D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick

It is a great book.

At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won't do.

And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he's not sure of himselœ And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

The artist was so much greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical- transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or any- thing else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

One wearies of the grand serieux. There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.

In his 'human' self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great.

It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things...(full here)

courtesy of John Pistelli

Lazy Sunday

The Alcoholic in Chief, and then...

there's this...is it just me or does one of those guys look very much like the now-legendary freestyle donut-warrior?

hobbyhorse, anti-Enlightened

This just in: FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA WAS REALLY NOT THAT GOOD. Yes, the originals are still better.

It's true, we've linked to things like this before. And now the most tired and tiresome debate in academic history is producing––in what must surely qualify as a miracle after decades of sucking on nature's pipe––indeed fresh juice. We could go further, of course, and point to a real, living example easily enough (no Real-ly, we could). Just as easy as the next fellow, in fact. Meanwhile, "Nobody needs French Theory," so sayeth Baudrillard, and like all mail-order mystics and dime-a-dozen pap gurus, his words they do carry an indulgent grain of truth. In any case John Holbo will be thrilled, we can be sure of it. (And no, it is not without some bemusement, we confess, that we observe the latter, irenic chief anti-Theory/[T]heory investor, caught unawares having been scooped twice in one week, first by one Michel Foucault and then by one Slavoj Zizek....the Rule of Affability, she dictates that we can only assume the latter response, no doubt the painstaking fruition of "serious study" of Zizek's better work, was far more Socratic than it was revealing.)

Oh, poor Socratic tick, you say, how thy smiling loophole, "I was only making fun of myself" doth find its cousin in the "I was only joking" for which the "Theorists" are forever castigated.

However, now that the 1970s and 1980s are probably over, and literature departments have had ample time to either earn some philosophic chops and genuine humility or risk being mocked off the podium altogether (it is only a matter of time; in the grip of this backlash we are forever ebbing and regressing––but don't think to hard about it, these things are all inevitable), well let's go off, shall we? Off to study some Francophone philosophy while we still can, shall we? And with someone interested in reading the philosophers themselves, that is, if we are truly lucky. Perhaps even in another language. Their own, for example. Poetry and literature too, absolutely, but please none of that Baudrillardian vomit. No, it was not your professors' faults, but you people have ruined literature departments for good. We mean it; that's it, man, we're back to The Snowman age again, Christian morality in Frost (yes, we remember that movie too) and counting caesurae, enjambments, alliteration and rhyming couplets; thanks for nothing. Don't get us wrong; we were brought up on this stuff, and we love it dearly. But the way things are looking now, if we're very lucky, in a good twenty years poststructuralism may even be discovered. Oh, how the image eternally returns, and the shape of the poem itself is so very snowman-like, almost an allegory of itself (one might someday say!) but Nietzsche he is long dead, and Bachelard was just some hobo in a Santa suit. And anyway none of them spoke English, and probably their ears were frozen (philosophers, as we all know, cannot sing).

The would-be genre historians of "Theory" are still all 'wong', of course (hell, in Russia they call it "filosophia," or so we hear; perhaps someone shall write a book condemning that soon enough), but let us leave them, for now. Condemned as they are to tread water upside down; happily lecturing the fishes, they are also drowning.

Still, Dear Lord, the sheer volume of bubbles they will release! Both goggled and madly googling, treading upside down as they address the same old gathered fishes (to be fair, those must be magnifying goggles) and gossiping so very freely about the whales! Our Vermont neighbor Greenblatt, sure, he's close enough for Derrida, as is Eagleton for Wittgenstein. These are exotic fish indeed, if one's target is actual philosophy. But so on they tred, splashing and quoting so much they can hardly hear themselves talk (noses, eternally pinched), but confident nontheless, that their books will eventually sell well enough, condemned as they are between the trivial and the obvious, and something they would rather still talk nothing about (let's call it for now the sun, shining on an upturned ass).



All by way of saying that I'm supremely grateful this year for some extraordinary pagan presence.

And...then...some and some...

the best thing written about DFW in some time

...is here, in case you missed it. Simply spot on. I wonder if SEK agrees. -MAC

..

this smart...and this very funny.

...

I thought this was very interesting.

Plus ça change

....



Time to pick up some threads from back here shortly. (Sorry again, about all the fine comments being flushed, but I suppose some things are inevitable. This space has never really aspired to a popular audience anyway, at least not without serious disquiet and reservation, call it snobbery if you want. But I do sound a bit boring in comparison. Everyone should, I think, be forced to re-read their own blog at least once a year. A note to whoever's been downloading, please be advised by my pride that it's ancient and unworthy and long since revised stuff, there.)

note to self

Do not give correct email address to Amazon.com, ever.

Either that or Google is just selling us off, in pieces, as we all expected they eventually would. Spam filter my ass. Really, is there anything less interesting than spam?

Cheney Administration Votes "Go Fuck Yourself" #722

Merry Fucking Christmas, and we'll target gay pride rallies as terrorist plots if we damn well feel like lying about it. So this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back, eh? Undercover feds nostalgic for cointelpro days, staging arrests to provoke the crowd to justify tear-gassing them, and snapping photos from unmarked cars, etc? I must say, even if the NYTimes sat on these stories for a year, it hardly comes as any revelation, at least not to any of those who actually attended these protests. Yes, that's right, I confess to looking kindly on one of those "potential terrorists" insofar as he protested this war before it began as opposed to two years too late, and only when politically feasible. And I further confess that on more than one occasion he may have pointed out the aspiring photojournalist undercover gents, on more than one occasion as they sat in their speedy unmarked cars, to kind middle-aged yuppie folks concerned about the sea turtles as they deigned to walk across the street, on their merry way to and from exercising their legal right to peacable assembly (despite the very latest in police provocation) and to that dreaded once-revolutionary force known as freedom of speech. (This fellow I know, even his blond dog was a potential terrorist, wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I'm more loyal than Lieberman, Daschle, Clinton...etc.") Pointed them out, he did, half a decade ago, as they sat there snapping pictures and telling jokes.

But anyone who's read anything about the 60's era knows that it was only a massive public outcry that instigated all the reforms in 70's in surveillance laws, reforms explicitly designed to protect these rights (while in reality the insidious military-prison-industrial backlash--including the despicable torture of modern-day slaves, otherwise known as US inmates--has happily quadrupled itself, unabated). But whatever nudges the decrepit and rusting wheels of justice along at this stage, hey, let's have it. They blatantly broke the law this time, yet still expect us to blindly entrust the constitution to pathological liars. Just when you think this all-war all-petty-emotional-blackmail all-the-time schtick can't possibly get any more ridiculous, it does. That would be Chutzpah, folks; spelled "real balls." When the alternative is Lieberman, I'll grant you that it's not exactly a tough sell.

Harold Bloom waxes blunt; New discoveries in Sovietology; And better news elsewhere, particularly from the global south (narcosphere has more).

ReadySteadySymposium

Do check out Mark Thwaite's Books of the Year Symposium (of which I'm greatly honored to be a part, if slightly embarrassed to be placed, straggler-fasion, on top). Truly, there is not enough time in the day, nor days in the week..

..

I've done a petty and futile, shameless thing.

oh dear...

A bit of (feminist) Theory, and NPR self-destructs. All their pat humanistic clichés and softly-smug male condescension, it comes a crumblin' down.

Typepad, meanwhile....well.

During routine maintenance of our network and storage systems last night, we experienced an issue with our primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored. [oops!] We are currently running diagnostics on the device, and working to restore your data as soon as possible. Verifying data can be a slow process and will take time. [i.e., all day]

In the meantime we are currently deploying backup copies of your weblogs from approximately 2 days ago. [actually, six] This is what will be displayed for your blog. [weird] The TypePad application is currently unavailable, which means that users will not be able to log in, and visitors to weblogs will not be able to post comments. We are working to bring TypePad back online as soon as possible.

We appreciate your patience as we work through these issues. [We also have no way to transfer ownership, and our spam filter just plain doesn't work.]

Say, who knows anything about WordPress?

John Whitelegg issues the sole dissent in a debate on environmentalism and capitalism:

At the core of this debate I am sure that Jonathan [Porritt] and I share a vision of what a sustainable community, town, city, region or world could look like. I don’t think we will get there by putting all our eggs in the basket of capitalism. Capitalism, after all, has given us slavery, small children working down coal mines, death and disease from pollution, and appalling disregard for people and communities – including my own family and community when cotton mills shut down in Oldham, Lancashire, in the early 1960s. Such depredations continue around the world today, often invisible to the eye even of the most informed or sensitive of observers.

This destructive, unsustainable dynamic has to stop. The process of stopping it will involve all those things that capitalist do not like (including regulation and taxation); changes in local government to give local communities and local people more power over what happens on their “patch”; and the kind of social change that ended slavery and brought down the Berlin wall. I have absolutely no doubt that this social change will take place and if I have my way it will be sooner rather than later.

ipop, you pop, we pop (and look to France)

Thinking of Zizek's recent comments (he has some funny things to say about Rawls, indeed)...but also about another student rebellion (and a genuinely populist one at that--in eclectic composition not unlike the genuinely international, though unfortunately-dubbed "anti-globalization" movement, whose roots are traceable back to Seattle, etc.)...

Meanwhile Negri: "This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants."

Zizek's calls the recent riots in France a "zero-level protest," or "a protest that wants nothing" in speaking of the "cycles of violence" identifiably linked to the neoliberal state (which produces its own excess and backlash, etc.) Violence being de facto an admission of relative impotence. But in his conception, if "post-ideology" means anything it is the context of this certain nihilism.

Might it be at all valuable, or worthwhile, to point out the deep roots of this alleged "post?" After all, what has come to be cited and invokded as "May '68" was by no means a purely, or clearly, utopian confluence of identity politics or politically-targetted and precise rebellion, judging from Blanchot and similar on the matter...Zizek opposes the recent riots to May '68, but his argument (such as it is) only serves to unite them. One wonders if he's even read much of the history (and philosophical fall-out), or whether he's borrowing yet another page from those who have patiently explored these questions in more detail (for instance, Nancy).

So what does this conception of a "post-ideology" (or a post-politics) actually mean? And in describing too quickly a return to such things as "an operatic staging of the other" does one not also risk prescribing their inevitability? Is it just that Zizek does a disservice to the nuances of his own argument (is there more room for hope outside of this banal mimetic or sacrificial indemnification), or is it that he simply doesn't have much of an argument to begin with? Nothing wrong with that of course (his comment about philosophers rightly (re)posing the questions is well-taken, and somewhat uncharacteristic perhaps), but maybe it's high time to hold Z. accountable for the seductive but pat maneuvers he makes, in this his apparently full-time capacity as a "public intellectual."

I don't mean to merely degrade him, of course. He is without question one of the most unconvential, engaging and brilliant theorists today. But as is the case with most popular spokesmen figures, those more familiar with the actual history (and in his defense, perhaps Z. would say that he was only citing popular history, I don't know), cannot help but raise their eyebrows, incredulous...still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Anyway, this makes many of the same arguments Z. does. There are some condescending overtones there, mixed in with equal parts romanticization and apocalypticism. It's all a bit redundant, indulgent and quite lazy. But then I also tend to think that Baudrillard should have long ago been hung from the nearest available billboard:

But it is also a movement without strategy, a movement more prone to gaze at itself on television screens, drawing its ephemeral strength from the media coverage it produces, and thus depending on the self-censorship of information put in place to avoid "the telethon effect." It is a movement nevertheless more Luddite than playful, sustaining itself at the source of real despair, but lacking utopia, its horizon limited by bars and block towers.

For sociologists, journalists and certain revolutionaries, this movement is incomprehensible since it resists the well-oiled arguments they use to explain social movements: neither social analysis, nor the study of the composition of class succeeds in defining its specificity.

These riots are made by an unidentifiable mob—rebellious bodies whose existence is reduced to bare necessity, and who have not found any other language than that of destructive gestures.

Let us not fool ourselves; in everyday life many of this mob are detestable; some are numbed by religion, many alienated by consumerism, or enthusiasts of masculine values, sharing with the masters of society the stupid worship of sport (some riots were suspended during televised football games). Many are contemptible in their behavior toward women—whose absence in the riots signals an unacceptable limitation. Most of this mob would certainly not be friendly to us.

What is remarkable, however—beyond them—is their revolt. Through their actual contradictions, they represent the dark face of a vengeful social unconscious held back for too long, as those in bygone days representing the “dangerous classes.” But, at the risk of plunging back even more bitterly in their poverty, it will be necessary for them to draw on the lessons of their recent experience in order to gain lucidity. Already they have seen at work the repressive role of the imams and of Islam, mere auxiliaries to the police— as is all religion. This movement still has to get rid of all forms of puritanical and masculinist morality so that women will join them as equals—like the women fire-raisers of the Paris Commune in 1871—to take an active part in all future stuggles. Likewise, they must have done with the stupid gang rivalry that nails them to their “territories” and deprives them of a mobile offensive. And finally, they must learn to choose more directly political targets.

In a society in which all previous forms of belonging, and therefore of associated consciousness, have been wiped out, these events testify to the eruptive and uncontrollable return of the social question, firstly under an immediately negative form, that fire—emblem of all apocalypses— symbolizes. Indeed, unlike the rebellions in Los Angeles in 1965 and in 1992, the population of the districts here did not massively join the rioters. And in contrast to May ‘68 neither poetry nor brilliant ideas are on the barricades. No wildcat strike is going to spread widely with these troubles. But the rulers have been give a good hotfoot and have been forced to unmask themselves.

A democracy which, in order to face up to a quantitatively limited movement (considering the number of participants), has been obliged to put back in force an old colonial law, but also to reveal its constituent deception: that is, where the police abuse their powers, the state of emergency gives to their abuse the legitimacy that it lacks. What we long ago called "individual freedom" is today known as the “discretionary power” of the cops.

In a flash, such warning lights have revealed—during these November nights—the return of a possibility that seemed to be lost: that of throwing power into a panic even when its forces are harassed in a disorganized manner through the whole territory by a handful of forsaken social casualties. From now on, we can imagine the strength of an uprising that would—beyond the inhabitants of the ghettos—include the whole population suffering from the rise of impoverishment, and would turn into civil war against the organs of capital and the state.

Beyond recent infernos presented as the very image of a nightmare, it is time that the dream of concrete utopia is raised anew.

Perhaps those such as Derrida's warnings about Benjamin (and an apocalyptic turn) are not to be taken so lightly.

Isn't it just possible that we're entering a more desperate, and more disenchanted stage of the necessary global protest against neoliberalism, marked also – though hopefully not equally – by episodes of localized populist outbursts (of the worst sort)? And the world ended in banality; Oy. Time to fight for some articulation.

Anyway, the funny bits on Rawls and operatic staging and the racist construing of the other during "Katrina" were all well and good, even if he still just gets it all from Derrida. The debate with Laclau (and 'Long Sunday) over populism has provided lots to think about.

vote, act

for Political Theory Daily Review. And if you haven't seen it already, the the Al Jazeera Staffer's blog is worth a look, and link (don't believe me--watch Control Room). Yes, it's been mentioned once or twice before.

Alternatively, one could start reading Amy Goodman's latest book in the middle, on page 181, with the subtly-titled chapter, Killing the Messenger (you may email me if you desire a gmail account to access GoogleBookSearch).

Update: Meanwhile, the time of impeachment draweth ever nigh...

Ah, the affable and sinister salesmen, may they continue to inherit the world.

Rose

On the recent tribute to Gillian Rose (insert jealous remark #722 here). By all accounts, a writer worthy of serious attention (though maybe not for the next LS Symposium?--how the word doth fly, +1).

Also of great interest, a rather thorough review of Deconstruction and Democracy. This Matthias Fritsch ought to get himself one of them blog.

growth, expansion, good

I've added Leiter Reports to the blogroll (right there, smack dab between AvW and 'lenin). To make up for it, here's this which looks promising. Maybe it's my quarter-age showing, I don't know. One simply can't write off the analytic icks forever, now can one. After all, they do rule the roost. And my sources say things about the roost that would have you drooling on your bowtie, let me tell you. Planes to catch right and left, and affable brown-skinned people to cook your pasta for you and such. Maybe when the guest-bloggers leave, I'll antiseptically remove it, in a gesture sure to take the world by storm, and shake it to its very roots. There are still some good 'ol grudges, of course. Not to mention the more obvious things, and things (and things).

Chomsky watch

So I watched this thing a while 'go. Not to subscribe, without some reservation, to the cult of Chomsky, but... Dershowitz is an ass. Oliver Kamm meanwhile, is a nobody. Right then.

the well

Please see A on events in Australia. The news, or should one say "the newscycle," from everywhere, was unbearable today. The tone of course was set early enough. Three times this morning, just myself and my visible breath, hand-making wreaths in the greenhouse smelling of balsalm and sap (yes, I'm a hardened farmer these days), my eyes well up with tears. How else to describe that feeling of despair; a resevoir suddenly tapped. I lean on the table for a few seconds, and put my head on my arms. There are sizes of despair. These waves were semi-pleasant; warming far more than crippling, and they didn't last long. Just checking in, my heart. Tinged with the familiar feelings of profound powerlessness and ineffectivity. Also a glimpse of another sort of well, in the return to...inoperativeness and im-potentiality. For maybe the second time this year, NPR was good a bit better than too little too late. How refreshing to hear genuine outrage, people calling on Bush by name, calling him a liar. People not intimidated by the latest Patriot Act, obviously (and how poised we are, to repeat that movie...I don't usually do this but, sign the motherfucking petition, please.)

Another Benjamin

The photographer did not approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar, or with the advice of ethnographers and sociologists, but, as the publisher says, "from direct observation." It was assuredly a very impartial, indeed bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of Goethe's remark: "There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with its object that it becomes true theory." [...] The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order, and the more rigidly its individual components are locked together in their death struggle, the more creative--in its deepest essence a variant (contradiction its father, imitation its mother)--becomes a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful--that is its watchword. In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists, even when this photography's most dream-laden subjects are a forerunner more of its salability than of any knowledge it might produce. But because the true face of this kind of photographic creativity is the advertisement or association, its logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction. As Brecht says: "The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality."

-from "Little History of Photography"

necessary aversion

John, on 'bookslut' Jessa Crispin on Pinter (more on Pinter and teh populism here). His comments on Rumsflee, also good. Yesterday, I heard Rumsfeld referred to the terrorists as "injuns" before correcting himself. This would be the kind of lame, direct inter-blogging I used to loathe. I still do, really.

In other news (that becoming-universal medium the mediocrity (and uncertain future) of which Benjamin described so well, in that essay, you know the one--it has to do with literature and politics), the tireless Michael Bérubé responds to the insomniac culture wars of the day with:

After all, at one point in our recent history, in certain contexts, virile, heterosexual masculinity was signified by lots of makeup, tousled hair, platform shoes, leather-studded body suits, and screaming, high-pitched vocals. It’s a wacky, multiaccentual world out there, in which a Nortel ad can quote Lennon’s “Come Together” and the BJP can quote Donna Haraway. Get used to it.

This sort of thing apparently gets him quite a lot of visitors.

(Certainly one can intuit easily enough why it is so fashionable and so tempting, and in this stolen age of regressive fundamentalisms especially, to adopt the Anglo-analytic approach, a toolkit ready-made for problems that must be solved. Unfortunately, I was long ago seduced by the the dark side (a wonderful consequence of that first necessary rupture, back in high school I think it was). What can I say? I was always more interested in reading, and the contradictions inherent to the problems themselves (not least of all the problem of 'reading'), than in their resolution onto some inevitably trivializing, and often violent and reductive plane. Perhaps the answers that were required seemed obvious enough not to warrant an infinite neutralization of the sort that followed from the meticulous logical faith in abstractions (there are places for this sort of rigor, but not in reading literature, and as a wise man once said, it's seriousness kills me). One could still debate moral relativism with Richard Rorty, I suppose (and he's right about the straw man the analytics constantly string up, of course). But far more interesting, more literary things have been going on in the meantime (not to mention the poetics of phenomenology). And to seek to diminish the role of literature in addressing itself to these questions, however indirectly, is to dismiss a great heritage. Those who would rather talk in circles than tackle the question of literature's relation to the history of philosophy (and there is ample good material on the subject) are simply irresponsible. Either that or they haven't read enough John Barth, or enough international modernist literature. Or enough German and then French (granted, though, they may be sometimes cute).

Clearly if something of value in "Theory" or "literary theory" is to survive (speaking in the pop-institutional idiom), "it" will have to confront/seek to avoid this complicity with, or easy cooptation/bastardization by advertising. Nothing new there. Then again, last time I checked, the real Theory was being done, as always, by people who still read. There is precious little real Theory out there, yes (but the alternative is just as frozen as it was in the 1950's, if you want to compare rotten apples, and so continue to ignore the barrel). Agamben seems to think, following a certain more-messianic-than-Marxist Benjamin and perhaps contra Zizek (to continue this somewhat obsequious chesstalk), that it must be a resistance taking place from within, to some degree. I'm not so sure.)

And wood s lot links to a rather timely article (soundtrack may be found here) on another faith-based villain (that special one conservatives are always invoking in their ill-planned preemptive strike on Godwin's Law (incorrectly attributed here.)) (The s lot (honestly, wherelse to get your daily blogpulse, dear reader?) -also links to some interesting essays on Derrida, Kant and the 'death of philosophy,' including a certain rather important one.) Sorry for the relative silence around here; no profound statements (especially not about boredom) intended. Sorry also, for the less than literary post. Fuck politics; back to books and politics shortly.