Distance

Roland Barthes:

It seems to me I learn more about France during a walk through the village than in whole weeks in Paris…. The distance makes everything signify. In Paris, in the street, I am bombarded with information, not signification.

What distinction, exactly, is Barthes making here? How is ‘information’ being used and doesn’t information also have ‘significance’?

The phrase ‘bombarded with information’ recalls many descriptions of the city (most obviously Benjamin on Baudelaire) as a place where the individual is over-crowded with data, assailed with petty shocks on every side. Everything, and from every direction, is ‘in your face’. ‘In your face’ is not ‘near’, because ‘nearness’ presupposes distance, differentiated space. The city, says Benjamin, relates to the mathematical sublime: Number, we might say, eclipses significance. Signification has no room in which to breathe.

I take ‘information’, in Barthes’ statement, to be a kind of instant & consumable significance. Information lives and dies in being consumed. Units of information, moreover, have a neutrality and equality. A computer can store these units without having to discriminate between ‘information’ about casualties in a war and information about soap powder sales. And Information arrives at where we are. It comes to our desktop.

‘Signification’ cannot be stored, nor is it instantaneous. Signification is an invitation to depart. The instant, rather than being the unit of meaning, at once opens up into a duration of interpretation. It is a clue not a fact. Signification, also, asks us to weigh importance, not simply to divide into ‘bites’/ units.

The eclipse of distance is, says Benjamin, one of the defining experiences of the city dweller:

To move in this crowd was natural.. no matter how great the distance the individual cared to keep from it, he was still coloured by it and, unlike Engels, unable to view it from without.

Engels can see the city because he is not one of its children:

The charm of his description [of London] lies in the intersecting of unshakeable critical integrity with an old fashioned attitude. The writer came from a Germany which was still provincial.

Thus Engels can make observations like this:

In London one can roam for hours without seeing the slightest indication that open countryside is nearby.

This is essentially a ‘provincial’ perception, i.e., it is made from the point of view of a place where open countryside is an everyday experience. From this point of view, London appears as a place of privation. Its streets have pathos. The Londoner, Benjamin implies, lacks the distance across which to see this lack. Signification is elsewhere.

Starvation

While we are posting things written by others, here is a short piece by someone I met in Prague, in the lovely Café Blatouch. J. writes parables and, I suppose, you could say that he composes pictures which can be inspected. After I returned to London, he would send me his short prose pieces accompanied by a rough translation. Sometimes I would take this rough and smoothen it into lean unlovely English. Here is a little piece called ‘Starvation’. Those of you who don’t like this kind of thing (i.e., ‘literature’& all that), who have Charlotte Street filed under ‘Political blogs’ for example (which is your prerogative), look away now.

**

'He is starving. He sits and dreams of food. But he has placed himself in such a position that the prospect of finding food is very small. Shadows line his ribs. One day, a day like any other, a day without augury or expectation, he is brought a fabulous feast on a silver platter. His reaction is two-fold. First, disbelief: why this sudden miracle? No, he thinks, starvation acts like an hallucinogen and the feast is only the product of his desperate fancy. But secondly, realising that there is indeed food infront of him, he begins to question whether his stomach can cope after such long abstinence. The woman holding the platter of food looks at him, expectant, waiting. Embarrassed by the extremity of his need and with little confidence in his chaste and withered stomach, he mumbles something about indigestion, politely shaking his head. As the woman walks away with his meal, he thinks he catches on her face a look of disappointment. It has been so long since he ate that hunger itself, defeated and ignored, had left his body. Only occasionally would its memory, like an empty word, flicker through his insides. But as the woman departs, he feels, foreign yet familiar, the recrudescence of hunger – a pain, a rodent pain – stirring once more in his anorexic stomach.

Perhaps it is slightly different. Yes, the starving man dreams of food. But his dreams have grown fantastical with desire. Fat ripe fruits bursting through their own skin, meats swollen with succulence, breads, gooey puddings and rich and steaming delights of all kinds. Indeed, so inflated with fantasy are these dream foods, so replete with want, that when real nourishment does arrive he simply fails to recognise it. As his starvation continues, so does the food of his dreams become even more rare and extravagant, more and more remote from the shapes, colours and textures of anything real. Finally, in the last days, he yearns for things which are entirely the product of his imagination, which have altogether lost contact with the world; things which, were they suddenly to materialise before him, would, of course, be inedible.

Guest Post

Like most of you, I don’t yet have a clear account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Like anyone with a critical or even curious mind (I supposed) there are questions to which I’d like to know the answer and blanks that I’d like to fill. That the ‘official’ account is still incomplete, that the initial reports were confused and contradictory, that many pertinent details await public scrutiny – these are surely banal truths.

So I would just like to say how struck I was, partly as regards the press but also very much in the blogosphere, by an eager credulity to accept the very first version spun from the presses and by a subsequent impatience with any sustained questioning of the version of events made available to the public. There were those (self-styled leftists even) who, even before the dead man had been identified, pre-emptively barked at civil liberties ‘fuckwits’ and human rights do-gooders for asking questions.

There was nothing at this stage, absolutely zilch, even to licence the conclusion that the dead man was a suicide bomber. But there was an alarming will to believe. This carnival of credulity did not come to an abrupt end when it was discovered that an innocent man had been killed. There was no embarrassment or compunction in the relevant quarters at the foolish readiness, the jettisoning of inquiring, and in some cases the audible enjoyment, with which they had greeted what was now obviously tragic.

Instead, the dismissal of any attempt to point out inconsistencies or holes in the official narrative continued. The ‘bulky winter jacket’, ‘the vaulting of the ticket barrier’ had quickly become impatient and defensive facts pointing unilaterally to the required conclusion. Those who dawdled with their doubts were diverting attention from important government work.

Now, the questioners have been of all political persuasions. And the questions asked are ones that should be asked in any democratically accountable state. And yet the implication, the ‘rumour’ is that even to raise questions is to declare a political position, or is to be guilty of certain unacceptable political allegiances, or to be some kind of ‘conspiracy nut’. What should be the duty of any thinking citizen is instead evidence of an ‘agenda’, the genuine need for information and answers construable only as hostility to the state.

A more general point, and certainly not original: there is a tendency to assume that anyone who does question the official account, which in this case seems self-evidently wanting and question-provoking, must somehow have another - often ‘sinister’ - account up their sleeve with which to replace it, i.e., those who interrogate and ask questions about the state are at once under suspicion.

That the mere existence of critical questioning is thought to denote a political programme is, needless to say, profoundly inimical to democratic debate and accountability.

Various

A reader kindly draws my attention to an interesting and timely article on Victorian anti-intellectualism. An extract here:

The practical nature of the English mind, its deep respect for facts, its pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, its ready appeal to common sense - and therefore, negatively, its suspicion of abstract and imaginative speculation - have always been characteristic of the nation. What distinguishes the Victorian period is that the conditions of life tended to increase this bias, to lessen the contrary influences of theological and classical studies, and thus to make what may be called a kind of anti-intellectualism a conspicuous attitude of the time. 2 This is not to forget that many of the Victorians were intellectuals nor that the age of Mill and Darwin made significant contributions to thought......
If “the extremely practical character of the English people” made them, as Mill recognized, excel all the nations of Europe “as men of business and industriels,” their commercial activity, in its turn, deepened this inherited bent. The minds which made the machines, which organized factories and solved the problems of supply and distribution - and did so under high competitive pressure - received an indelible training in practical contrivance. It was, as Carlyle said in 1829, the age of machinery in the inward as well as outward sense of the word; “the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.” When Mill spoke in 1835 of the celebrity of England resting on her docks, her canals, and her railroads, he added, “In intellect she is distinguished only for a kind of sober good sense;… and for doing all those things which are best done where man most resembles a machine, with the precision of a machine.” [Thanks Robert]

Hear Badiou and others talk about Deleuze here. And a new (short) post by me at the increasingly busy Long Sunday.

Speaking of anti-intellectualism, K-Punk nicely skewers a (familar) contemporary example here. In the example cited, note in particular cases [see comments] a clumsy eagerness to demonstrate with one hand a knowledge that’s immediately made fun of with the other.

Proust, Reading and Friendship

"No doubt friendship, friendship for individuals, is a frivolous thing, and reading is a friendship. But at least it is a sincere friendship, and the fact that it is directed to one who is dead, who is absent, gives it something disinterested, almost moving. It is, moreover, a friendship unencumbered with all that makes up the ugliness of other kinds. Since we are all, we the living, only the dead who have not yet assumed our roles, all these compliments, all these greetings in the hall which we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome. [....] In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its first purity. With books, no amiability. These friends, if we spend an evening with them, it is truly because we desire them. In their case, at least, we often leave only with regret. And with none of those thoughts, when we have left, that spoil friendship. What did they think of us? Didn't we lack tact? Did we please? All these agitations of friendship come to an end at the threshold of that pure and calm friendship that reading is. No more deference; we laugh at what Moliere says only to the exact degree that we find him funy; when he bores us, we are not afraid to appear bored, and when we decidedly have had enough of being with him, we put him back in his palce as bluntly as if he had neither genius nor fame. The atmosphere of that pure friendship is silence, purer thatn speech. For we speak for others, but we keep silent for ourselves.

Franz Kafka and the Aesthetics of Reading

‘Altogether,’ Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, ‘I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.’

'The only true Bolshevist writer'

Whilst in Yorkshire, I’ve been returning to certain passages of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. My old pencil marks and underlinings suggest a preoccupation with Marx’s concept of ‘the human’, in particular the ‘human’ as a possibility as opposed to an establishes fact. Also, the exemplary and utopian humanity of the writer:

The writer does not regard his work as a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. So little are they a ‘means’ for himself, and for others, that he will, if necessary, sacrifice his own existence to their existence.

The writer, even the most isolated writer, such as a Kafka, establishes him/her self as one concrete cell of a potential social reality in which the means>end relation of our current economic rationality has been reversed. Here, in the writer’s garret, is the organisation of life towards the endless end of creative self-fulfilment glimpsed.

This is what makes someone like Kafka – superficially the most a-social, isolated figure – deeply ‘political’. Kafka permits nothing to divert him from his writing, even ‘his own existence’. Certainly, he does not allow even an intimate relation (that between himself and Felice) to obstruct his writing, ingeniously and demonically diverting the relationship into an epistolary one. The relation exists only in and through writing, its creature, its theatre. But this inversion of the standard means-end relation arguably leaves its structure in tact: in doing this, the flesh and blood individual Felice becomes only a means to serve his writing.


At various points, Marx suggests that ‘humanity’ consists in going beyond and negating Nature – i.e., ‘Nature’ in the sense of the realm of necessity:

Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist.

Once pleasures and desires are not subservient to immediate need (ie immured in the realm of necessity, of the basic re-production of life) they can be ‘cultivated’, developed as ends in themselves. Sex as reproduction, food as negation of hunger: these are not-yet human. For most of history, the majority of the species has had most of its energy consumed in - and confiscated by – reproducing its basic conditions of existence. However, in certain places, among certain classes, groups of people were able to devote energies – surplus energies - to pleasures and activities which were enjoyed as ends in themselves. (Eg, once there is no longer the imperative to reproduce, sex can be divorced from utility and its inherent pleasures explored. This is human sexuality).

Indeed, the problem has always presented itself to societies of how to have energy left over for free creative activity. The ‘solution’ to this problem, hitherto, has been to divide society up into classes. One class is largely confined to the realm of necessity; the other can devote its time to the free play of the faculties.


However, the ‘free play’ available to the dominant class is invariably distorted and compromised by the exploitation through which it has been purchased. The price paid by others in immiseration and suffering means that the leisure and creativity of the dominant class is prevented from being fully human.


Now, when Marx comes to industrial society, it is clearly no longer merely a case of this division between the ‘inhuman’ realm of necessity and reproduction and the higher realm of creative fulfilment (albeit compromised and necessarily ‘ideological’ because of the price to be paid for its realisation). So, as a final fascinating pointer, this passage:

Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver… He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can demand the service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the condition sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.

*The title of the post is (apparently) Brecht's intriging description of Kafka.

Monsters Cannot be Announced

Some time ago I promised a post on monsters. Well, it exists as a draft. I'll post it next week when back from Yorkshire. So, in the meantime, here are some select quotes and images, starting with Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:



'Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light'

John Evelyn's Diary, 1660:

I saw in Southwark at St. Margarites faire, a monstrous birth of Twinns, both femals & most perfectly shaped, save that they were joyn’d breast to breast, & incorporated at the navil, having their armes thrown about each other …: It was reported quick in May last, & produced neere Turne-style Holbourn: well exentrated & preserved till now:
We saw also a poore Woman, that had a living Child of one yeare old, who had its head, neck, with part of a Thigh growing out about Spina dorsi: The head had the place of Eyes & nose, but none perfected. The head monstrous, rather resembling a greate Wenn; and hanging on the buttocks, at side whereoff, & not in the due place, were (as I remembred) the excrements it avoided …

Lyotard:

a libidinal monster with the huge fat head of a man full of warrior's thoughts and petty quarrels, and with the soft body of young amorous Rhenane--a monster which never achieves the realization of its unity, because of this very incapacity, and it is this 'failure' which is marked in the interminable theoretical suspense. .... the hermaphrodite, another monster in which femininity and masculinity are indiscernibly exchanged, thereby thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference"

To begin with, what is a monster? Etymology has a bit of a shock up its sleeve there:
‘monster’ comes from ‘monstrare,’ ‘to show.’ A monster is something which is shown,
pointed at, exhibited at fairs, and so on. [---] If you don’t want to be a monster, you’ve got to be like your fellow creatures, in conformity with the species.

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Deleuze:

I would imagine myself approaching an author from behind, and making him a child,
who would indeed be his and would, never- theless, be monstrous. That the child would be his was very important because the author had to say,in effect, everything I made him say. But that the child be monstrous was also a requisite because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slidings, splittings, secret dis- charges which have given me much pleasure.


Habermas: The monstrous act itself was new. And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with their hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation. What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,



Hegel:

“The activity of distinction is the power and labor of understanding, of the most
wonderful and greatest, or rather of the absolute power. The circle in which it remains enclosed and contains its moments as substance, is the immediate and for that reason not wonderful relationship. But that accidental things separated from their own realm, things bound up which are truly real only in their context with others, that these achieve a genuine existence and a particulated [abgesonderte] freedom, is the monstrous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure I.”

A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation is at once rewarded with a certain understanding... Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existing patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech .... Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the world coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

Herbert Marcuse

An interesting and timely tribute to Herbert Marcuse here, with excellent links - eg this little clip of Marcuse speaking.

A Note on Notes on Rhetoric

re notes on rhetoric I was thinking it would be good to link to particular instances. So if readers encounter nice examples, email me or leave in comments box. Recent additions to the notes include:

Chorus It is axiomatic that your opponent always speaks as part of a ‘chorus’ or ‘company’, whereas you of course speak as an autonomous individual. Whereas your opponent merely chimes in with a consensus, you have the courage to speak out and tell it like it is - as is the case with all the others who support your position.

The Left (ii) An umbrella organization consisting exclusively of students on the one hand, and, on the other, middle-class people who like hosting dinner parties. Contrary to a lingering misconception, The Left has nothing to do with the working class, who are actually quite content with their lot.

Postmodern - use to refer to any jargon unfamiliar to you. Apparently the term has a more precise meaning, but this is only according to people who write in unfamiliar jargon.

Note

I'm off to Yorkshire for a few days. Light posting, probably.

Nonsense to live by...

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body 'will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

As someone once said: "nonsense isn't it? But nonsense to live and die by".

Wyndham Lewis

Picked up a lovely second hand copy of Wyndham Lewis’ The Demon of Progress in the Arts. Lewis is the subject of an interesting early book by Jameson, who contends that Lewis’s ‘reactionary’ viewpoint nonetheless, precisely as reactionary, offers a critical vantage point from which to think about capitalism and the arts. Anyway, here are a couple of quotations on the theme of the New in modernism. It’s wrong, I think, but productively wrong:

In the eighteenth and in the seventeenth centuries there was the homogeneity of the discipline, the like-thinking of a classical norm. The turning point was political; the era of political revolution was followed by the era of perpetual revolution in the arts. Half-way through the last century the revolutionary zest, the turmoil of schools, the roaring of slogans and watchwords, began to assume a crazy intensity. But at present, halfway through the twentieth century, revolution, of a visual kind, appears to have stabilised at a point which is as far as it is possible to go technically, without disappearing altogether – without the arts committing suicide. There are several schools on the continent which the slightest push would tip over the blankness of the great zero.

For the last hundred years the art student has found himself at the centre of a brawl between old and new, assailed by the claims of schools or of leading artists to be ahead in the race, or to possess some secret of technical up-to-dateness..

The mercurial masters of the budding century had to give the student mass a new sensation every few years, or even, if they felt they were losing ground, every few months, by going red, or by going blue.

Reading List

A piece by John Berger in yesterday's Observer on the London bombings.

A belated link to the Kafka Diaries, now on the blogroll.

Jacqueline Rose's new book, The Question of Zion was reviewed in this Satruday's Guardian. It looks worthy of serious attention. Anyway, there's a chapter available online here. Here is an excerpt:

In May 2004 Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and take out the settlements was defeated in a poll of his party, Likud. "If, God forbid, there is a disengagement," states Nissim Bracha of Gush Katif, one of the key settlements in Gaza designated by the plan, "I am going to destroy everything."22 For Hagi Ben Artzi, religious Zionist and member of Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful), a national disaster is approaching: "And not an ordinary disaster, but in monstrous proportions--the collapse of the process of Jewish redemption."23 To remove one settlement is to destroy not just the spiritual foundations of Zionism, not just the State of Israel, but the whole world. A minimal return of land--enacted unilaterally, without negotiation with the Palestinians, and promising nothing even vaguely close to a viable Palestinian statehood--is a violation of the Torah. Ben Artzi will commit himself to mesirut nevesh, or total devotion (when asked, he does not object to the analogy with the Islamic concept of martyrdom).

Catastrophe will be met with catastrophe. The word of God transcends the laws of state. "We have another partner in these decisions," Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party explained, as he threatened to withdraw from the coalition in response to Sharon's plan, "the master of the universe. We must show the master of the universe that we are willing to sacrifice our souls for the land."24 According to one strand of Jewish thought, God's personal dignity requires the redemption of Israel. Without it, his name is profaned.25 Ariel Sharon is guilty of defilement. Behind the rhetoric we can recognize the signs of more prosaic forms of disgust. "That this beautiful place will become the home of Arabs," states Ofra Shoat of Bdolah (another threatened settlement in Gaza), "This is something I can't digest."26

These voices are not representative of the whole of Israel--far from it; more than half of the nation supported Sharon's disengagement plan. But today in Israel, catastrophe has become an identity. Ha'aretz feature writer Doron Rosenblum entitles a recent article "Cashing In on Catastrophe," or "how it comes about that every event and/or terrorist attack 'only proves', and even reinforces, what we already thought anyway."27 In a cruel twist, horror, however genuinely feared, redeems Israel's view of itself.

A Note on Enlightenment

Paradoxically, the crisis of Enlightenment arose from within, and indeed from its most cherished principles. The problem is that this principle is self-reflexive. If reason must subject all beliefs to criticism, it must also subject its own tribunal to criticism. To exempt its tribunal from scrutiny would be nothing less than ‘dogmatism’, accepting beliefs on authority, which is the very opposite of reason. The criticism of reason therefore became the meta-criticism of reason. If the Enlightenment was the age of criticism, the 1790s were the age of meta-criticism. All the doubts about the authority of reason, which are so often said to be characteristic of our ‘post-modern’ age, were already apparent in late eighteenth-century Germany.

From Frederick Beiser’s Hegel.

[This being, incidentally: An elementary lesson on the Enlightenment and its necessary supplement of self-doubt, and on how, contrary to the vain cat-calls made by sundry (philosophically illiterate) skull-heads, this self-doubt is not simply synonymous with some nebulous entity called ‘post-modernism’, this last being so often little more than an opaque gas compounded of the atoms of indignation and disgusted/ frustrated grunts of those who are prevented from grasping anything lying outside their drastically foreshortened purview of the world on account of their being chained to the ballast of Common Sense and stuffed with pre-digested journalese pap. Gracias]

See also Alphonse's post.

Eyeless In Gaza

Innumerable things, but for example, this article, or Matt's post, led to the following reflection:

We often commend in an academic way, or for reasons of cultural or literary distinction, phrases or concepts which we make no attempt to actually take at their word, let alone put into practice. How many of us, for example, will invoke the Benjaminian line about history been written by the victors, without really thinking about how this is true even now in the present, and what has to be done to wrest events away from their embodiment in official accounts, or, indeed, simply from oblivion, from willed amnesia.

The vanquished and the relatively powerless, on the other hand, denied even their own names (note the scare quotes still used by some in refering to the Palestinians) and stories (again, the nakbah of the Palestinians), are relentlessly accused of seemingly endemic mendacity and malice. The media is said to be dominated by their representatives. If a reporter or historian uses such sources he is necessarily 'biased', since he has not tried to 'verify' them - ie submit them to others who are judged capable of verification. Some time ago, I responded to one such 'unverified report' as follows:

"Who can verify these stories?" The fact that we cannot verify them (because those who would verify such stories are not granted legitimacy, because the
‘legitimate’ scribes will not grant them verification), that official accounts have no interest in their verification or even registration, that History, written by the victors, does not feel answerable to such stories and can let them spill into oblivion with impunity, that even to draw attention to such stories is met by accusations of unacceptable complicities, that one is re-directed to more 'worthy' items and suddenly deafened by ideologues screaming for 'context'- all this is of course precisely the problem.

____

'But of course, Benjamin was writing about a different era, about the 1930's, whereas today.. '

"whereas today": thus every generation slips into the arrogant and indolent belief that "there has been history, but there is no longer any," and the still incendiary ideas of the past are treated as so many antiquarian puzzles or stages in a history now complete.

enbee, An interesting exchange between Alph & Alain on the subject of the West Bank and other things here.

Rallying to the Cause

Why did the house go up in flames? Because it was made of wood, or because of an arson attack? Or because of an insurance claim? Choose one only. As you’ll all know, even way back in the day, solid ol’ Aristotle distinguished four levels of causality (ha, only four?): material, efficient, formal, final, if I remember aright. When it comes to certain tings, tho’, there can only be the one cause, for sure, and in single and peculiar instances things can be only their own cause, spinning round and round in their own wee tautology, and the curses of Sycorax on anyone who says otherwise. Like, for instance, the only cause of football hooliganism is the hooligans. So if there’s a footy match between two fierce rivals, and the security is really lax, and the barriers are all broken, and a horrid spat breaks out, then this is only and always attributable only to the hooligans, and to refer to any other level of causality is insensitive and perhaps wicked. And the historians, when they come to explain the hooliganism of the 1980's will doubtless also say that the only proper explanation is that there existed many hooligans. Anyway, please insert other examples as you see fit.

Oh Monstrous!

I hope to write something on monsters and the monstrous, as discussed here. In the meantime, do consult this (aborted?) work-in-progess Encyclopedia of the Marvelous, the Monstrous, and the Grotesque, it contains an eclectic number of entries, and definitions such as this:


Acephalous. 'Having no part of the body specially organized as a head' .

Lacanian Dictionary

An appendix has been added to the Critical Dictionary - 'Towards a Further Understanding of Lacan'. Again, notational and initially just for my own use, so don't expect anything comprehensive.