Boo-Hurrah for the Enlightenment

One should always try and rescue words from the work they are made to do in the current rhetorical marketplace, to set aright what stupidity and polemic have turned upside down or reduced to convenient and misleading abbreviation. . One presently rather overworked term is ‘Enlightenment’.

The Virtual Stoa has some questions about the term. He writes:

I think it's worth having answers to questions like these -- otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for "the Enlightenment" (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that'd be a shame.

The conditional tense is presumably ironic. But if Chris or anyone thinks that the polemicists who have reduced 'Enlightenment' to a cheap catchphrase just need a few hours in the library, or that the said phrasemongers would welcome enlightenment as to the meaning of Enlightenment, that they actually care about this as a historical or philosophical question, then we are dealing with something akin to a category error.

It will then become evident

The tribunal of reason comes not to terrorise the unenlightened with an external doctrine or fixed measure, but to squint at it sideways until its kernel of truth can be discerned. It does not present the world with an altogether new principle, but allows it to discover the meaning of its existing principles. It compels a mystified humanity to go beyond itself, not by starting again from degree zero, but by a more rigorous form of fidelity. See the following Enlightenment document:

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be – as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion – to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

Balzac on Coffee

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. ....... coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. ...Coffee changes over time. Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended. For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power. When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days. Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. ...this coffee falls into your stomach ... it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder. ...When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more,... you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie. The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing... One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state ... some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. ... We found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

I'm curious.. has anyone tried Balzac's 'brutal method'?

note on method 3

"I believe it is axiomatic that a philosophy which does not include within itself a theory of its own particular situation, which does not make a place for some essential self-consciousness along with consciousness of the object with which it is concerned, which does not provide for some basic explanation of its own knowledge at the same time that it goes on knowing what it is supposed to know, is bound to end up drawing its own eye eithout realising it."

Again with the Zizek

In the email this morning: the Winter edition of the Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory contains an mp3 interview with Zizek. Meanwhile, Jodi ponders the extent to which Z. has become the mere vendor of his own reified thoughts.

Tell me about your Motherland

The Enlightenment and its Romantic aftermath gave birth to two doctrines distinguished only by the letter s.* The first was that people had the right to self-determination; the second was that peoples had such a right. The former belief is the keystone of modern democracy, and indeed of socialism; the second is a piece of romantic mystification, a fact which has not prevented a good many on the political Left from endorsing it. Nor has its philosophical basis been much examined in the standard literature on nationalism.

from: Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism and the Case of Ireland".

Can you psychoanalyse A People and not be complicit with this 'romantic mystification'???

petit aspect a

It can be rhetorically useful to assert that an event/policy is identical with a particular 'positive' consequence/ aspect thereof, regardless of whether this was the primary purpose of the policy. Objecting to the event is nothing more or less than objecting to this single aspect. The carpet bombing of the village has stopped the operations of the terrorist cell, therefore 1) this action is henceforth deemed 'the removal of the terrorist cell' & 2) those objecting to this policy are simply 'those who wished to see the terrorist operations continue'. As with other rhetorical strategies, sheer repetition can more than make up for sheer vacuity.

Morning Reading

Jonathan L. Beller on Deleuze & Cinema etc, via comments at Le Colonel Chabert.

And L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze

A(nother) note on rhetoric

If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc

Say things like:

Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??

Talks

Zizek's master class on Lacan at Birkbeck college.

Ranciere at the ICA, 27th March.

Letters

In relation to an earlier post on letters and letters writing, it is probable that I was thinking of this:

"It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters we receive from a person should be more or less similiar to oneanother and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the preson we know to constitute a second personality"

Proust, ROTP, iii, 66.

Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low

National Homeland

'The Firbolgs-----‘bagmen’ in Irish-----were the mythical people who are said to have inhabited the island before the arrival of the Celts. If there were still any of them around today, they could no doubt claim prior and proper possession of the place, in resistance to Celtic colonialism.'

From Terry Eagleton, Nationalism and the Case of Ireland.

Dropped out of the calendar

I always attributed the phrase 'a day that had dropped out of the calendar' to Walter Benjamin, but I've almost certainly misremembered it. He said something to that effect, although it was, I think, in a revolutionary and historical context. But every year there are days which seem to have 'dropped out of the calendar', by which I mean only two things:

1) A day like today, in February, when I can walk down the street without a coat, sit out on the balcony reading, breathing in what feels almost like spring air. So it's like a Spring day, or a promise of that, interpolated into February.



2.) A day which doesn't fit its designated name. So, on or near Christmas for example, people will say 'it feels like a Sunday' or simply 'what day is it?' But in particular, and these are curiously among my favourites, those days that fall between the end of Christmas and the beginning of the New Year - days which seem to have no place, supernumerary days, where time seems to pause, idle days but without guilt, for time itself is stalling not you. These days are, in time, what a railway station is spatially.

2 Interviews

Both lucid and interesting. This, with Lacan (from 1957); and this (via A Gauche) with Badiou.

Here is Badiou on Zizek, which I quote partly because of my (near) agreement with it, partly becuase of what I take to be the twinkle of humour in it:


I think that the brilliant work of Žižek is something like the creation of a conceptual matrix that has the power to shed new light on a great field of cultural facts: movies, books, sexual differences, sexual practices, psychoanalysis, and so on. And so I read Žižek as a strange and completely new composition, the composition of a conceptual nucleus between Lacan and German Idealism. He is an absolutely singular unification of Lacan and Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. With this sort of conceptual nucleus, with this conceptual matrix, Žižek can interpret anything in the world. You can ask him, ‘What do you think about this horrible movie?’ And he will have a brilliant interpretation that is much better than the actual movie because his conceptual matrix is very strong and very convincing.

As if..

Last week I had to assess some student presentations. One student gave an interesting talk about ‘Virtual worlds’, a cyberspace phenomenon I hadn’t really been aware of. These are fictional or imaginary worlds given graphic realisation online. They are not copies of particular real locations; nor are they necessarily fantastic (comic-book scifi escapism). Some generic hotel, bar or beach would be typical, it seems. Computer users enter into and ‘hang out’ in these spaces, through some iconic on-screen representation of themselves. However, it is not a game as such - there is no specific task or grid of rules, the time of a visit is not pre-determined. It’s simply a space to 'hang out', but from which the body is exempt.

Now according to the student, people apparently purchase objects or space within these worlds. A virtual island has recently been bought for a significant sum. One enters into a world which is in some sense fictional, and yet there is the desire for and possibility of possession.

This led to some random thoughts on fictional worlds and the category of the ‘fictional’ in general. Of course in one sense, a novel by Dickens or Proust (or whoever) constructs a recognisable ‘world’, similar to but distinct from that of the reader. One enters into this little universe, which has its peculiar feel, a whole phenomenology of characteristic ‘experiences’, the illusion even of textures and odours. Reading Proust or Dickens is to dwell in this world. And withdrawing from such a world can be an abrupt and vaguely disappointing transition. Not wanting to put the book down is among other things a desire to cleave to a certain world, to abide with and in it. It, too then is a ‘virtual world’. But at no stage, when we read the description of a clock on the mantelpiece, of an old sturdy chair do we, or can we say ‘I want to buy that’. Of course, it’s ridiculous. But when we talk about fictional objects, it would seem that not all fictional objects are equally fictional.



I wonder if readers might recommend something on this subject, ie, a possible taxonomy of fictions and degrees of fiction, including legal and political examples. In the film Michael Collins, DeValera, after the 1916 Rising, but before the Irish Free State, DeValera is made to say “We must act as if the Republic is a fact”. I’m unsure whether it’s an actual quote but the idea is that of the enabling fiction. Acting in fidelity to the fiction produces real and otherwise unrealisable effects. What we might question is how this Republic is any less fictional than the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” which it would replace? Is the latter not itself a legal fiction supported and made solid by law, bureaucratic structures and military force? Now before Ireland gained any kind of independence, DeValera also forms, and heads, a ‘cabinet’ with designated ministers. Is this cabinet qua cabinet a fictional entity? Does it await the nod of a posterity - which it also helps bring about - to make it ‘real’? But if it is a fictional entity it is obviously not so in the same way as Mme Verdurin’s Drawing room, or the ‘Elsinore’ that a theatre audience (agree to) see before them on the stage.

These are banal points. But what would interest me is a book which dealt with the category of the fictional without confining itself to the literary, and which when it did look at literary-fictional worlds saw them in relation to the that inescapable quota or fiction which is part of the very texture of (and not the opposite of) reality.

If you knew for certain..

In the pub with G., remembering from university those ‘thought experiments’ much beloved by certain philosophers of the ‘analytical’ persuasion. Such as: if you knew for certain that torturing Mr X would yield knowledge of the whereabouts of 7 hostages who would otherwise die, would it be legitimate..

G. thinks these are valid tools of philosophical enquiry. I reply that they invariably seem to involve some impossible posited ‘certainty.’ Since this certainty is an abstraction, it can surely have little or no practical moral value. It appears almost as a tool forcing you to accept the conclusion in question.. ‘If you knew for certain that feeding a live human being to some rats would prevent nuclear bombs being dropped on every capital city in the world…”. These curious hypotheticals are like ruses permitting some particular fantasy-scene of cruelty or whatever. And with the alibi of disinterested theoretical speculation.

Easter 1916; or, the politics of weather erosion.

Let’s begin with a possible addition to the ‘notes on rhetoric’: if your opponent proposes a stark moral choice, you reply 'if only reality were that simple’ and accuse him/her of blinkered binary thinking or whatever. If the shoe is on the other foot, your opponent is unnecessarily complicating (sophistry, over-analysis) the simple reality of the matter. In both cases there is an appeal to a ‘reality’ that is either being obscured through theory and over-analysis or forced into an artificial or schematic framework. Reality can be impossibly messy or obtrusively obvious, depending on your rhetorical purpose.



This rhetorical appeal - to a reality that debunks our cherished myths or mere theories - is commonplace. I've been reading a number of recent articles on the 1916 rising in Ireland, the subject of a recent book by Charles Townshend. Although these reviews ranged from the frankly shrill and silly to the academically serious, they all at some point invoked the sobriety of reality against various dangerous imaginary intoxicants. (Always tricky move in the case of history, as the ‘reality’ in question no longer exists. )

First, the historian Mathew Kelly in the LRB. It’s a detailed and interesting review, but here is Kelly quoting from the Proclamation of the Republic:

“The Irish republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irish woman” .

‘The reality’, he adds ‘was much more complicated’. An odd remark for two reasons. It is surely little more than a banality that 'reality will be more complicated' than an engaged historic actor can grasp. (Why would we need historians otherwise?). Secondly, the Proclamation was presumably a political-rhetorical act of a certain kind, not an intended 'representation of reality'. Of course ‘reality’ is ‘more complicated’ than a pre-emptive rhetorical strike. (Arguably, the Proclamation was a peculiar variant of ‘Performative speech act’).. Here we have the gesture of debunking but with no intellectual content.

Undoubtely the worst of the articles on offer was Martin Kettle’s in the Guardian. Again, the usual device:

“At the heart of all recent refusals to bow the knee to the celebration of heroic violence has been a belated recognition of the reality of the Northern Ireland experience”.

1916 is an example of such ‘celebration’, ‘but’, he intones [ha]:

“there is a long and dignified tradition of resistance  to the fetishizing of 1916. it stretches in an unbroken line from Eoin Macneill’s original attempt to countermand the rising”

It is difficult to see how MacNeill could have been de-fetishizing what had not yet been fetishized, but in any case the point is wrong. MacNeill’s objections to the rising were strategic. He thought military action by the rebels must be in response to some provocation or clampdown by the British. (Does Kettle imagine that MacNeill thought 'I'd better countermand the rising before it gets bloody fetishised'?). But once more, ‘fetish’ is there simply to suggest quasi-religious obsession. In terms of historical veracity or logic, it is nonsense. Kettle’s illogic and distortion result from his determination to see dangerous romantic myth on the one hand and sober reality on the other. He also telescopes the past through the present in an attempt to produce spurious journalistic relevance:

“It is also the legacy of a state born in martyrdom and violence, created around the romance of the deed, whose origins are steeped in the pseudoreligious cult of the transformative blood sacrifice and purging authenticity of the acts of a committed minority that al-Qaida or Hamas could recognise.”

This is of course absurd hyperbole. What modern state has not been 'born in violence'? (and gone on to celebrate its violent inception). But it's worth noting how many writers stress the 'blood sacrifice' stuff when writing about the rising. (Kettle also throws in 'cult' to suggest some kind of brainwashed messianism). In fact the only rebel who uttered such rhetoric was Pearse, and though this rhetoric may have proved effective in certain respects, it would be rather silly to think this represented a common ideology. James Connolly, and the Irish Citizen Army, for example, certainly had no such belief in 'blood sacrifice'. And mention of Connolly should remind us also that that Rising comprised an alliance between two groups, the IRB and the Citizen Army, not knitted together by a single political doctrine but by the belief that only force would effectively end British Rule. The elevation of Pearse's peculiar Christological speeches and poetry to some kind of representative status is, then, itself a transparently political manoeuvre, which would have political violence (when used by one 'side') inevitably tagged as regressive, irrational, romantic and, more to the point, pathological.

Finally, even the eminent Roy Foster is not exempt from a weaker variation of this kind of ploy. Here he delivers a killer punch:

'Nowadays, the icons of 1916 are features on the Dublin tourist trail, which includes a "Rebel Tour" -even if the "bullet-holes" on the GPO's pillars have recently been declared to be nothing more than weather erosion'

What exactly is the force of that ‘even if’, other than a meaningless bathos? Should the tour now be abandoned? I have read at least one historian make a persuasive case for the bullet holes thesis – why is this automatically trumped by the anonymous ‘declaration’? Presumably because weather erosion is a factum brutum, bullet holes are an ‘interpretation’; one is simply present in reality, the other a sentimental projection; ‘weather erosion’ has the prosaic certainty of science and nature on its side, bullet holes form part of some mythological narrative. (The ‘rebel tour’ is in fact conducted by a published historian, and is certainly no exercise in icon- or hagiography)

Were the rebels inspired to violent action by Romantic myth, or was a certain rhetoric enlisted (by some) in the service of a violence already deemed necessary. In any case, the ease with which phrases like ‘romantic myth’ spin off the tongue should be sufficient grounds for caution. Such clotted, automatic phrases are themselves often the symptoms of real 'myth' at work. It would be convenient if myths always resided in the past rather than the present, if they belonged to the pre-modern rather than the contemporary, it they were never on the side of liberal democracy, if the latter were simply synonymous with enlightenment.. But this is just wishful thinking. The significant (and toughest) myths are the ones so embedded in our present that they can pass themselves off as the wide-eyed presentation of the real.

Joining Hands

Over at ReadySteadyBook, a review of a new Memoir of Samuel Beckett. It mentions in passing that Beckett considered writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnet 71:


No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.

cf this from Keats:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Please see Ellis Sharp's fully justified corrective to my lazy cutandpaste of an online version of Shakespeare's sonnet.

A new rhetorical trick

Thus, a new rhetorical device is given us: let us call it the Galloway.

The Virtual Stoa was ridiculing Stephen Pollard, who’d been forced to retract a potentially libellous post on Interpal (the usual). To cut a long story short, one of the comment-box rejoinders went something like:

‘Do you really want to be in the same camp as Galloway on this one?’

Delightful. And can be pushed to absurd limits: ‘Small dogs should not be thrown in the air and volleyed’ ‘Oh Really, you’re not concerned that this places you in the same camp as Galloway?" Needless to say, for 'Galloway' you can substitute a designated bogeyman of your choice.

Nb. A lone emailer demanded to know why I ‘defend Galloway’. In case anyone else is proposing to ask me such a question, my answer to him was: “Find one positive word about Galloway on this blog and we can talk’.