This is perhaps merely a footnote to some of my previous notes on the uncanny etc. I suggested (Plastic Things) that there seemed to be a 'Modern' uncanny object – those old Victorian dolls and puppets, who might be jerked into life by an alien (human) hand, or moved by the tinny melody of a music box, before returning to their crumpled, forlorn state in the corner of the room, irradiating a peculiar melancholy silence. By contrast, we have the ‘Koonsian’ plastic beings of post-modernity, benign and unaware of the humanity they lack, unperturbed by the poverty and muteness of their world.
Is there something analogous, or weakly related, in musical terms? There is a famous passage in Proust, where the violin is described as, basically, a little wooden box with a genie inside*. The genie is released by the violin player, and the sonorous notes of the instrument are somehow like the plaintive striving towards speech of this genie. This is part of the violin’s appeal - it is eerily reminiscent of the human voice, the pure voice uncoupled from content, searching out but never discovering that content. It both exceeds the eloquence of speech and fails to attain it.
One of my impressions when listening to Jazz (specifically old, Dixieland-style jazz), esp. the trumpet, is of a trapped voice trying to get out. It’s on the verge of speech, but – comically – never quite makes it. We have a drunken, jolly, swaggering anticipation of a voice which never itself appears. And the various instruments frequently seem to reply to oneanother, a crazy melodious bar room banter.
In such cases, then, there is a kind of implicit speech, a voice trapped in a foreign medium, but all the more expressive for this. The eloquence is that of melancholy, albeit a comic melancholy in the case of Jazz.
Now isn’t it a defining trait of modern synthetic music that it does not have this quality? It can simulate for sure, but it is not given in the instrument itself. The synthesizer is the appropriate accompaniment to those plastic Koonsian dolls who have forgotten what they lack. Such music has nothing to say about the eloquence of the unsaid.Because it is not lacking anything its ‘fullness’ is completely empty*.
[*Have now found the passage, which reads:
‘at times, too, one thinks one is listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness of the sapient, quivering and enchanted box.’]
As one commenter points out (below), this emptiness can indeed have its own unearthly/ chilling beauty - but it is of a different order than that of the searching note of the violin.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Act/ Art
There is an aphorism from Adorno that ‘every work of art is an uncommitted crime.’
cf this from Zizek:
‘From the perspective of the existing positive laws of a symbolic community, an act appears by definition as a crime.’
Also: ‘A work of art creates the taste by which it is to be consumed’ cf ‘an act.. defines its own conditions, retroactively produces the grounds which justify it.’
The question arises of the relation between Act and Art and of the resemblance between the two.
The work of art, like the act, confronts its author as something alien, object-like. It seems to have exceeded any intention, and redefines (claims a kind of ownership over) its author, rather than the author being able simply to claim it. The writer (or whatever) can never entirely ‘assume’ his/her work, for the work operates according to a logic that has finally escaped him/her.. Kafka writes 'The Judgement' in a single night. It is if he were able to key in to the logic of the story which then carried him, depositing him the following morning, tired and bewildered.
Sometimes a writer will live in the shadow of a great work, be unable to live down, or live up to it. Somehow his freedom and identity has been confiscated by that of which he was nominally the author.
Indeed, it is a commonplace, but many writers (see Kafka's visit to Dr Steiner) report on writing as an experience in which the ‘I’ is almost incidental. Doesn’t Rilke speak of receiving the ‘enigmatic dictation’ of the Duino Elegies. Beckett pictures himself as a 'clerk or scribe'. The writer is taken over, compelled, etc, and yet it is not quite he/ she who is doing the compelling. The writer is ‘de-subjectified’ by his work. The art work has an impetus of its ‘own’ and has made me its object; it calls me to work on it. As with the act, the (Imaginary) ‘I’ is not able to entirely ‘assume responsibility’ for what has arisen – daemons or supernatural instructors are invoked to paper over the gap.
The Act, we are told, transforms it bearer. What does the artwork transform? Is its 'bearer' the author or, somehow, the history of art within which it intervenes? Like the act, it demands new criteria of evaluation, but has also simultaneously given birth to those criteria/ created them through sheer declarative fiat.
So what is the relation here (if any) between the art work and the Act. Is the art work like the ghostly adumbration of the act, does it delineate the shape of the act? Or can it be, in fact, an Act? Or are we merely dealing with a forced analogy here?
cf this from Zizek:
‘From the perspective of the existing positive laws of a symbolic community, an act appears by definition as a crime.’
Also: ‘A work of art creates the taste by which it is to be consumed’ cf ‘an act.. defines its own conditions, retroactively produces the grounds which justify it.’
The question arises of the relation between Act and Art and of the resemblance between the two.
The work of art, like the act, confronts its author as something alien, object-like. It seems to have exceeded any intention, and redefines (claims a kind of ownership over) its author, rather than the author being able simply to claim it. The writer (or whatever) can never entirely ‘assume’ his/her work, for the work operates according to a logic that has finally escaped him/her.. Kafka writes 'The Judgement' in a single night. It is if he were able to key in to the logic of the story which then carried him, depositing him the following morning, tired and bewildered.
Sometimes a writer will live in the shadow of a great work, be unable to live down, or live up to it. Somehow his freedom and identity has been confiscated by that of which he was nominally the author.
Indeed, it is a commonplace, but many writers (see Kafka's visit to Dr Steiner) report on writing as an experience in which the ‘I’ is almost incidental. Doesn’t Rilke speak of receiving the ‘enigmatic dictation’ of the Duino Elegies. Beckett pictures himself as a 'clerk or scribe'. The writer is taken over, compelled, etc, and yet it is not quite he/ she who is doing the compelling. The writer is ‘de-subjectified’ by his work. The art work has an impetus of its ‘own’ and has made me its object; it calls me to work on it. As with the act, the (Imaginary) ‘I’ is not able to entirely ‘assume responsibility’ for what has arisen – daemons or supernatural instructors are invoked to paper over the gap.
The Act, we are told, transforms it bearer. What does the artwork transform? Is its 'bearer' the author or, somehow, the history of art within which it intervenes? Like the act, it demands new criteria of evaluation, but has also simultaneously given birth to those criteria/ created them through sheer declarative fiat.
So what is the relation here (if any) between the art work and the Act. Is the art work like the ghostly adumbration of the act, does it delineate the shape of the act? Or can it be, in fact, an Act? Or are we merely dealing with a forced analogy here?
Metaphor to the Rescue
Yeats invents a rich caste of conceptual and fabular personae. Yeats scholars are of course familiar with such ‘notions’ as the ‘gyres’, even as it is unlikely that a single of those scholars believes in these as historical realities or invests faith in their explanatory value. Yet their 'aesthetic appeal' is attested to. Thus, the gyres are not treated seriously as concepts but appreciated as fictions. A number of questions arise, the most obvious perhaps being which of these attitudes – belief or aesthetic utility – approaches Yeats’ own position. How far did he himself subordinate belief to fictional appeal. The second concerns the heuristic status of metaphor. How is it that we are able to ‘rescue’ as metaphors what are remaindered and vacuous in purely conceptual or propositional terms.
We say: as a ‘belief’ this is obviously ‘silly’ and without foundation; as a metaphor, however,, it is poetically and affectively productive. But what objects should come within the remit of this rescue strategy? Is the séance to be redeemed metaphorically? Fairies? The ‘deeps of mind’? reincarnation? And were these things always for Yeats only ‘metaphors for poetry' - this last been Yeats's phrase for what his Supernatural Instructors gave him.
(The latter (famous) phrase, or ‘get out clause’ depending on one’s point of view, is in any case ambivalent. Did Yeats mean that the instructors gave him metaphors which he was able to use in his poetry, or that they gave him a metaphoric representation of poetry itself as a process, a making. )
In a sense, what we are saying here is that the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels corresponds to the cognitive and affective levels or dimensions of a belief or practice. Thus, whereas the said belief or practice entails propositional content which now seems risible, we assert that its appeal was not at all on this purely cognitive level (i.e., it appealed because of its rigorous…) but rather for its affective charge and cathartic or dramatic power. And whereas the belief-as-belief is the obvious object-choice for the condescension of posterity, it is in reality a decoy or straw man, since people hardly embrace beliefs simply through disinterested cogitation.
‘Belief’ judged purely as belief is, from this point of view, merely the detritus left by history, the empty skeleton of a ‘habitus’, an ‘illusio’, a form of life.. the inessential husk of what had its raison d’être elsewhere… it would therefore be ‘category error’ for the historian to take such beliefs ‘in-themselves’.
To understand, for example, Yeats's attraction to the back-room theatrics of the seance, involves a minimal generosity towards its metaphoric content, and a bracketing off of its propositional truth content.
We say: as a ‘belief’ this is obviously ‘silly’ and without foundation; as a metaphor, however,, it is poetically and affectively productive. But what objects should come within the remit of this rescue strategy? Is the séance to be redeemed metaphorically? Fairies? The ‘deeps of mind’? reincarnation? And were these things always for Yeats only ‘metaphors for poetry' - this last been Yeats's phrase for what his Supernatural Instructors gave him.
(The latter (famous) phrase, or ‘get out clause’ depending on one’s point of view, is in any case ambivalent. Did Yeats mean that the instructors gave him metaphors which he was able to use in his poetry, or that they gave him a metaphoric representation of poetry itself as a process, a making. )
In a sense, what we are saying here is that the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels corresponds to the cognitive and affective levels or dimensions of a belief or practice. Thus, whereas the said belief or practice entails propositional content which now seems risible, we assert that its appeal was not at all on this purely cognitive level (i.e., it appealed because of its rigorous…) but rather for its affective charge and cathartic or dramatic power. And whereas the belief-as-belief is the obvious object-choice for the condescension of posterity, it is in reality a decoy or straw man, since people hardly embrace beliefs simply through disinterested cogitation.
‘Belief’ judged purely as belief is, from this point of view, merely the detritus left by history, the empty skeleton of a ‘habitus’, an ‘illusio’, a form of life.. the inessential husk of what had its raison d’être elsewhere… it would therefore be ‘category error’ for the historian to take such beliefs ‘in-themselves’.
To understand, for example, Yeats's attraction to the back-room theatrics of the seance, involves a minimal generosity towards its metaphoric content, and a bracketing off of its propositional truth content.
A Note on Method and Representation
In particular, it should not be forgotten that the division into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology and clinical medicine does not exist in nature
The elementary point here being that: The categories of the understanding are never simply ‘given’ in the object understood. Indeed..
It is the scandalous power of the understanding to sunder (and thus render intelligible) what had been whole and entire.
The categories of the understanding thus require laborious construction. The structure of, the relations between these categories may be radically at variance with the contours of what is understood.
Thus, understanding first quarters and ‘destroys’ (‘murders’) the thing in order to divulge its meaning which then stands separate and complete like the rewards of plunder.
mmm??
The elementary point here being that: The categories of the understanding are never simply ‘given’ in the object understood. Indeed..
It is the scandalous power of the understanding to sunder (and thus render intelligible) what had been whole and entire.
The categories of the understanding thus require laborious construction. The structure of, the relations between these categories may be radically at variance with the contours of what is understood.
Thus, understanding first quarters and ‘destroys’ (‘murders’) the thing in order to divulge its meaning which then stands separate and complete like the rewards of plunder.
mmm??
'My Visit to Dr Steiner'
'My happiness, my abilities, and any possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) which in my opinion correspond to the clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor, in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.'
FK, 1911
FK, 1911
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Act
What is an act?
This question has arisen from previous posts on Hamlet. But we are not speaking of act in the theatrical sense. Rather, a Lacanian definition is sought (as filtered through Slav. again).
An elementary definition is proffered in Ethics of the Real:
“The act differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after the act I am simply not the same as before.”
A second occurs in Plague of Fantasies:
‘The act occurs as a ‘crazy’, unaccountable event which, precisely, is not willed. The subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to and repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed into it, the subject can never fully ‘assume’ the act. In short, what Lacan calls ‘act’ has the precise status of an object, which the subject can never swallow, subjectivise – which forever remains a foreign body […] The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.’
One does not recognise oneself in the act. ‘I cannot believe I just did that.' Thus, one’s Imaginary identity is shattered. Or one asks, legitimately, ‘Who is the ‘I’ responsible for what just happened?’ If it is not the Imaginary I, is it not in some sense the Subject itself that flashes into view here – the pure freedom of the subject? Or is it that a new subject is born through the act.
Is the Act something like an Event on the level of the individual? Henceforth, things cannot be the same again, there is no way back. Your previous history has now to be rethought from the point of view of the act. The act enlarges the concept that the individual had of his/ her self. The new concept cannot be dismissed, nor can it be quite faced or metabolised. Any attempt to face or metabolise it comes from within the old self. Thus it can only be faced or metabolised from a point of view appropriate to and created by the act itself.
So, when Zizek says the Act is an Object, this can be understood to mean it confronts us as something foreign, as not owned by/ belonging to the Subject. It is experienced as traumatic, as ‘too much’ to deal with. One cannot say of the act ‘this is mine.’
One wonders what the attraction of the Act is exactly. Is it not somehow this ‘more than’? That is to say: The act is always ‘more than’ our intention to do it. The potential to act is like a vortex, like the proverbial heady desire to jump from the cliff edge. But whereas one’s attraction to the act, one’s fatal curiosity, is always fraught and contradictory, the act itself knows no ambivalence. It introduces a line of demarcation which cannot be re-crossed. The act represents a kind of judgement or fatal exposure.
The act, like Badiou’s event, is incalculable. I do not know whether you can anticipate an Act, but there is a poem by Patrick Pearse which might illustrate some of this:
Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost…
Pearse writes this poem shortly before his involvement in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. From every available point of view, in terms of calculable returns, what Pearse would go on to do was ‘folly’. (And it is folly partly because, precisely, its returns were not calculable). Pearse makes a wager, and an admission that what he is about to do will outrun any predictable framework. There are no existing criteria that he can appeal to in justification of his act. The act is thus perhaps a pure negative: it is the desire to blow open a hole in the existing framework, to transform the framework, but absolutely without any guarantees. Of course, if there were guarantees, then the act would be within the framework.
To accept this radical openness, this risk, this surrender to the incalculable is, I think, what is meant by the Lacanian phrase ‘to pass the act’. To ‘pass the act’ is to accept an empty desire: empty because it commits one the new, but not to any specific meaning. I am to set in motion a concatenation of events whose end or significance I can in no way envisage. And I am attracted to the act (as well as repelled by it) exactly on that account.
There is a line from Kafka that might be relevant here:
'From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. '
Anyway, comments and emendations most welcome, including examples of what you might consider an Act.
This question has arisen from previous posts on Hamlet. But we are not speaking of act in the theatrical sense. Rather, a Lacanian definition is sought (as filtered through Slav. again).
An elementary definition is proffered in Ethics of the Real:
“The act differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I ‘accomplish’ – after the act I am simply not the same as before.”
A second occurs in Plague of Fantasies:
‘The act occurs as a ‘crazy’, unaccountable event which, precisely, is not willed. The subject’s will is, by definition, split with regard to an act: since attraction to and repulsion against the act are inextricably mixed into it, the subject can never fully ‘assume’ the act. In short, what Lacan calls ‘act’ has the precise status of an object, which the subject can never swallow, subjectivise – which forever remains a foreign body […] The standard subject’s reaction to the act is that of aphanisis, of his/her self-obliteration, not of heroically assuming it: when awareness of the full consequences of ‘what I have just done’ hits me, I want to disappear.’
One does not recognise oneself in the act. ‘I cannot believe I just did that.' Thus, one’s Imaginary identity is shattered. Or one asks, legitimately, ‘Who is the ‘I’ responsible for what just happened?’ If it is not the Imaginary I, is it not in some sense the Subject itself that flashes into view here – the pure freedom of the subject? Or is it that a new subject is born through the act.
Is the Act something like an Event on the level of the individual? Henceforth, things cannot be the same again, there is no way back. Your previous history has now to be rethought from the point of view of the act. The act enlarges the concept that the individual had of his/ her self. The new concept cannot be dismissed, nor can it be quite faced or metabolised. Any attempt to face or metabolise it comes from within the old self. Thus it can only be faced or metabolised from a point of view appropriate to and created by the act itself.
So, when Zizek says the Act is an Object, this can be understood to mean it confronts us as something foreign, as not owned by/ belonging to the Subject. It is experienced as traumatic, as ‘too much’ to deal with. One cannot say of the act ‘this is mine.’
One wonders what the attraction of the Act is exactly. Is it not somehow this ‘more than’? That is to say: The act is always ‘more than’ our intention to do it. The potential to act is like a vortex, like the proverbial heady desire to jump from the cliff edge. But whereas one’s attraction to the act, one’s fatal curiosity, is always fraught and contradictory, the act itself knows no ambivalence. It introduces a line of demarcation which cannot be re-crossed. The act represents a kind of judgement or fatal exposure.
The act, like Badiou’s event, is incalculable. I do not know whether you can anticipate an Act, but there is a poem by Patrick Pearse which might illustrate some of this:
Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost…
Pearse writes this poem shortly before his involvement in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. From every available point of view, in terms of calculable returns, what Pearse would go on to do was ‘folly’. (And it is folly partly because, precisely, its returns were not calculable). Pearse makes a wager, and an admission that what he is about to do will outrun any predictable framework. There are no existing criteria that he can appeal to in justification of his act. The act is thus perhaps a pure negative: it is the desire to blow open a hole in the existing framework, to transform the framework, but absolutely without any guarantees. Of course, if there were guarantees, then the act would be within the framework.
To accept this radical openness, this risk, this surrender to the incalculable is, I think, what is meant by the Lacanian phrase ‘to pass the act’. To ‘pass the act’ is to accept an empty desire: empty because it commits one the new, but not to any specific meaning. I am to set in motion a concatenation of events whose end or significance I can in no way envisage. And I am attracted to the act (as well as repelled by it) exactly on that account.
There is a line from Kafka that might be relevant here:
'From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. '
Anyway, comments and emendations most welcome, including examples of what you might consider an Act.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Passwords
‘For Lacan the exemplary case of empty speech is the password. How does a password function? As a pure gesture of recognition, of admission into a certain symbolic space, whose enunciated content is totally indifferent? If, say, I arrange with my gangster–colleague that the password that gives me access to the hideout is ‘Aunt has baked the apple pie’, it can easily be ‘Long live comrade Stalin!’ or whatever else. Therein consists the ‘emptiness’ of empty speech: in this ultimate nullity of its enunciated content. And Lacan’s point is that human speech in its most radical, fundamental dimension functions as a password: prior to its being a means of communication, of transmitting the signified content, speech is the medium of the mutual recognition of its speakers.’
Perfectly clear. Just a footnote:
I wonder when, under what historical conditions, 'empty speech' becomes visible, or capable of being conceptualised? Isn't it the case, after all, that the emergence of a concept points back to and reveals something about the historical conditions of its emergence. And the possibility of conceptualisation always marks a particular stage in the development of the thing conceptualised (Marx, for example, accounts for his ability to conceptualise capitalism).
This is a slight problem I have with the whole Lacanian conceptual repertoire*. Its as though the 'Big Other', 'Symbolic Order' 'object a, ' (et al) were just inertly there awaiting 'discovery' and, once discovered, can be used retrospectively to decipher anything from Greek Tragedy onwards. Perhaps some of you, who know Lacan better than me, might point me in the direction of occasions where he attempts to account for possibility of his own thought.
(*not just him of course)
Please see Alphic comments below on Lacan & Judaism
Perfectly clear. Just a footnote:
I wonder when, under what historical conditions, 'empty speech' becomes visible, or capable of being conceptualised? Isn't it the case, after all, that the emergence of a concept points back to and reveals something about the historical conditions of its emergence. And the possibility of conceptualisation always marks a particular stage in the development of the thing conceptualised (Marx, for example, accounts for his ability to conceptualise capitalism).
This is a slight problem I have with the whole Lacanian conceptual repertoire*. Its as though the 'Big Other', 'Symbolic Order' 'object a, ' (et al) were just inertly there awaiting 'discovery' and, once discovered, can be used retrospectively to decipher anything from Greek Tragedy onwards. Perhaps some of you, who know Lacan better than me, might point me in the direction of occasions where he attempts to account for possibility of his own thought.
(*not just him of course)
Please see Alphic comments below on Lacan & Judaism
Hamlet the Dane
In the comments to a previous post (which I suggest you read before continuing) Jodi of I Cite has raised a couple of questions about my reading of Hamlet and Zizek. I thought I’d use another post to reflect on those questions:
The symbolic mandate given to Hamlet by his father (also ‘Hamlet’ of course), complete with superego blackmail - ‘if thou did thy dear father love’, is one he initially accepts: ‘Thy commandment all alone shall live in the book and volume of my brain.’ This position – making the self into a pure instrument of a Mandate – is of course impossible. It produces only a kind of castrating over-proximity, a ‘too much of address.’). It’s only when Hamlet adopts a parodic, ludic relation to his Father’s Name that he is able to act. (This is hardly an orthodox interpretation, I know).
Two things, though:
1. Is this ludic mockery of the Symbolic, of his father’s name and mandate, simply equivalent to ‘not taking it seriously’ or is it something more radical. I’m really not sure. Perhaps a bad analogy, but imagine a student using with bravado and parodic gravitas his father’s credit and business cards – is this reverence or mockery, or both? And suppose the use of the credit card is animated by a disgust with consumption as such?*
2.Again, it seems to me that Hamlet is first entangled or precipitated into the world of action and then is able slough off or gain distance from his Symbolic mandate. One interpretation here would be that Fate seems to have grabbed him by the throat, and to some extent he can now ‘resign’ himself to that. So the Big Other, in the form of Destiny, has wrested some of the initiative from him. Paradoxically, this awareness of Fate, the sense that part of you is apportioned to some dark power over which you exercise little control, actually licences/ enables action - you can act only against such an irrevocable/ inscrutable background, to which you can entrust a portion of yourself. On the infrastructure of necessity is raised the superstructure of free decision.
*Actually not helpful at all, I think, but do try and see the point!
The symbolic mandate given to Hamlet by his father (also ‘Hamlet’ of course), complete with superego blackmail - ‘if thou did thy dear father love’, is one he initially accepts: ‘Thy commandment all alone shall live in the book and volume of my brain.’ This position – making the self into a pure instrument of a Mandate – is of course impossible. It produces only a kind of castrating over-proximity, a ‘too much of address.’). It’s only when Hamlet adopts a parodic, ludic relation to his Father’s Name that he is able to act. (This is hardly an orthodox interpretation, I know).
Two things, though:
1. Is this ludic mockery of the Symbolic, of his father’s name and mandate, simply equivalent to ‘not taking it seriously’ or is it something more radical. I’m really not sure. Perhaps a bad analogy, but imagine a student using with bravado and parodic gravitas his father’s credit and business cards – is this reverence or mockery, or both? And suppose the use of the credit card is animated by a disgust with consumption as such?*
2.Again, it seems to me that Hamlet is first entangled or precipitated into the world of action and then is able slough off or gain distance from his Symbolic mandate. One interpretation here would be that Fate seems to have grabbed him by the throat, and to some extent he can now ‘resign’ himself to that. So the Big Other, in the form of Destiny, has wrested some of the initiative from him. Paradoxically, this awareness of Fate, the sense that part of you is apportioned to some dark power over which you exercise little control, actually licences/ enables action - you can act only against such an irrevocable/ inscrutable background, to which you can entrust a portion of yourself. On the infrastructure of necessity is raised the superstructure of free decision.
*Actually not helpful at all, I think, but do try and see the point!
Monday, April 25, 2005
The Communist inside us.
Just a quick follow up to an earlier post on the fascist/ communist distinction, or rather, the importance of making, maintaining and theorising the distinction rather than just lamenting that both fascism and communism are equally distant from liberal democracy (conceived of as the telos of History).
You remember some of the provisional differences outlined by Zizek, and other examples from Adorno, from John Berger. It seems to me there's another one that might be worth mentioning, which is that some (Deleuze, Foucault for example) talk about the 'fascist inside us', fascism as a mentality. No one, by contrast talks about the 'communist inside us' or the 'communist personality'. The 'Psychopathic god' named by Auden is of a piece with many who have seen in fascism something rooted in or corresponding to psychological structures.
Now admittedly, much of the 'fascist psychology' stuff is dismissable (one thinks of most obviously of early theories linking fascism to repressed homosexuality), but isn't it intuitively meaningful to speak of fascism as a kind of predisposition, an obscene injunction to be resisted perhaps, a lurking atavism cross-pollinated with certain definitively modern developments.
Communism, conversely, appeals to something impossible, unattained, 'the claims of the ideal'. I think George Steiner called it the 'blackmail of transcendence'. (The blackmail is that if you do not answer this call, you will not be able to live with yourself). The following, lifted from Marx, might have consoled or inspired a Communist, but it could never have served, and will never serve as a fascist's credo:
'Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.'
You remember some of the provisional differences outlined by Zizek, and other examples from Adorno, from John Berger. It seems to me there's another one that might be worth mentioning, which is that some (Deleuze, Foucault for example) talk about the 'fascist inside us', fascism as a mentality. No one, by contrast talks about the 'communist inside us' or the 'communist personality'. The 'Psychopathic god' named by Auden is of a piece with many who have seen in fascism something rooted in or corresponding to psychological structures.
Now admittedly, much of the 'fascist psychology' stuff is dismissable (one thinks of most obviously of early theories linking fascism to repressed homosexuality), but isn't it intuitively meaningful to speak of fascism as a kind of predisposition, an obscene injunction to be resisted perhaps, a lurking atavism cross-pollinated with certain definitively modern developments.
Communism, conversely, appeals to something impossible, unattained, 'the claims of the ideal'. I think George Steiner called it the 'blackmail of transcendence'. (The blackmail is that if you do not answer this call, you will not be able to live with yourself). The following, lifted from Marx, might have consoled or inspired a Communist, but it could never have served, and will never serve as a fascist's credo:
'Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.'
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Foucault & the background of emptiness.
I am posting (part of) a short intro. to Foucault's History of Sexuality I wrote years ago for an ephemeral book - one which hopefully none of you possess. Here it is, edited and badly typed:
‘Our notion of ‘sexuality’, suggests Foucault, is a peculiarly modern category of self-understanding. It would have been incomprehensible to (say) the Greeks.
The Greeks did not have a single sexual moral code which applied equally to everyone. Sexual conduct was tailored to an individual’s way of life and social position. No universal imperative could erase social distinctions. The key measure, however, was moderation. A sexual act was not considered bad per se, but only if performed to excess (like eating to excess), a question of degree rather than essence. Desire was taken for granted – it was not, as it would later become, an issue or problem.
Christianity replaces the moderate/ immoderate schema with that of Good/ Bad. It introduces a universal moral code by which acts themselves (i.e. divorced, now, from the social embeddedness of the actor) were to be judged. Moreover, Christianity made Desire itself the substance of ethics. The goal became purity, conceived of as the eradication of desire; not, as with the Greeks, self-mastery conceived of as the correct management of desires and pleasures.
These developments produced a radical mutation in subjectivity. The self ‘turned inward’; its every impulse and silent craving were to be examined and if needs be expurgated. So it is that ‘conscience’ arises: the universal code transformed into a reflex of the soul. The institution which both reflects and reproduces this Christian form of subjectivity is the Confession.
With the advent of modern society, though, this Christian ‘regime of truth’, its organising categories and habits of thought, began to be overturned. If up until roughly the nineteenth century, sexual acts were perceived according to a scheme of the permissible and the illicit, good and bad, sex henceforth is made intelligible through notions of the Normal and Pathological. And these notions defined not simply acts but individuals. ‘Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts, the nineteenth century homosexual was a personage’.
The whole realm of sexual pleasure was codified, particularised and made the object of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Every gesture or way of speaking became readable as a ‘symptom’. By creating and taxonomising ‘abnormalities’, medical discourse defined by implication the Norm.
Foucault’s celebrated move is then to see our present discourse as continuous with, not radically removed from, this nineteenth century obsessional scrutiny. The continued talk today of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ sexualities, the very recourse to ‘sexuality’ as the vital key to our identity, the now commonplace notion of ‘getting in touch’ with one’s sexuality, can all be seen as mere local shifts within a more basic horizon.
The idea of ‘sexual identity’, historically conditioned and bound up with certain forms of power subtends the line of demarcation which, we like to think, separates us from the repressed Victorians. Take the example of psychoanalysis (in some of its variants). It is often predicated on the idea of an inner sexual nature. Its questions and answers are delimited by the idea that we ‘have’ such a nature, and that this lies at the root of our person. Our sexuality has been ‘repressed’ or disguised and we need only uncover it to be ‘ourselves’.
Notions such as ‘sexual identity’ assume as self-evident what is, in reality, the product of certain discourses and historically specific habits of thought. The real ‘repression’ is the forgetting of such preconditions.
This last point underlines a basic aim of Foucault’s work, and one he has himself stated clearly:
‘To show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity.’
‘Our notion of ‘sexuality’, suggests Foucault, is a peculiarly modern category of self-understanding. It would have been incomprehensible to (say) the Greeks.
The Greeks did not have a single sexual moral code which applied equally to everyone. Sexual conduct was tailored to an individual’s way of life and social position. No universal imperative could erase social distinctions. The key measure, however, was moderation. A sexual act was not considered bad per se, but only if performed to excess (like eating to excess), a question of degree rather than essence. Desire was taken for granted – it was not, as it would later become, an issue or problem.
Christianity replaces the moderate/ immoderate schema with that of Good/ Bad. It introduces a universal moral code by which acts themselves (i.e. divorced, now, from the social embeddedness of the actor) were to be judged. Moreover, Christianity made Desire itself the substance of ethics. The goal became purity, conceived of as the eradication of desire; not, as with the Greeks, self-mastery conceived of as the correct management of desires and pleasures.
These developments produced a radical mutation in subjectivity. The self ‘turned inward’; its every impulse and silent craving were to be examined and if needs be expurgated. So it is that ‘conscience’ arises: the universal code transformed into a reflex of the soul. The institution which both reflects and reproduces this Christian form of subjectivity is the Confession.
With the advent of modern society, though, this Christian ‘regime of truth’, its organising categories and habits of thought, began to be overturned. If up until roughly the nineteenth century, sexual acts were perceived according to a scheme of the permissible and the illicit, good and bad, sex henceforth is made intelligible through notions of the Normal and Pathological. And these notions defined not simply acts but individuals. ‘Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts, the nineteenth century homosexual was a personage’.
The whole realm of sexual pleasure was codified, particularised and made the object of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Every gesture or way of speaking became readable as a ‘symptom’. By creating and taxonomising ‘abnormalities’, medical discourse defined by implication the Norm.
Foucault’s celebrated move is then to see our present discourse as continuous with, not radically removed from, this nineteenth century obsessional scrutiny. The continued talk today of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ sexualities, the very recourse to ‘sexuality’ as the vital key to our identity, the now commonplace notion of ‘getting in touch’ with one’s sexuality, can all be seen as mere local shifts within a more basic horizon.
The idea of ‘sexual identity’, historically conditioned and bound up with certain forms of power subtends the line of demarcation which, we like to think, separates us from the repressed Victorians. Take the example of psychoanalysis (in some of its variants). It is often predicated on the idea of an inner sexual nature. Its questions and answers are delimited by the idea that we ‘have’ such a nature, and that this lies at the root of our person. Our sexuality has been ‘repressed’ or disguised and we need only uncover it to be ‘ourselves’.
Notions such as ‘sexual identity’ assume as self-evident what is, in reality, the product of certain discourses and historically specific habits of thought. The real ‘repression’ is the forgetting of such preconditions.
This last point underlines a basic aim of Foucault’s work, and one he has himself stated clearly:
‘To show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity.’
No Comment
Election coverage: nausea.
Each election campaign a weak parody of the last. The click and whirr of the rhetorical machine. The gaudy baubles taken out each year at Xmas. The riffs and gestures of empty ritual. Changing of the guard.
Language hollowed out into noises (albeit the 'right noises'):
‘how it effects the lives of ordinary people… only making promises we can keep.. sums don’t add up.. I am answering the question, Jeremy… the British people are sick and tired… we want to see a Britain where… I’m not going to give you spin and sound bites’
Why this farce day after day?
Each election campaign a weak parody of the last. The click and whirr of the rhetorical machine. The gaudy baubles taken out each year at Xmas. The riffs and gestures of empty ritual. Changing of the guard.
Language hollowed out into noises (albeit the 'right noises'):
‘how it effects the lives of ordinary people… only making promises we can keep.. sums don’t add up.. I am answering the question, Jeremy… the British people are sick and tired… we want to see a Britain where… I’m not going to give you spin and sound bites’
Why this farce day after day?
The Example of Zizek
Some time ago, in a comments thread, I made the following point about Zizek’s use of examples:
Zizek's points can and sometimes should be understood even if he has misread or misremembered the example which carries the point. There's an instance where Zizek cites a 'strawberry cake' dream from Freud in order to illustrate a point about fantasy. Turns out he slightly misremembered the dream, but the point stands nonetheless.. the example is just instrumental.
I was, however, wondering about this ‘instrumental’ use of examples, in relation to this:
“Hamlet himself, the very embodiment of obsessive procrastination.. becomes capable of acting at the exact moment when, in the last act of the play, he answers the rhetorical question ‘Who Am I?’: ‘What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis../ .. This is I, Hamlet the Dane’. It is the split between ‘I’ and ‘Hamlet the Dane’, between the vanishing point of the subject of the enunciation and his support in symbolic identification, which is primordial: the moment of ‘passage to the act’ is nothing but an illusory moment of decision when the subject’s being seems to coincide without remainder with his symbolic mandate’.”
Zizek refers to this example on a few occasions. The point is the same : Hamlet acts when he assumes his Symbolic Mandate and makes the imaginary move of conflating ‘I’ with his Symbolic title. This point, though intelligible in itself, is completely wide of the mark as regards Hamlet.
A few things:
Hamlet has already entered the field of ‘action’ well before this point, perhaps starting with the chance death of Polonius. This ‘accidental slaughter’ seems to have precipitated H. from the world of potentiality to that of the deed/ act. He is thrown into a scene he had hitherto observed. Despite the fact that his Act (killing Polonius) is ‘meaningless’, an almost motorial reaction to a noise, it almost immediately accumulates meanings and importance which H. cannot pre-empt, predict, control.
By the time we encounter H. in the burial scene he has already dispatched R & G to their deaths. He has done this, you remember, by using the royal seal (on his father's signet ring) to ‘authorise’ a counterfeit letter. The Symbolic here is thus the instrument of a kind of dark joke, the punchline of which is ‘R & G are dead’. It is the efficacy of the Symbolic insignia, unattached to a bearer, manipulated by H., which delivers the two gulls to their execution. H. thus demonstrates (in the most practical sense of that word) how authority and force are effects of the Symbolic. But he does this not by ‘assuming’ symbolic authority, but by cynically employing it.
Immediately preceding the burial scene, moreover, there is H.’s now all too familiar banter with the gravedigger, which of course mocks symbolic Gradations and Names with the hollow laughter of the Death’s head. It is impossible to imagine that H., after eloquently deriding and debunking Symbolic titles could then simply adopt one
Hamlet’s declaration of ‘identity’ is in fact a self-parodic and consciously bombastic intervention. His ‘I, Hamlet the Dane’ has something of the irony of Lear’s ‘Aye, every inch a king’.
Here it is again, along with the subsequent address to Leartes:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
Note the suggestion of rhetorical deliberation – ‘bears such an emphasis’ ‘phrase of sorrow’. And then, to Leartes:
‘Does thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
[…]
I’ll rant as well as thou’
H. cannot see Leartes’ grief as anything but affection, designed to ‘upstage’ H. Hamlet will prove equal to Leartes’ 'performance'.
It is as if any symbolic act can only be gestural, as if the Symbolic itself has been systematically reperceived as bombastic theatre – shapes, symbols, pre-agreed signals. Hamlet’s phoney assumption of his Symbolic title is in mockery of the empty symbolic rituals everywhere around him.
Indeed, one further point overlooked by Z. is that this very title ('Hamlet the Dane') is ordinarily that assumed by the King of Denmark. From this point of view, Hamlet’s ‘assumption’ of it is the illegitimate, mocking arrogation of a title not his.
Hamlet acts, then, when he realises the necessary hyperbole of the Symbolic, and its radical non-coincidence with the 'I'. To enter the Symbolic is to engage, willi-nilli, in theatrical posturing.
If one has to translate all this into Lacanese, it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet acts when he ceases to be troubled by the ‘too much’ of the Symbolic mandate foisted upon him, the traumatic excess of the ghost’s demand. He does this by an (enforced, partly) distantiation from the Symbolic Order as such.
To come to such an interpretation is surely to rethink the relation between Symbolic mandates and Acts, not just to venture another view of Hamlet. In the end, then, it does matter that Zizek’s use of examples is often purely instrumental. Not out of some abstract ‘fidelity to the integrity of the text’. No. It’s because, as in the present example, attending to the text actually produces a more theoretically suggestive result.
Theory is not only the Interrogator but the interrogatee; or, rather, if it is not also interrogated is it not theory at all.
Zizek's points can and sometimes should be understood even if he has misread or misremembered the example which carries the point. There's an instance where Zizek cites a 'strawberry cake' dream from Freud in order to illustrate a point about fantasy. Turns out he slightly misremembered the dream, but the point stands nonetheless.. the example is just instrumental.
I was, however, wondering about this ‘instrumental’ use of examples, in relation to this:
“Hamlet himself, the very embodiment of obsessive procrastination.. becomes capable of acting at the exact moment when, in the last act of the play, he answers the rhetorical question ‘Who Am I?’: ‘What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis../ .. This is I, Hamlet the Dane’. It is the split between ‘I’ and ‘Hamlet the Dane’, between the vanishing point of the subject of the enunciation and his support in symbolic identification, which is primordial: the moment of ‘passage to the act’ is nothing but an illusory moment of decision when the subject’s being seems to coincide without remainder with his symbolic mandate’.”
Zizek refers to this example on a few occasions. The point is the same : Hamlet acts when he assumes his Symbolic Mandate and makes the imaginary move of conflating ‘I’ with his Symbolic title. This point, though intelligible in itself, is completely wide of the mark as regards Hamlet.
A few things:
Hamlet has already entered the field of ‘action’ well before this point, perhaps starting with the chance death of Polonius. This ‘accidental slaughter’ seems to have precipitated H. from the world of potentiality to that of the deed/ act. He is thrown into a scene he had hitherto observed. Despite the fact that his Act (killing Polonius) is ‘meaningless’, an almost motorial reaction to a noise, it almost immediately accumulates meanings and importance which H. cannot pre-empt, predict, control.
By the time we encounter H. in the burial scene he has already dispatched R & G to their deaths. He has done this, you remember, by using the royal seal (on his father's signet ring) to ‘authorise’ a counterfeit letter. The Symbolic here is thus the instrument of a kind of dark joke, the punchline of which is ‘R & G are dead’. It is the efficacy of the Symbolic insignia, unattached to a bearer, manipulated by H., which delivers the two gulls to their execution. H. thus demonstrates (in the most practical sense of that word) how authority and force are effects of the Symbolic. But he does this not by ‘assuming’ symbolic authority, but by cynically employing it.
Immediately preceding the burial scene, moreover, there is H.’s now all too familiar banter with the gravedigger, which of course mocks symbolic Gradations and Names with the hollow laughter of the Death’s head. It is impossible to imagine that H., after eloquently deriding and debunking Symbolic titles could then simply adopt one
Hamlet’s declaration of ‘identity’ is in fact a self-parodic and consciously bombastic intervention. His ‘I, Hamlet the Dane’ has something of the irony of Lear’s ‘Aye, every inch a king’.
Here it is again, along with the subsequent address to Leartes:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
Note the suggestion of rhetorical deliberation – ‘bears such an emphasis’ ‘phrase of sorrow’. And then, to Leartes:
‘Does thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
[…]
I’ll rant as well as thou’
H. cannot see Leartes’ grief as anything but affection, designed to ‘upstage’ H. Hamlet will prove equal to Leartes’ 'performance'.
It is as if any symbolic act can only be gestural, as if the Symbolic itself has been systematically reperceived as bombastic theatre – shapes, symbols, pre-agreed signals. Hamlet’s phoney assumption of his Symbolic title is in mockery of the empty symbolic rituals everywhere around him.
Indeed, one further point overlooked by Z. is that this very title ('Hamlet the Dane') is ordinarily that assumed by the King of Denmark. From this point of view, Hamlet’s ‘assumption’ of it is the illegitimate, mocking arrogation of a title not his.
Hamlet acts, then, when he realises the necessary hyperbole of the Symbolic, and its radical non-coincidence with the 'I'. To enter the Symbolic is to engage, willi-nilli, in theatrical posturing.
If one has to translate all this into Lacanese, it would be more accurate to say that Hamlet acts when he ceases to be troubled by the ‘too much’ of the Symbolic mandate foisted upon him, the traumatic excess of the ghost’s demand. He does this by an (enforced, partly) distantiation from the Symbolic Order as such.
To come to such an interpretation is surely to rethink the relation between Symbolic mandates and Acts, not just to venture another view of Hamlet. In the end, then, it does matter that Zizek’s use of examples is often purely instrumental. Not out of some abstract ‘fidelity to the integrity of the text’. No. It’s because, as in the present example, attending to the text actually produces a more theoretically suggestive result.
Theory is not only the Interrogator but the interrogatee; or, rather, if it is not also interrogated is it not theory at all.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Inhuman One
From Rilke, 'Black Cat':
But all at once,
As if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
And with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
Inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
Suspended, like a prehistoric insect.
(if anyone has the Paul Muldoon translation, I would be grateful if you could post it in the comments)
Whereas an animal is non-human rather than inhuman, the look of an animal might well be described as inhuman. No? Is it because in it ‘the human’ is estranged, rendered unrecognisable? In the animal's eye you sense an outside that can never be recuperated or made familiar.
But all at once,
As if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
And with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
Inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
Suspended, like a prehistoric insect.
(if anyone has the Paul Muldoon translation, I would be grateful if you could post it in the comments)
Whereas an animal is non-human rather than inhuman, the look of an animal might well be described as inhuman. No? Is it because in it ‘the human’ is estranged, rendered unrecognisable? In the animal's eye you sense an outside that can never be recuperated or made familiar.
Inhuman Three
Jameson’s Marxism and Form has numerous passages on Sartre and the ‘Inhuman’, at least it seems so to me. Here, from one of them:
“Thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape.”
Only the project of surviving or crossing the desert discloses its 'inhumanity'. It is ‘an inhuman landscape only in relation to a specific project. But what has also been made known is our 'humanity' - by way of what resists and threatens it.
The project, therefore, is ontologically prior – both the human and inhuman are made known in arrears, in the wake of the project. The project is that First Judgement which discloses to us the contours and content of our World.
Okay, we are defined by certain basic ‘projects’, even if the project is only survival (thus, it is not to be thought of as a formulated project). There is, however, an inflexiblity and perverse bias already present in the environing world, and it's this which defamiliarises and removes our projects from us. Language itself, for example:
‘the inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them […] a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thought and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and by the previous history of the material itself.’
That which confiscates from us our intentions and aims, and re-directs them along its own path – or the very product of such estrangement - can be defnied as the Inhuman.
This last also alerts us to the fact that the inhuman is not always simply non-human. The machines that enter into the mental activity of the factory girl (see below), the brutality of bureaucratic regulation and so on, are all human products, albeit rendered unrecognisable.
Sartre is also attuned to how the human takes on something of the colour of the inhuman. There is a famous, often quoted example from the Critique:
In the early period of semi-automatic machines, interviews have shown that girls involved in this specialised work drifted into specifically sexual daydreams while working, recalled their room, their bed, the night, the most private details about the couple in solitude. But in reality it was the machine that dreamed through them about their erotic experience: for the type of attention required in that particular kind of work allowed neither for complete distraction (thinking of something else entirely) nor complete concentration (thinking interferes with physical operation); the machine thus requires and creates in the human being an inverted semi automatism in order to complete itself: an explosive mixture of unconscious vigilance and; the mind is absorbed without being used, involving a kind of lateral control, while the body functions mechanically under a kind of surveillance.
The demands of the machine are met, internalised, by the worker. The specific bodily and mental disposition of the worker ‘answers’ the requirement of the machine, lives in symbiosis with the machine. The human organism has restructured itself around an inhuman presence and is now irrevocably modified. In trying to ‘subjectify’ the machine, the worker’s substance is subtly altered.
It seems to me that in all the variants of the ‘Inhuman’ I’ve mentioned rest on or relate to ideas of alienation or self-estrangement. The Inhuman seems to designate experiences which produce such estrangement or the material/ institutional embodiments thereof. Not particularly helpful, perhaps. So no more inhuman ruminations from me for the time being.
“Thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape.”
Only the project of surviving or crossing the desert discloses its 'inhumanity'. It is ‘an inhuman landscape only in relation to a specific project. But what has also been made known is our 'humanity' - by way of what resists and threatens it.
The project, therefore, is ontologically prior – both the human and inhuman are made known in arrears, in the wake of the project. The project is that First Judgement which discloses to us the contours and content of our World.
Okay, we are defined by certain basic ‘projects’, even if the project is only survival (thus, it is not to be thought of as a formulated project). There is, however, an inflexiblity and perverse bias already present in the environing world, and it's this which defamiliarises and removes our projects from us. Language itself, for example:
‘the inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them […] a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thought and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and by the previous history of the material itself.’
That which confiscates from us our intentions and aims, and re-directs them along its own path – or the very product of such estrangement - can be defnied as the Inhuman.
This last also alerts us to the fact that the inhuman is not always simply non-human. The machines that enter into the mental activity of the factory girl (see below), the brutality of bureaucratic regulation and so on, are all human products, albeit rendered unrecognisable.
Sartre is also attuned to how the human takes on something of the colour of the inhuman. There is a famous, often quoted example from the Critique:
In the early period of semi-automatic machines, interviews have shown that girls involved in this specialised work drifted into specifically sexual daydreams while working, recalled their room, their bed, the night, the most private details about the couple in solitude. But in reality it was the machine that dreamed through them about their erotic experience: for the type of attention required in that particular kind of work allowed neither for complete distraction (thinking of something else entirely) nor complete concentration (thinking interferes with physical operation); the machine thus requires and creates in the human being an inverted semi automatism in order to complete itself: an explosive mixture of unconscious vigilance and; the mind is absorbed without being used, involving a kind of lateral control, while the body functions mechanically under a kind of surveillance.
The demands of the machine are met, internalised, by the worker. The specific bodily and mental disposition of the worker ‘answers’ the requirement of the machine, lives in symbiosis with the machine. The human organism has restructured itself around an inhuman presence and is now irrevocably modified. In trying to ‘subjectify’ the machine, the worker’s substance is subtly altered.
It seems to me that in all the variants of the ‘Inhuman’ I’ve mentioned rest on or relate to ideas of alienation or self-estrangement. The Inhuman seems to designate experiences which produce such estrangement or the material/ institutional embodiments thereof. Not particularly helpful, perhaps. So no more inhuman ruminations from me for the time being.
Inhuman Two
One of Sartre’s contemporary commentators (IT) remarks:
'Similarly, man exists in the first place and in general for everyone as non-human man, as an alien species.'
This perhaps recalls a famous Sartrean passage:
‘The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast,.. Man himself’
And to me, free associating, it calls up this from Kafka:
'What is it that binds you more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any other thing, the penholder in your hand for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very reason why you raised the question.”
What is ‘inhuman’ here, Man, or the point from which he is seen? To name Man as a ‘species’ - from where is this nomination made? A species, clinging to a dying planet, hopelessly governed and defined by its species-being, playing out some logic of genesis, flourishing and self-destruction unbeknown to itself.
The ‘inhuman’ is the way we are seen, captured in a foreign look, the object of a desire or project wholly extraneous to us.
As our commentator points out, for the USA the Soviet Union was 'inhuman' partly because it seemed to be pursuing a project in which the USA was an object, and this object was something it felt unable to quite reappropriate or make plain.
But, more generally, as Sartre suggests, we are forced, in pursuing our projects, to regard others as objects, instrumental to the realisation of that project. And so, for them, we are inhuman – we speak and act from a place eccentric to their freedom, praying on them, bringing about a self-estrangement against which they must perpetually fight. We must take on and subjectivise the disfiguring picture that the Other has of us, recast it, claim ownership. I assume this is partly what IT means by:
For Sartre, every action aiming to transform the inhuman into the human must, in the first instance, interiorise a particular inhumanity. Man only humanises himself by assuming against the inhuman order his own subjective part of inhumanity
But I may have missed the point entirely.
'Similarly, man exists in the first place and in general for everyone as non-human man, as an alien species.'
This perhaps recalls a famous Sartrean passage:
‘The century would have been good if man had not been tracked down by his relentless, immemorial enemy, by the carnivorous species that had set out to slay him, by that hairless, sly beast,.. Man himself’
And to me, free associating, it calls up this from Kafka:
'What is it that binds you more intimately to these impenetrable, talking, eye-blinking bodies than to any other thing, the penholder in your hand for example? Because you belong to the same species? But you don’t belong to the same species, that’s the very reason why you raised the question.”
What is ‘inhuman’ here, Man, or the point from which he is seen? To name Man as a ‘species’ - from where is this nomination made? A species, clinging to a dying planet, hopelessly governed and defined by its species-being, playing out some logic of genesis, flourishing and self-destruction unbeknown to itself.
The ‘inhuman’ is the way we are seen, captured in a foreign look, the object of a desire or project wholly extraneous to us.
As our commentator points out, for the USA the Soviet Union was 'inhuman' partly because it seemed to be pursuing a project in which the USA was an object, and this object was something it felt unable to quite reappropriate or make plain.
But, more generally, as Sartre suggests, we are forced, in pursuing our projects, to regard others as objects, instrumental to the realisation of that project. And so, for them, we are inhuman – we speak and act from a place eccentric to their freedom, praying on them, bringing about a self-estrangement against which they must perpetually fight. We must take on and subjectivise the disfiguring picture that the Other has of us, recast it, claim ownership. I assume this is partly what IT means by:
For Sartre, every action aiming to transform the inhuman into the human must, in the first instance, interiorise a particular inhumanity. Man only humanises himself by assuming against the inhuman order his own subjective part of inhumanity
But I may have missed the point entirely.
Morning reading. (Well it's morning to me.)
A new Zizek book is in the shops, in London anyway. Its basically a collection of articles, interviews and essays, with an introduction by SZ entitled 'The Inhuman'.
The LRB carries a considered and intelligent piece on the 'War for Oil' argument. Its nub is: "The invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp."
Now, I had no idea that Freud collaborated with William C. Bullitt in writing a psychological profile of Woodrow Wilson. After much scepticism from the Psychoanal. community, it seems that he did. Read about it here.
The LRB carries a considered and intelligent piece on the 'War for Oil' argument. Its nub is: "The invasion of Iraq was about Chevron and Texaco, but it was also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI and DynCorp."
Now, I had no idea that Freud collaborated with William C. Bullitt in writing a psychological profile of Woodrow Wilson. After much scepticism from the Psychoanal. community, it seems that he did. Read about it here.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Addendum to last post but one
On the 'non-existence of the Big Other' & Kafka: The remarks of RMUtt rescued from the comments box:
I believe Kafka should be read in a somewhat different way; "The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’" are the way to uphold the illusion that there is a Big Other - and thus the way to maintain the Big Other. This is, I think, especially clear in the fragments that are related to his planned novel about The Great Wall of China.
"The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death--all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire--before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcoming hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate--but never, never can that happen--the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself."
Now, I think that Mutt and I may be somehow talking about two sides of the same coin. The Big Other has the quality of being 'everywhere and nowhere' and the oscillation between these, the perpetual ambivalence, is the secret of its success. Kind of like the gaze of the panoptican - you sense it constantly, but turn round and its vanished, its somewhere else.
The logic is something like this: That which is everywhere is nowhere in particular; conversely, that which can be found nowhere in particular acquires the appearance of omnipresence – that it cannot be local-ised attests to its magnitude rather than its non-existence. Each time the inquirer bemoans ‘that’s not it’, ‘it’s not here’, anxiety mounts, and this cumulative anxiety is misrecognised as the shadow of its object.
This last implies that the illusion is generated precisely by the fact of there being an inquirer (after the Big Other); or rather the Big Other is a spectre (forever 'just round the corner) thrown up by the very process of inquiring into it.
I believe Kafka should be read in a somewhat different way; "The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’" are the way to uphold the illusion that there is a Big Other - and thus the way to maintain the Big Other. This is, I think, especially clear in the fragments that are related to his planned novel about The Great Wall of China.
"The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death--all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire--before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcoming hammering of his fists on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate--but never, never can that happen--the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself."
Now, I think that Mutt and I may be somehow talking about two sides of the same coin. The Big Other has the quality of being 'everywhere and nowhere' and the oscillation between these, the perpetual ambivalence, is the secret of its success. Kind of like the gaze of the panoptican - you sense it constantly, but turn round and its vanished, its somewhere else.
The logic is something like this: That which is everywhere is nowhere in particular; conversely, that which can be found nowhere in particular acquires the appearance of omnipresence – that it cannot be local-ised attests to its magnitude rather than its non-existence. Each time the inquirer bemoans ‘that’s not it’, ‘it’s not here’, anxiety mounts, and this cumulative anxiety is misrecognised as the shadow of its object.
This last implies that the illusion is generated precisely by the fact of there being an inquirer (after the Big Other); or rather the Big Other is a spectre (forever 'just round the corner) thrown up by the very process of inquiring into it.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Charlottenstrasse revisited
Eric Santner on Kafka and the Big Other.
“Gregor’s fall into abjection [can] be understood as a by-product of his encounter with the ultimate uncertainty as to his place in the community of which his father is the nominal master. Gregor’s mutation into an Ungeziefer , a creature without a place in God’s order… points to a disturbance within the divine order itself.
Gregor discovers one of the central paradoxes of modern experience: uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “Big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. The mythic order of fate where one’s lot is determined behind one’s back .. is displaced by a postmythic order in which the individual can no longer find his place in the texture of fate.”
A thought: In my ‘Ontological Bureacracy’ post I assumed that the affinity between bureaucracy and human nature which Kafka suggests resided in the fact that bureaucracy made into a kind of huge exoskeleton - embodied in buildings, paperwork, dictates, Organisations - the Symbolic Order that regulates and defines subjects.
What the passage above suggests, on the contrary, is that what bureaucracy lays bare, at least in Kafka’s understanding, is that this Symbolic Order is ultimately without transcendental guarantee. The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’ but never what they represent.. all this carries with it the ominous rider that there is no Big Other.
What happens therefore is that when the Big Other achieves its most complete historical embodiment (modern bureaucracy) instead of this being its apotheosis, its Truth, it is instead the moment it is revelaed as as lie, or a as a gaping absence.
“Gregor’s fall into abjection [can] be understood as a by-product of his encounter with the ultimate uncertainty as to his place in the community of which his father is the nominal master. Gregor’s mutation into an Ungeziefer , a creature without a place in God’s order… points to a disturbance within the divine order itself.
Gregor discovers one of the central paradoxes of modern experience: uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “Big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. The mythic order of fate where one’s lot is determined behind one’s back .. is displaced by a postmythic order in which the individual can no longer find his place in the texture of fate.”
A thought: In my ‘Ontological Bureacracy’ post I assumed that the affinity between bureaucracy and human nature which Kafka suggests resided in the fact that bureaucracy made into a kind of huge exoskeleton - embodied in buildings, paperwork, dictates, Organisations - the Symbolic Order that regulates and defines subjects.
What the passage above suggests, on the contrary, is that what bureaucracy lays bare, at least in Kafka’s understanding, is that this Symbolic Order is ultimately without transcendental guarantee. The endless deferrals of the bureaucratic world, the inability to localise responsibility, the fact that we encounter only and everywhere ‘representatives’ but never what they represent.. all this carries with it the ominous rider that there is no Big Other.
What happens therefore is that when the Big Other achieves its most complete historical embodiment (modern bureaucracy) instead of this being its apotheosis, its Truth, it is instead the moment it is revelaed as as lie, or a as a gaping absence.
Bog roll
Via a blog that links to mine I came across a Linguistic Profiling test. Its of no interest to me, except I would be grateful isf someone could please explain question 4:
4. The act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper is called...
1. Toilet papering
2. Rolling
3.TP'ing
4. The act of covering a house or area in front of a house with toilet paper is called...
1. Toilet papering
2. Rolling
3.TP'ing
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