acte.
The second, main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew Modine) who, throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic 'human distance' towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription 'Born to kill' is accompanied by the peace sign, etc. - in short, it looks as if he has stepped right out of MASH!), shoots a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded; he is the fully constituted military subject. The lesson is therefore clear: an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: 'not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'
Friday, March 25, 2005
A Note on 'Notes' & the Turkey ruse.
Notes On Rhetoric now has its own site here. There will be occasional updates. Many appear to be still as serviceable as ever, in particular this one:
Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)
A nice example of this at the Tomb.
The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.
At worst, the 'Turkey' tactic can also short-circuit moral universality - the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with 'but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..'; patient criticisms of the 'democratic deficit' in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.
Turkey - If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)
A nice example of this at the Tomb.
The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.
At worst, the 'Turkey' tactic can also short-circuit moral universality - the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with 'but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..'; patient criticisms of the 'democratic deficit' in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.
Orwellian ironies
It's well known that the US was condemned by the World Court for aiding and abetting a terrorist war in Nicaragua. How grimly ironic then, to read this:
'Early in 2004, Dora Maria Tellez, a heroine of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution and now a professor of history, applied for a visa to study in the US in preparation to teach at one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions, Harvard University's Divinity School.
In January she was told by the US consul in Nicaragua that, under new provisions of the US immigration rules, her request for a visa had been denied. Only later did she discover that the provisions concerned people connected with terrorism.'
So, someone who suffered under a terrorist campaign directed against her country is barred from speaking on account of being a 'terrorist'. At the same time, the man involved in directing the terrorist campaign against her country is appointed 'intelligence chief' in the country from which she is barred.
'Early in 2004, Dora Maria Tellez, a heroine of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution and now a professor of history, applied for a visa to study in the US in preparation to teach at one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions, Harvard University's Divinity School.
In January she was told by the US consul in Nicaragua that, under new provisions of the US immigration rules, her request for a visa had been denied. Only later did she discover that the provisions concerned people connected with terrorism.'
So, someone who suffered under a terrorist campaign directed against her country is barred from speaking on account of being a 'terrorist'. At the same time, the man involved in directing the terrorist campaign against her country is appointed 'intelligence chief' in the country from which she is barred.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Note on Steiner
For some reason today I picked up a tattered copy of George Steiner's Death of Tragedy. It opens with 'We are entering on large, difficult ground'. This opening illustrates what I would call the gestural component of writing. I.e., Statements, as well as their ostensible meaning, are significant for the gestures they perform, gestures of disavowal, repudiation, self-dramatization etc. Let us take Steiner's line as an example. Of course, it has a literal meaning and can be interpreted as a bare statement of what is the case. But there is also the gestural component: it is, firstly, a gesture of 'humbling', the narrator is dramatized as a wrestler with the imponderable. It is a gesture of invitation: some modern day Virgil is offering to guide us through a hellish terrain. There is an implicit challenge: 'are you with me?' 'can you stay the course?'. This is not a book for passengers. It is a gesture of warning and a demand for readerly commitment and solidarity. There will be no easy answers, no short cuts. But of course, reader, we neither expect nor want any. We are courageous as well as suitably meek, and can look at things unflinchingly. Thus, over and above any prepositional content, the statement invites, warns, and positions both the writer and reader.
One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.
The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.
One of the tasks of the literary critic is to isolate and describe the gestures that are charactersitic of a writer's work. Having identified the gesture, the second task is to interpret it, not simply psychologically, but historically - weighted with historical freight.
The other point (all this spilling out of that one Steiner sentence!) is that, of course, as a reader we are frequently responding to, answering the gestures of the writing as much as its bare content. We respond to Steiner's prose because of how it interpellates us, positions us, because we like the image of ourselves involved in answering the call of his characteristic gestures. The prose, through its gestures, produces, in its reader the weak simulacra of a form of subjectivity which that reader finds appealling. I certainly think this is part of Steiner's appeal - I speak as one greatly drawn by his prose as an adolescent, being beckoned, so it seemed into a that terrain which he alludes with minatory solemnity at the beginning of the Death of Tragedy.
Be Evil!
Some time ago 'Lenin' made the following speculation about Fascism - 'the fascist regime says "You May!" - you may oppress, vilify, rob, abuse etc. In this way, the supporters of fascism are libidinally bound to its order.' I drew his attention to a remark of Genet's about a sojourn in Nazi Germany. At the time I couldn't remember the source, but have now found it (the beautiful Thief's Journal), so here it is:
"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.
'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."
Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:
'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'
"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.
'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."
Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:
'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'
Note on Blanchot & modern poetry
Blanchot:
'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.
Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.
The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:
'This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'
Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.
Blanchot quotes Valery thus:
'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."
A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.
But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'
In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.
cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.
'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.
Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.
The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:
'This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'
Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.
Blanchot quotes Valery thus:
'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."
A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.
But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'
In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.
cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Intellectual on the Carpet
Courtesy of Glueboot:
"Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say....? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language that is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear", to "put your cards on the table." Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us- in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry- that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we will do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language." (H. Marcuse)
Indeed. And not just analytic philosophy either.
"Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say....? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language that is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man on the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear", to "put your cards on the table." Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us- in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry- that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we will do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language." (H. Marcuse)
Indeed. And not just analytic philosophy either.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Lifers
"You see that you don't love them," says Roquentin. "You wouldn't recognize them in the street. They're only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.
In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.
There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.
[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]
In Sartre's Nausea there is famous attack on the Humanist. He is, says Roquentin, interested in people only as illustrations of an abstraction called 'The Human, ' he feels pity, concern etc for them only via his concern for this bloodless generality. In its negation of actual humans, Humanism is anti-humanism. I was reminded of this by the rhetoric of some 'pro-Life' campaigners, and by a genuinely unpleasant article on 'the Terri Schiavo case' linked to by Jodi Dean. The author states: '"There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live." This is false. They don't care about whether Terri Schiavo lives, i.e., about this individual in her particularity - about which they know nothing. Their object of concern (if we are being generous) is that someone is in this situation, and they would campaign regardless of who it was. The particular and individual life is inessential to their point, which concerns Life in the abstract. Terri Schiavo counts as an illustration of this abstraction, as a convenient embodiment of Life. And it is precisely because she has, sadly, been emptied of her particular qualities that she can stand for this abstraction. 'Life' swims into view when actual, particular and individual life is absent - the person in a coma, the unborn. Only when it is no longer ensnared in the world, only when it is life-less, does Life become precious - Life beyond the original sin of actually living.
There is, then, a notable contrast between the abstraction which is necessarily the object of the pro-Lifers' solicitations, and the casual familiarity with they refer to 'Terri', discarding even the formality of the surname, as if she were a long lost member of the family; or as if (see comments) they 'are Terri's personally chosen spokespeople.' Indeed, this fantasy of intimacy is particularly ugly - the self-delusion of pretending merely to be ventriloquising the wishes of someone else; the indignity, for that someone, of having substituted, for her lost personhood, the cloying fantasies of some deluded ideologues.
[The above is a slightly modified version of the original post.]
Monday, March 21, 2005
Caravaggio
There is currently a lovely Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London. While looking into it, I came across Berger's essay about the painter online. It begins:
Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.
I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.
But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:
'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.
The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.
Once I was asked to name my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer.
I wonder, though, whether searching for the least knowing answer isn't itself a kind of knowingness. The very process of selecting a non-knowing response sounds close to a rhetorical ploy, as if one is going for the effect of naivety; as if one wants to appear boldly innocent of the socially defined canon.
But maybe not. Maybe he's onto something about the spontaneous/ 'knowing' distinction. Look, in the above passage the knowing answer presumably comes first. It's as if the 'naive, spontaneous' response has to be won through reflection, while the thought-at-the-front-of-our-mind, ready to pick, is, by contrast, already contaminated with social knowledge and/ or calculation. What's ready to hand is not the very pulse of intuition but a hardened and socially-astute response. Reflection does not dilute the spontaneous / 'least knowing' part of ourselves, it breaks through to finally access it. Well, what Berger accesses is this:
'Caravaggio'. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems - for the answer came unpremeditated - to whom I feel closer.
The few canvases from my own incomparably modest life as a painter, which I would like to see again, are those I painted in the late 40s of the streets of Livorno. This city was then war-scarred and poor, and it was there that I first began to learn something about the ingenuity of the dispossessed. It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a life-long aversion.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Note on Zizek
A lengthy debate here on Slavoj Zizek. The ostensible occasion for this debate was that someone had chosen to isolate a random piece of Zizek's prose as an example of 'question begging'. The passage came from Zizek's LRB article (see below). Now, my first thought was, of course a short article like this will beg (and provoke) questions, so what? Certainly the piece doesn't involve 'question begging' in the strict logical sense ("A democracy is where a democratic process of decision making etc"). But perhaps the obvious point is that 'question begging' is typically not a direct property of a text or speech but a function of the relation between speaker/ audience or text/ reader. So, at university, we had a lecturer who was keen to draw attention to how certain texts were 'true to human nature'. Now for us, with our newly worked through theoretical approach, this presupposed precisely what we were 'interrogating' (as we liked to say). But plug this same lecturer into a different context, Cambridge in the 1930's, the begged questions obediently disappear, and lecture glides effortlessly into the audiences' set of preoccupations. Similarly, unplug a liberal lecture from its intended audience and its suddenly shot through with outrageous and inexplicable assumptions that take for granted what its audience has long since debunked, discarded or at least started to unpick.
It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.
But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.
c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]
It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.
But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.
c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Literature: Escape & Critique
J. Derbyshire draws our attention to his review of John Berger's new book.He has a nice phrase for Berger's signature clarity: 'Berger’s prose is a stealthy miracle of precision. His painterly eye for sensuous particularity has often been remarked on and it is on frequently thrilling display here: the “right” temperature for greengages is said to be the “temperature of a small boy’s fist”'
Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?
To quote an earlier post:
[In the epic world] a distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)
Now, an obvious question about that last sentence: why would it be unacceptable, and deemed bad literature, if Berger had simply given a celsius figure. From one point of view this would be 'more exact', for there is no matching the laser precision of science, so why is the 'small boy's fist' to be preferred? Is it not because (much) literature is the remembrance and dream of an 'epic' world, the world that precedes and has not yet 'emptied out' into abstract measure, where things are knit together by resemblance and analogy. And this knitting together recognises the haeccity of concrete and particular things, a recognition lost to our world - ?
To quote an earlier post:
[In the epic world] a distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
Literature clings to the concrete integrity of that earlier world. In offering this explanation I seem to be in agreement with a point made by a commenter to my soap opera post, who writes of 'the escapist comfort afforded by literary art in general'. I would add, repeating myself, that this 'escape' is a determinate escape, i.e., a reflection of what it 'escapes' and a revelation of what is lacking therein. It is, at the same time, anodyne consolation and potent revolutionary nostalgia (cf Adorno's 'Baby With the Bath Water' in Minima Moralia)
Friday, March 18, 2005
Atopos
For some reason this blog is the no.1 google citation for 'Ranciere'*. Odd. Anyway, am currently reading an interesting little book by Ranciere wherein he discusses Rossellini's Europe 51. I'd like to post something about this book and the 'Socratic' notion of 'atopos' - this concept surely underlies R's recognition of the symbolic place of the poor in philosophical discourse. Meanwhile, here is a useful essay on JR, from which this useful summary of Ranciere's Politics:
Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.
* 17/01/06 Not any more.
Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.
* 17/01/06 Not any more.
No surprise
"No matter how I imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens! The realization brings with it an unforeseeable nothing which changes everything."
Bergson, The Possible and the Real
Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.
n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant
Bergson, The Possible and the Real
Scragg, a small animated aquaintance who was once mistaken for a marmoset by a child in the street, reports on her recent visit to New York - 'It was exactly as I imagined it, exactly.' 'Oh, come on', I replied, 'nothing is exactly like you imagine it, not even the next room, isn't this the very mark of reality, that it always exceeds our imaginings?" "No", she insisted, obviously not having read Bergson, "I'm telling you it was just the same as the image I had of it". I wasn't prepared to grant this at all."The only way it could have been exactly as you imagined it, I retorted, was if you'd imagined that it would exceed your image of it", at which point she disappeared in a puff of logic.
n.b. Some excellent reflections on this post at new blog Fort Kant
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Bureaucracy ii: Objective mirage
[see previous post]
Adorno:
'.. the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down, and illuminating his face in such a way as to divide it pitilessly into bright utilizable parts and dark, disreputable areas of incompetence.'
But the light that so illuminates the candidate does not emanate from the manager. It is the Company's light, and the manager simply refracts it. He speaks with a voice, and looks with an eye trained by the the Company (no, not by training videos, but the very structure if the institution). His small talk, enquiries after your health and so on are all subordinate to testing your useability, suitability, adaptability etc. Thus, the designs of the company empty both the manager and language itelf into the merest instruments.
This is how bureacracy works. People represent and speak on behalf of The Company, but 'the company' is not localised in any individual, not even, or especially, the managing director. It is a kind of objective mirage, or working fiction. Because this objective mirage is never localised in an individual, it is always 'elsewhere,' deferred, absent.
For some revealing 'insider' reflections on bureaucracy, see State Street.
Adorno:
'.. the appraising look of the manager asking an interview candidate to sit down, and illuminating his face in such a way as to divide it pitilessly into bright utilizable parts and dark, disreputable areas of incompetence.'
But the light that so illuminates the candidate does not emanate from the manager. It is the Company's light, and the manager simply refracts it. He speaks with a voice, and looks with an eye trained by the the Company (no, not by training videos, but the very structure if the institution). His small talk, enquiries after your health and so on are all subordinate to testing your useability, suitability, adaptability etc. Thus, the designs of the company empty both the manager and language itelf into the merest instruments.
This is how bureacracy works. People represent and speak on behalf of The Company, but 'the company' is not localised in any individual, not even, or especially, the managing director. It is a kind of objective mirage, or working fiction. Because this objective mirage is never localised in an individual, it is always 'elsewhere,' deferred, absent.
For some revealing 'insider' reflections on bureaucracy, see State Street.
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