essential things

A sunny afternoon spent devouring the Number Two Spring Issue of n+1, which arrived today. Or maybe this weekend, as I was away in New York visiting an old friend (a tradition of shared birthday celebrations, helium balloon competition - it hardly seems to matter she is three times my senior. A nonagenarian, she has finally stopped driving, so I bring her some vintage matchbox cars. She hands me an old phonograph and several hundred LPs, mostly Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Gilbert and Sullivan, Scottish Folksongs and pre-WWII German University Songs...)

N+1 is a truly exquisite publication. For philosophical verve, unsentimental, memoir-esque fresh fiction, cultural criticism, intelligent reviews and original, unmelodramatic writing - in short, for absolute modernity without the vodka ads - one couldn't really do much better. It is also quite funny, in a deliberately non-Eggersardian manner. Responsible to the deeper questions of literature without forsaking politics. Important blog people even think so. If you only subscribe to one magazine, and remain otherwise content with the substantial online offerings of litblogs, Postmodern Culture and Contretemps then well, you are in good company. You may subscribe for the price of a decent steak here.

I hope Marco doesn't mind me reproducing some excerpts from The Intellectual Situation: A Diary (which does seem to function almost as a manifesto, of sorts):

But it looks today like the happiness doctors have won. Totalitarian states enforced happiness through love of force, worship of terror, submergence in the mass. Liberal democracy was more easygoing about it, and that proved wiser. Pills keep us cheerful; sex is healthy exercise; violent light entertainment passes the time. Aldous Huxley wrote a letter to George Orwell right after 1984 appeared, in which he praised the Big Brother vision but had to say he thought his own prediction of the future would be a lot closer to the truth. Not a boot stomping on your face for all eternity, but a society in which preferring unhappiness - because you didn't want happiness by ersatz means - would be the totally unintelligible thing. We are told the terrorists hate our freedoms - but who was freer than those guys, riding around Afghanistan in pick-up trucks with Kalashnikovs? It's not our freedoms we're going to bring the peoples of the world. No, we're going to bring them our happiness...

[...]

They weren't wrong, the positivists - you didn't have to get very far into academic Idealism to see it was so much soft-boiled egg. The tragedy of analytic philosophy was the fact that it won so decisively in US philosophy departments - annihilating its traditionalist competition - at just the wrong time. It triumphed in the Sixties, when the actual convulsions of US society called for a renewed treatment of love, freedom, the other, politics, and history - "pseudo-problems" turned intensely real. It was nice to have John Searle so understanding of SDS at Berkeley, and Hilary Putnam chanting Maoist slogans at Harvard; but the kids in Paris had Foucault.

In fiction, nothing is so clear-cut...By the 1940s and 1950s, when newly professional critics ruled both the small literary journals and the universities, American greatness became a closed system. Because the critics had just solidified two different canons at the same time - an Old Testament of the American Renaissance (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman), and a New Testament of American modernism (James, Elito, Hemingway, Faulkner) - they didn't need to step outside it. It was type and antitype, the 1920s speaking to the 1850s and vice versa, accomplishing all things, and contemporary postwar writers were left out in the cold. The demands on new novelists, for a "Great American Novel" in the vein of these Gospels, became too great. The astonishing thing was that artists still occasionally delivered, as Ellison and Bellow each did once - but they were an end and not a beginning.
By the mid-'60s something crippling was happening to fiction, still quite hard to explain: articulate writers blamed the sheer craziness of American life (Roth) or the "exhaustion" of forms (Barth). There was the pressure of criticism, which could lead even a dyed-in-the-wool critic like Sontag to declare herself "Against Interpretation"; others pointed to academic writing programs and the group therapy of the workshop. In short order, 1968 arrived, and the chaotic Seventies, an era which received - in place of Germinal or Sentimental Education or The Posessed, or even The Grapes of Wrath! - Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis's JR...But in retrospect these books appear marginal...heroic sighs of depletion instead of inaugural hymns.

[...]

The big mistake right now would be to fail to keep faith with what theory once meant to us. You hear a great collective sigh of relief from people who don't have to read "that stuff" anymore - the ones who never read it in the first place. But who will insult these people now, expose their life as self-deception, their media as obstacles to truth, their conventional wisdom as ideology? It will be unbearable to live with such people if they aren't regularly insulted.

And all of us who spent our formative years on a critique of the sign can't only have gone into advertising. So theory will return in unexpected ways...

[...]

The author photo: Few books fail to include a headshot now; it makes it that much harder to read anything. Even book reviews run photos of the author, in a triumph of crassness that took a decade to worm its way up from local newspapers to the New York Times. The local papers had no other way to fill the columns, lacking staff reporters. What is the Times' excuse?
There ought to be nothing more irrelevant than an author's face...

[...]

The novel's anxiety to have a ready-made public makes it less and less deserving of one. The novel needs to get over the 19th century. For about a hundred years it was the dominant art form of bourgeouis civilization. Since then, as if unwilling to resign its old position, it's tried to contend with movies and TV, not to mention long nonfiction articles in the New Yorker. Now it tries to rival the stand-up routine and, in novel-memoir, the daytime talk show...Someone should tell the novel that is not and never was dying; those death-throes were just the feeling of a monopoly ending, the shortness of breath that comes with loss of market share. Let the comedians, the lip-gloss models, the movie directors, the journalists and historians be. Their work may be inferior to the novelist's, but they do it better than he does....A novelist who isn't truly alone when he writes will never provide a reader worthwhile company.

Well, I get carried away. It's tempting to quote the whole damn thing. Also contained in these 248 pages: a piece on Isaac Babel, on "Last Cigarettes" (recalling for me Josipovici), fair but devastating reviews of Roth, Agamben and Art Spiegelman, and some excellent poetry. Well you may peruse the contents for yourself.

whose protests? whose U.N.? Shy-vo, ei-o, ei-o

Yoshie puts two and two together. Well, it's high time something backfired. Update: Or maybe the political costs are already being washed away as the corporate networks drown us in necrophilia dignified. They knew they could count on a good show, in any case. And with promises that 'Terri' (not Mrs., that would imply a certain sovereignty, difficult to reconcile with the victim script) may continue to live/die for a full two weeks... well anti-war protests are so boring anyway. An auto-immune race to the bottom, this television. Repetition compulsion, poshlost' run amock. Denial of the work of mourning. No wonder suicide seems a tempting sort of affirmation these days, and especially among soldiers (an affirmation that remains nevertheless shallow and reactive, a false exist, no solution to the problem of living with the im-possibility of death). Let's not drown yet, turn off the set (apologies to Wittgenstein).

“How fading and insipid,” Swift wrote, “do all Objects accost us that are not convey’d in the Vehicle of Delusion?”

Also from Harper's:

It is not physician-assisted suicide that poses the greatest threat to the poor and the disabled but physician-assisted eternal life: the desire of the old and the rich to avoid death at any cost, especially if the cost can be passed on to another generation or another continent. The worldwide trade in organs—nine farmers in the Indian village of Rentachintala selling their kidneys to pay off debts to the pawnbrokers who lend them money to buy seed—is but one of the more egregious examples. The trade in ultra-desirable “fresh” human ova is likely to emerge as another. We already know the countries and the classes from which they’re going to be harvested.

Is anything more indicative of the vast chasm that exists between rich and poor, between a minority in surfeit and a majority in woe, than the fact that a few should lobby for deliverance from high-tech medical care while millions clamor for the basics of a first aid kit? It is a well-known statistic that with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, Americans consume a quarter of the world’s nonrenewable energy. It is considerably less well-known that within that all-consuming sliver, per capita federal spending on the elderly exceeds the amount spent on children by a ratio of 11 to 1. When I was younger and more romantic I could imagine serving the poor by dying in a revolution. Now it seems as though the most truly revolutionary thing I could do is simply to die.

On another note, there will be two more films about the Rwanda genocide. One thing that did vaguely irk me about "Hotel Rwanda" in addition to the somewhat pat, therapeutic, and rather Biblical ending, was the lack of long-term historical context given. It looks like "Sometimes in April", also based primarily on survivors' testimony and documentary footage, may delve a little bit deeper yet, if still without risking too much offense. The one thing that remains consistent is the mirror of shame pointing back at the French and United States govenments who failed to act soon enough. But it risks having all the effect of a familiar, tired trope if these films do no engage further and risk real dialogue over remaining controversial questions. One reason why one wishes, increasingly, that there was a competitive critical West Wing series - one where all efforts were not always made to redeem Clinton at every turn. In fact, wouldn't it be nice if Clinton received some blame for the thoroughly monopolied, income-gap state of affairs threatening democracy today like never before? Maybe just one episode, where Martin Sheen slaps down labor, endorses corporate mergers and is exposed as using multi-purpose, smart-sounding rhetoric in vastly opposite scenarios? In any case, it would still be nice to have him as the head of the U.N. right now (as was expected if Kerry had won). So long as there were never any more genocides in Africa...The simple point being, anyway, that deification and demonization, worship and scandal, are merely two sides of the same obsolete coin.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

What we need are more and better institutions that can, over time, make military power as unimportant as it is across the U.S.-Canadian border, or the Franco-Spanish one. America's dominance is only valuable insofar as such a world does not yet exist; insofar as it fades because we have created one, we come out ahead. At its best, American power is used -- as it was during the Gulf War -- to strengthen and enforce a rule-based, global security regime.

(Both of these articles courtesy of Political Theory Daily Review.)

aging well

Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self. It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no longer hope that anyone might share them - at just the moment that they are pouring into the streets, less private than ever. So we are less than ever in a position to marry them to the world. Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefes from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy.

- Stanley Cavell, found in Gabriel Josipovici's Touch, 43.

There would seem to be only two possible responses to Godard's films today. Some immediately claim that they are antiquated, hopelessly antiquated, if not obsolete - in short, they have not aged well. Others may suggest that such responses betray a certain ideological stance as well as an inability to see Godard's jokes. Personally, I am all for abrupt endings, for film experiences that are less than perfectly smooth, that seem to reference in advance their own antiquation even. Josipovici writes of addiction, and of a "great age of movies" that "was also the age of adolescence:"

(That our adolescence coincided with the great unselfconscious era of the Hollywood movie is of course pure chance, but it does suggest that we and all those born between 1920 and 1945 will always have a different sense of film from those born before or after.) Cavell, at any rate, spends a good deal of time wondering why the films he recalls with such pleasure are the middle-brow films produced with such confidence and in such quantities by the Hollywood machine, and why, now that movies seem to have caught up with the other arts, so to speak, and are dividing more and more clearly into high and middle-brow, there may be great films produced but it is impossible to view them with precisely the kind of delight with which we viewed them as teenagers...

[...]

Addiction, then, in the full sense of the word, is an adult condition, though its seeds are sown in childhood. And so it may well be that it is far too solemn, far too censorious, to describe film as having all the ingredients of addiction, as I did earlier; it may simply be that film is a form that belongs...to a moment in our life when we are struggling to make the transition from child to adult, and that high-flown theories of the nature of film and the greatness of individual examples quite miss the point. (Touch, 44-45)

Anyway, I think what I admire most about Godard is his precision, even and especially - as he happens to say about Hitchcock - with regard to "the smallest" and "most subtle of truths." Contrived, clunky, quaint? But isn't this part of Godard's point? Is a sensitivity to Benjamin's 'aura' made possible by Godard's film's? Or maybe we should just be content to get our kicks from the renowned existentialist, Jim Carrey?

blinks

A humbling little dose of reality for uppity English-degreed dish-washers. Juan Cole advises you to lighten up about "discovered" Networks and related matters with: Discover Your Momma's Network. I've been enjoying the Bob Dylan mp3s dating from 1962, available here.
Update: Bérubé has responded to Horrorwits yet again, of course. Tom Waits lists his top ten favorite albums. And to continue, unfortunately, the Dead Beat Watch:

Foucault's Heir, again

An interesting new translation of something Agamben has recently uttered (apparently he and "Toni" are the most disagreeing of palls) (via Mark Woods):

These are my questions :

Do we have to keep using the concept of movement ? If it signals a threshold of politicisation of the unpolitical, can there be a movement that is different from civil war ? or

In what direction can we rethink the concept of movement and its relation to biopolitics ?

Here I won’t give you any answers, it is a long term research project, but I have some indications :

The concept of movement is central to Aristotle, as kinesis, in the relaiton between potenza and act. Aristotle defines movement as the act of a potenza as potenza, rather than the passage to act. Secondly he says that movement is ateles, imperfect act, without an end. Here I would suggest a modification to his view, and maybe Toni might agree with me for once on this : that movement is the constitution of a potenza as potenza. But if this is true then we cannot think of movement as external or autonomous in relation to the multitude. It can never be subject of a decision, organisation, direction of the poeple, or element of politicisation of the multitude or the people.

Another interesting aspect in Aristotle is that movement is an unfinished act, without telos, which means that movement keeps an essential relation with a privation, an absence of telos. The movemetn is always constitutively the relation with its lack, its absence of end, or ergon, or telos and opera. What I always disagree with Toni about is this emphasis placed on productivity. Here we must reclaim the absence of opera as central. This expresses the impossibility of a telos and ergon for politics. Movement is the indefiniteness and imperfection of every politics. It always leaves a residue.

In this perspective the motto I cited as a rule for myself might be reformulated ontologically as this : the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn’t, it lacks itself (manca a se stesso), and if it isn’t, is as if it was, it exceeds itself. It is the threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency which marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive imperfection.

Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files available here.

Wittgenstein's Mistress

I'm sorry for not posting much of late, fighting a familiar case of the late winter, pre-birthday blues. Sorry of course not because of guilt over failing to be a good hyper-cyberactive, but because the 'community' 'here' is one I value greatly. A different, beautifully demanding relationship, no car, and three barely rewarding jobs being the easiest-to-identify bullshit excuses. While wondering what could possibly be said about David Markson that hasn't been said already (there is actually a good deal, I think, given his grossly underappreciated status, and maybe I am trying too hard to calibrate in advance an exact emotional or theoretical response), I've been re-reading some essays on Heidegger. For instance, this letter:

Monday, December 30, 1929 (at Schlick's)

I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up against Paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics--whether there be knowledge, whether there be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it. It is a priori certain that whatever one might offer as a definition of the Good, it is always simply a misunderstanding to think that it corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means (Moore). Yet the tendency represented by the running-up against points to something. St. Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you wretch, so you want to avoid talking nonsense? Talk some nonsense, it makes no difference!

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Heidegger on Being and Dread, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Ed. Michael Murray, 1978

As much as I enjoyed reading it (even laughing out loud, and getting tight-throated at moments), to say that Wittgenstein's Mistress represents a running up against death would be saying too much, I think. That being said, all options are still on the table. There is running up, to be sure. A perpetual running up, seductive, charming, suggestive and genuinely moving running up. Talk about intertextuality! His prose style is absolutely contagious. But against death? Or is it more a running in place, maybe?

For something of real substance on David Markson I'd recommend this interview and this article. MadInkBeard also has a nice introduction.

Markson's scenario of a solitary, "philosophical garbage lady" may be especially potent for a very specific, structural reason, detached cultural echoes of iconoclasm or genre. Namely: he did in fact already write the initial traumatic period of her history, back when she discovers herself the last woman on earth. In a brillaint move, these 125 pages from the beginning of the novel were subsequently dropped. Why brilliant? I don't know, maybe because it's charming to know that the earlier events Kate refers to actually did take place in Kate's world? (The reader's identification with her, or sympathy for her at least, seems crucial somehow). Or because it's daring and allows for new unforeseen possibilities (like a Borges story) and layers of ambiguity? Or maybe it's just comforting to know the novel was actually work, although Markson admits to writing quickly, without revising until the very end? (It reads so damn effortlessly, but without the repetitions of phrase becoming trite or tiresome). Actually maybe they do become a little tiresome. Doubtless this is part of the point, you will say.
The part pertaining to philosophies of language, no doubt.
Or maybe I am just rather tired now, and unable to be dishonest about that.
This may be irresponsible in some important sense, I will effortlessly admit.
It did get 54 rejection notices, Markson's book, after all.
People thought it wouldn't sell.
Why on earth wouldn't a book composed of no paragraphs longer than two sentences sell these days?
Well not exactly these days, but in 1988.
Still.
This is a brutal way to touch a book, risking cheap parody. I will probably regret it in the morning. Does it matter? Why would one write a book in which nothing seemed to matter?

Well, because it works indirectly. In talking around the thing itself, the thing appears, or begins to appear, in its proper light. The novel works subtly, cumulatively, and leaves us with frozen...skirts. A dream of fame. We are not fools. We know some real person is behind this book. We are left to infer, and the soil cleared for inference, with regard to pain, and with regard to what it means to speak, to write, is rich indeed. Perhaps I did not put that very well.

The cynic returns. Well Joseph Tabbi would prefer to read Wittgenstein's Mistress as more suggestive for cognitive science than for deconstruction...I don't know, maybe he is on to something.

As wonderful as much contemporary hypertext can be--and I enjoy a great deal of it, particularly for its probing, often daring sense of chance and whimsy, for risking to make 'literature' itself tremble anew--there is also a tendency toward surface-level fixation or facile deferral that remains in some important sense--if not even categorically--opposed to the kind of sustained meditative thinking that leads to a sincere 'perhaps', to genuine fragments (that doesn't have to sound impossibly pretentious, I don't think). There are certainly identifiable motives--whether conscious or not--for such tendencies. But in any case I find much hypertext somewhat uniformly, predictably disappointing in its seeming compulsion toward tendencies that encourage us to stop thinking.

No, there's really no polite way to put it. Markson is not Wittgenstein. And neither is Kate.

After all, Wittgenstein lived in a world full of other people. Perhaps history does end when there is no 'other.' Perhaps the drawing of distinctions is more valuable, in the now, than the endless drawing of connections, where the same risks being taken for the same. "The same is not the same as the same," says Blanchot. Can a world with only one inhabitant still be a world at all? "The world is what we share with others," says Heidegger. How can a solitary being be said to die?

Kate menstruates in the novel, and often updates us about her stainings. This is brave and liberating, for a novel, especially since Markson is not a woman, and has never menstruated. There is a kind of cuteness that is quite touching, maybe. Disappointing and touching. They do go together, after all. Returning to the text, and quoting at length here is perhaps the only possibility...

Before I came back to the typewriter I went upstairs and took the framed snapshot out of the drawer in the table beside my bed, for just a moment.
I did not put it back on the table itself, however.
There was no book by Marco Antonio Montes de Oca in the carton either, if I happen to have given that impression.
On the other hand there were no less than seven books by Martin Heidegger.
I have no way of indicating the titles of any of these, of course, short of returning to the basement and copying out the German, which it would certainly seem pointless to trouble myself with.
When I say it would seem pointless, naturally what I meant is that I would still not understand one word of the German in any event.
A word that certainly did catch my attention was the word Dasein, however, since it seemed to appear on practically every page I opened to.
Martin Heidegger himself remaining somebody I know no more about than I know about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the other hand.
Except for now knowing that he was certainly partial to the word Dasein, obviously.
Then again as I believe I have said one is frequently apt to come upon a name such as Martin Heidegger's in one's reading, even if one is scarcely apt to be reading any books by Martin Heidegger himself.
At least this would presumably remain the case if one happened to ever do any reading, which as I have also said I have stopped doing.
In fact I cannot remember the last book I read, even if it may on occasion have appeared to have been a life of Brahms.
All things considered I still do not believe it has ever been verified that I did read a life of Brahms, however.
As a matter of fact it has only at this moment struck me that every solitary thing I know about Brahms could have been learned by reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records.
Possibly I have not mentioned reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records before.
It is a thing one does, however.
Well, or did, in any event, since it can now also be fairly definitively stated that I have not read the back of the jacket on a phonograph record for basically as many years as I have not read a book.
In fact there are no phonograph records in this house.
Well, there is no phonograph either, when one comes down to that.
Actually, this may have surprised me when I first came to the house, although it is not something to which I have given any thought since I perhaps first gave it some thought.
Well, as I have furthermore said, I have not played any music since having gotten rid of my baggage in any case, said baggage having naturally included such things as generators for operating such things as phonographs.
None of this is counting whatever music I hear in my head, conversely.
Well, or even in certain vehicles when I have turned on the ignition and it has happened that the tape deck has been set to the on position.
Hearing Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini under either of those circumstances being hardly the same thing as making a deliberate decision to hear Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini, obviously.
Although what I am now suddenly forced to wonder is if certain things I do know about Brahms would have appeared on the backs of the jackets on phonograph records after all.
Such as about his affairs with Jane Avril or with Katherine Hepburn, for instance.
Or for that matter how do I know that Beethoven would sometimes write music all over the walls of his house when he could not get his hands on any staff paper quickly enough?
Or that George Frederick Handel once threatened to throw a soprano out of a window because she refused to sing an aria the way he had written it?
Or that the first time Tchaikovsky ever conducted an orchestra he was positive that his head was going to fall off, and held on to his head with one hand through the entire performance?
Well, or on another level altogether, would anybody writing the information for any of such jackets have actually troubled to put down that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children?
Certainly nobody writing such information would have put that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Perhaps I have not mentioned that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.
On my honor, however, Brahms frequently visited the home of the Wittgenstein family, in Vienna, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a child.
So if it is a fact that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children, then surely it is likely that Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the children he gave candy to.
Very possibly this was what was in Wittgenstein's own mind all of those years later, in fact, when he said that you do not need a lot of money to give a nice present, but you do need a lot of time.
By which I mean that if the person Wittgenstein had wished to give a present to had been a child, he could have naturally taken care of the problem exactly the way Brahms generally did.
Doubtless one does not stroll about Cambridge carrying candy in one's pocket to give to Bertrand Russell or to Alfred North Whitehead, however.
Although what one might now wish one's self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with that Dasein.
Well, or perhaps even with that other word, bricolage, that I woke up with in my head, that morning.
Or likewise with the whole sentence that I also must have said to myself a hundred times, a little later on, about the world being everything that is the case.
Surely if Wittgenstein was as intelligent as one was generally led to believe he ought to have been able to tell me if that had meant anything, either.
Then again, something else I once read about Wittgenstein was that he used to think so hard that you could actually see him doing it.
And certainly I would have had no desire to put the man to that sort of trouble.
Although what this for some reason now reminds me of is that I do know one thing about Martin Heidegger after all.
I have no idea how I know it, to tell the truth, although doubtless it is from another one of those footnotes. What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.
I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.
So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.
Even if there was only the smallest likelihood that a pair of boots Van Gogh used to wear were the same pair he also once painted a painting of, obviously.
Unless of course he had painted with only his socks on, that day.

- David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress, 167-171



A morning thought: All games and instruments aside, what might it mean to read Markson's novel as itself a reading of the Tractatus as burdened precisely with a knowledge of the later Wittgenstein (he who more directly abandoned the proposition that logical structure must also be the essence of the world, refusing to make the leap from the nature of language to the nature of the world)? A reading of a novel, then, already haunted in advance not only by what came before (Kate's trauma) but by what came after (everything has happened already). Hence the inadequacy of Kate's descriptions to reflect anything but her own experience. That she expresses ambivalence toward Heidegger and Dasein is therefore important. Significantly perhaps, Kate's mood never veers into the experience of Angst, shame (homo sacer?), or radical boredom; she remains on the plane of the everyday. In short, Markson does not grant her any ontical confirmation of Heidegger's ontology. Perhaps Wittgenstein's Mistress, unlike Sein und Zeit, remains hesitating on a certain threshold before saying, "we."

an unhealthy closet liberal?

John Holbo nimbly puts Zizek down (granted, without a whisper of Lacan or much of Hegel). When Zizek takes as his point of departure the assumption that Fukuyama--with his "liberal democracy, perfect as it is, having finally and rightly inherited the earth for now and always"--is essentially full of shit, I don't really mind, to tell the truth. But the deeper question of responsibility remains, and Zizek, for one, would often seem to fancy his writing unanswerable. I will quickly admit that in today's climate the question of what may constitute a "healthy liberal" befuddles me a bit. In any event, the conversation continues elsewhere.

..

Hotel Rwanda last night, is (rightly) a difficult film experience to shake. The building itself has since been repaired, re-sanitized, and purged of memory. Made safe again, from conscious fools and cockroaches (rooster-fish)..

By pure chance, I was actually in neighboring Uganda with my mother just a few months before the uprising took place (I was about 13). The woman we had been staying with later defied U.N. orders (coming from the U.S.) and entered Rwanda to help with the orphan crisis.


Ryan also looks to be quite good (watch the clip).

Paolo does not kiss her, he kisses her mouth, just as in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere which they are reading it is not the queen who is kissed but the 'desired smile'. In addiction, as in the mirror, the self is fragmented and bits of the body float free of any unifying responsible self. That is why fetishism and addiction go together.

-Gabriel Josipovici, Touch

irregularnews, Foucault Society blog

Well maybe it's not that lonely up here after all. We're a savage bunch, no doubt. But then if one is truly humble, why risk appearing to feel the need to proclaim it, to play at being able to take oneself lightly? (Granted this is all some people ever do; one wonders if they have a serious side at all.) A good chunk of Vermont is more "progressive" than Howard Dean will ever be, and not afraid to say so. Granted, some of them are beyond quaint, haven't watched television in 30 years, and smell a bit. And although what this word signifies in the popular imagination (car insurance, perhaps?) of course remains more than a little ambiguous.

Awash in stories about bloggers (not about what they say), the mainstream press without fail imposes a frame for "debate" a priori immunized against sincere analysis (which would mean self-criticism). Is not the need to refuse the question greater now than ever? Those not in a position of power to actively shape the dominant discourse, not bearing that responsibility, ought not to be confused, or to allow their egos to be confused, with those who are, and do. Then the real work can begin.

Of the 393 interviews about the coming war on the four major nightly newscasts—NBC, ABC, CBS, and the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer—in this critical period right before invasion, only three interviews were with anti-war representatives. That is not mainstream media. That didn’t represent mainstream America, when most people were in favor of pursuing diplomacy and inspections rather than going to war. That’s extreme media.

-Amy Goodman

Update: The first post on The Foucault Society's new blog happens to feature a quote from a visit to a certain very (sorry, Martin Amis) special state.

in lieu of a post

The incomparable wood s lot featuring M.B., the disturbingly fructiferous Alphonse, who also probes Sade, Bourdieu and Zizek, and Charlotte on "The Power of Nightmares" (indirectly, I think). Responses welcome to the following quotes:

With regard to the "perhaps," moreover, there exists a theological vein, in the work of Böhme, Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa, that defines God not as being--and precisely for which fact they break with what Heidegger call the "ontotheological tradition"--but defines God as "before" and outside of being, without being. They define God as "perhaps." God is the perhaps...The most impossible becomes more than impossible, otherwise than impossible. (Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," 31)

Theories are necessary (the theories of language, for example): necessary and useless. Reason works in order to wear itself out, by organizing itself into systems, seeking a positive knowledge where it can posit itself, pose and repose and at the same time convey itself to an extremity which forms a stop and closure. We must pass by way of this knowledge and forget it...Forgetfulness is a practice...The theoretical battle, even if it is waged against some form of violence, is always the violence of an incomprehension; let us not be stopped short by the partial, simplifying, reductive character of comprehension itself. This partialness is characteristic of the theoretical: "with hammer blows," Nietzsche said. But this hammering is not only the clash of arms. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 75-76)

The correct criticism of the System does not consist (as is most often, complacently, supposed) in finding fault with it, or in interpreting it insufficiently (which even Heidegger sometimes does), but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism or, as they say, inevitable. Then, since nothing escapes it because of its omnipresent unity and the perfect cohesion of everything, there remains no place for fragmentary writing unless it come into focus as the impossible necessary: as that which is written in the time outside time, in the sheer suspense which without restraint breaks the seal of unity by, precisely, not breaking it, but by leaving it aside without this abandon's ever being able to be known. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 61)

memoria technica

Well, Manning Marable, it's been thirteen years, and there is still no comprehensive archive. Although "The Official Web Site of Malcolm X" does claim to have "everything you want to know about this historical figure."
This most certainly being computer wallpaper.
A better resource of audio files is here. Would recommend listening to the comments he made in Paris, 1964. He was an advocate for the New International before his time (one must at least hope, and even despite a fierce neo-nationalism). From a speech given in 1965:

The step-by-step process that was used by the press: First they fanned the flame in such a manner to create hysteria in the mind of the public. And then they shift gears and fan the flame in a manner designed to get the sympathy of the public. And once they go from hysteria to sympathy, their next step is to get the public to support them in whatever act they're getting ready to go down with. You're dealing with a cold calculating international machine, that's so criminal in its objectives and motives that it has the seeds of its own destruction, right within.

See also this excellent resource.

Derrida, waving, cont.

1. Why Politics?

It is true that, from the beginning, so to speak, when I started writing and teaching, many people, friendly and unfriendly, reproached me with not directly addressing political questions. I think that it was at the same time both an unfair and fair objection. Unfair because I think everything I did was directly or indirectly connected with political questions, and I could show this in a very precise manner. But it is true and it is a fair objection to the extent that this relation to politics was very indirect and very elliptical, and waiting for a moment in the development of my work when the level I wanted to reach in this re-elaboration of the political question could be reached; and this accounts for
the delay, for the implicit fashion I addressed this question at the beginning.

Now, to take literally Geoff's question which I have in front of me: I don't think that even now I am answering the demand for politics, that is to propose something which could fit into what one calls in our tradition, politics. What I am trying to do now, especially in the books Spectres of Marx or in the Politics of Friendship, is to try to understand or to re-think, I'm not the only one doing that of course, but to try with others to re-think what the political is, what is involved precisely in the dissemination of the political field. So, I'm not proposing a new political content within the old frame but trying to re-define, or to think differently, what is involved in the political as such, and for the very same reason I don't
propose a political theory because what I'm saying, specifically on friendship and
hospitality, on what friendship is and what hospitality is, exceeds, precisely, knowledge. In its extreme and more essential form it has to do with something which cannot become a theoreme, it is something which simply has to be known, there is some type of experience, of political experience in friendship and hospitality which cannot be simply the object of a theory. Which is not an anti-theoretical move; I think political theory is necessary, but I try to articulate this necessity of a political theory with something in politics or in friendship, in hospitality, which cannot, for structural reasons, become the object of knowledge, of a theory, of a theoreme.

So, it's not a political theory - part of what I'm trying to say in these texts is not part of a theory that would be included in the field known as politology or political theory, and it's not a deconstructive politics either. I don't think that there is such a thing as a deconstructive politics, if by the name 'politics' we mean a programme, an agenda, or even the name of a regime. We will see even the word democracy, which I try to locate, is not simply the name of a political regime or nation-state organisation. So, I don't think that what I'm engaged in, what I have been trying to do in a very complicated way for a long time, can be called political theory or deconstructive politics, but I think that given - or supposing that they are given - the premises of what I have been doing before these last books, the time has come for me to say something more about politics. Not simply a political theory, a deconstructive politics, but to say something about politics is again not simply a speculative gesture: it's a concrete and personal commitment, and this performative commitment is part of what I'm writing. Spectres of Marx, before being a text about Marx's theory, Marx's heritage, is, let's say, a personal commitment at a certain moment, in a certain form, in a singular fashion.

[...]

Q6: You talk about geographical exclusion and how your idea of hospitality can address that, but you haven't mentioned the way in which geographical exclusion is completely tied up with economic exclusion. The countries from which it's difficult to get into England are poor countries: it's not really France or Germany, it's the Caribbean, it's Africa, it's the Indian sub-continent, and I wondered how you think your concept of friendship, your non-canonical concept of friendship, can address economic exclusion, and especially economic exclusion in its most extreme form which is the exclusion by those who own capital of everyone else. You can't ask those who own capital to be hospitable ...

J.D.: I ask them nevertheless [laughter].

Q6: It's naive to ask them, it's a naive request.

J.D.: Perhaps, but I still do. The problem of the economy, although I didn't refer to it explicitly in this short presentation, is at the centre of this. It's a problem of economy, of appropriation, misappropriation, hospitality is economy. This is the question we addressed a moment ago about assimilation, which means appropriation, that is exploitation, and so on and so forth. So, I think of course that the problem of capitalism is at the centre of this question; if I didn't name it before I apologise, but it is at the centre of this attempt, without a doubt. When I try to question or to deconstruct the classical concept of the political, it is in order to open it on to other fields, spaces, strata and layers, such as the economical or economy in the broad sense. In the narrow sense of use and exchange values, capital, speculation, financial return and also in the broader sense of propriety, the proper, what is proper to whom, appropriation, and the concept of hospitality should not remain outside of this, and of who owns what. It consists of opening your own space, your own goods, your own house and nation, it's economical and it has to do with economy; and of course however naive I may be, I'm not totally unaware of the problems of the poor being more excluded at the border than the rich. In my own country I can see this every day, at the airport I see who enters easily and who does not with the same legislation. Thankyou for your suggestion, but I'm not totally blind to these questions.

Q6.: I am only saying: how can you use your concept of hospitality to address the problem of capitalism?

J.D.: I can't do it right here and now, but I think this is the problem, the problem that has to be faced no doubt. What I call the transformation of international law implies a transformation of the market, of the global market, and you can't touch the global market without touching capitalism. Everything I say here has to do with that, it would have been easier for me to say 'Well, that's capitalism', but capitalism is precisely tied to this organisation of the political, the classical organisation of the political. At the same time I think it's a little more complex than that, and I think that the development of new forms of capitalism are responsible for, on the one hand the consolidation of the old concepts of politics, democracy, friendship, etc., but at the same time undermining this tradition. It's because of new developments of capitalism that everything is shaken. When you see that for instance the concentration of the powers of the media and tele-technologies goes beyond state power, becomes international, on the one hand it confirms the traditional structures of politics, and on the other it deconstructs them. There is a deconstructing effect of capitalism, that's why the approach to capitalism is very complex, but I agree with you it's a central problem.

Q7: I wanted to link into this last question, and I just wanted to ask you if you think it's possible to transform a concept like democracy without linking that attempt to an attempt to transform material reality? In other words, the example you used about immigration and democracy - the fact that under bourgeois democracy in theory everyone is free to go wherever they like and do whatever they like, except if you're seen as the wrong colour you can't cross the border, or if you don't fit with the politics of a certain nation - and doesn't that mean that basically we have to go back to Marx and say that to throw your weight behind the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters is the only way you can go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy? Don't we have to go beyond discourse and look to a systematic attempt to change the world?

J.D.: We won't change the world before two o'clock [laughter], but what I'm saying is that we have to, and through the transformation of the organisation of capitalism, to a transformation of the Marxist heritage, taking into account what's happening today especially in terms of citizenship and colour of skin and so on and so forth; and when I'm not giving a lecture at the University of Sussex I try to do my best as a French citizen to fight for the transformation of the laws on immigration in my country, which is a very burning issue right now in the French parliament. I'll do what I can to intervene, very modestly and minimally, in this field of concrete and urgent questions. We have to do both, to speak and to act.

-excerpted from a brief talk on Specters of Marx and The Politics of Friendship, given at The University of Sussex in December of 1997

• Also of serious note: No Compromise [PDF]: An exchange between François Laruelle and Jacques Derrida (1988(?)), translated (a work in progress) by Robin Mackay of Dread, Walking

And Scott McLemee reports on the conferences in New York this past weekend.

Update: McLemee's second piece is here:

The root difficulty, according to Derrida, is that we cannot think about democracy without dragging in another concept, sovereignty. "These two principles," he writes, "are at the same time, but also by turns, inseparable from one another."

Why is that a problem?

Well, the concept of sovereignty (that is, authority and domination over a discrete territory) has survived from the era of monarchy. Under democracy, "the people" replace the king as sovereign. But the structure remains at least potentially authoritarian. For one thing, defining "the people" is anything but a semantic issue: Even a multiethnic democratic state can be gripped by the passions of xenophobic exclusion.

At the same time, the very notion of sovereignty implies the use of force. The borders of a sovereign state are ultimately backed up by the power to wage war in their defense.

The internal contradictions create what Derrida calls political "autoimmunity" -- the tendency of sovereign power to turn on democratic rights, in the name of democratic principles. (full)

'Autoimmunity' may be one of Derrida's most slippery, potentially distracting concepts, in that it appears to resist the stronger emphasis, or moment of aporia--the loophole, if you will--upon which he always insists. When following Derrida's own reading closely, it becomes difficult to see such a process in either a purely negative or positive light. The biological and psychoanalytic stakes also add to the confusion. Nevertheless he seems to distinguish between autoimmunity and auto-immunity: the former would be merely practical or prescriptive (political, in a sense) and the latter more descriptive, representing a stronger aporia.

email from a Vermont poet

...with his own journal and everything.

HEAVEN

Up in the morning early pot of tea sun salute
play my shakuhachi sit cross-legged on my cushion
burn some incense.

To my desk a morning's work write a couple letters
a dozen emails work on a poem work on another essay
about The Emperor's cruelty.

Lunch a nap tea.

Put on my winter work clothes long johns greasy over-alls
old shirt, beat up sweater duct tape mended mittens
hard-hat grab the chainsaw head out to the woods.

A couple hours cutting next year's firewood stagger around
in the snow hump and sweat heave and groan then home
through the dark trees.

Eat good food in the warm, night-time house toasty
by the woodstove go to bed. Get up the next day
do exactly the same thing day after day after day.

Boring? Are you kidding? Who needs
nirvana enlightenment satori?

This is heaven right here on earth.

David Budbill

http://www.davidbudbill.com

It's cold up here again, the sap might not be running for a week.

Hunter S. Thompson R.I.P.

photo via scarecrow

More and less here, here and here. A long interview with Terry Gilliam about the making of the film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is worth reading.

so

So apparently Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic, eh? Well that would explain a lot. Not that it means anything, even if true, of course. It would seem, in a sense, a pretty easy claim to make about just about anyone (so Derrida accuses Heidegger). And like the label of "cynic," not as unflattering as it might at first sound.

On another note (and in keeping with this blog's down to date policy) would anyone happen to recommend the Carole Angier biography of Primo Levi (as opposed to the other one)? The woman in the bookshop was nice enough to let me use her computer to "pull up the Amazon reviews." When I proceeded to tell her about blogs, she expressed the usual, entirely justifiable hesitancy, the feeling overwhelmed by just how much is out there. Which is, I suppose, precisely the reason to read blogs (I may have recommended a few). But might anyone else have any lines they like to use re: why those in the bookshop business should not be afraid of blogs (and afraid of Amazon)? To her great credit, she did mention the recent scandal concerning anonymous self-reviewers at that Bush-supporting, monolithic, bottom line-worshipping place. Or if the bookshop woman happens to stop by here, and cares to leave a comment of any sort, that would of course be most welcome.

I was able to locate one review in The New Republic (BugMeNot required), from whence the following sentences:

Angier's book is not a critical biography or an intellectual biography. It is an emotional biography.

[...]

Angier's approach will not appeal to everyone. She is unrelenting in her pursuit of the personal, and she can be mawkish. Though she comments very effectively on certain aspects of Levi's writing, anyone looking for literary criticism should look elsewhere. Her book has passages of much grace, but it is bloated. She assumes a broad base of knowledge about Levi's books, failing to adequately introduce much of his work. And her speculation about Levi's wife and mother is astonishingly one-sided, utterly lacking the sympathy with which she treats so many of the other figures in his life.

Most controversially, Angier confesses in the introduction that at times she has "felt or imagined the past from a story, or from an encounter." This is not as dubious as it sounds, because the chapters in which she does this form a sort of "shadow biography": they are set apart from the main text, with their headings in italics, and anyone wishing to avoid speculation about Levi's life could simply skip them. Angier comments that these chapters have an "unstable bond" with Levi, but her own relationship with them is slippery as well. By setting them apart from the text and emphasizing their reliance on guesswork rather than scholarship, she appears to disavow them; but at the same time she says that she believes these "irrational chapters" to be "more true" than the rational ones. Angier really does seem to believe that she has gotten inside Levi's head, and maybe she has. But her perceived intimacy with him dominates the book, leading to a sense that she is too close to her subject, whom she refers to throughout by his first name.

It strikes me that this is much like what Derrida does in Counterpath, with his 'postcards' set aside in grey boxes, separate from the "more rigorously philosophical" text written by Catherine Malabou, and yet more intimate, more easily written (in the spirit of Debord, perhaps), and ultimately, more interesting.

Update: Speaking of being more interesting, some more thoughts on the Shakespeare book, the everyday contempt for readers, London, life and death are here.

books and bookshops

From Bookshop Memories (1936), by George Orwell (via wood s lot):

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money...(more)

Yes, the weekend is a time for books. Purchased today, for less than $20, Kafka's The Castle and Amerika, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, DeLillo's Libra, Nabokov's Bend Sinister, and an old hardcover of Dorris Lessing's Stories. Such a pleasant problem to have, too many books to read. And yet also the pressure always, bordering on compulsion, for just one more book...Fortunately enough I can't afford to do this often. Have just begun Wittgenstein's Mistress, and would like to post something on that next, without forgetting Counterpath.

dispense

Mark Kaplan is right to insist on the sometimes weight of certain words. (Although sometimes it is not quite, of course, as simple as saying "point taken." Neither is it sufficient to invoke the false assurance of a "we," saying something like, "we defer.") But in any case, the "recovering Habermasian" come Zizekian Jodi Dean links to a provocative article that deserves wider mention:

There is a new joke circulating in the post-vote liberal press: prominent sections of the Left are now advising that in order to avoid any further drift into irrelevance it should compromise its principles and adopt a new Bible-toting symbolism capable of appealing to the swing voters of Middle America. The punch line, of course, is the notion that the Left has any principles left to compromise! Principles require a non-cynical approach to the political, and cynicism is precisely the strategy the Left has embraced so it can justify its pragmatic opportunism as the height of "enlightened" thinking. The rise to cult celebrity of John Stewart and Comedy Central's The Daily Show is a case in point. Most weeknights The Daily Show entertains a primarily younger audience with a savvily cynical Left take on current events. With shrewd hilarity, Stewart and his cohorts relentlessly puncture the solemnity of the official political discourse in the U.S., all under cover of what is billed as "fake news". "Fake news" is what allows Stewart to evade any political responsibility for the state of political discussion on the Left while remaining an idol of the Left. Laughing the seriousness out of all "principles", Stewart is the "real" idol of a supposedly idol-less Left (and his faking not being an idol only adds to his idol-ness). Yet what Stewart conveniently doesn't get is that in Bush's "America" the fake is what keeps the (manufactured) "real news" looking like reality. The cultural politics of the "fake news" of Comedy Central is to produce the "real fake" so that the Brian Williams and Peter Jennings of the world look less fake.

Is this not the same role, ultimately, as that played by shows like 24? Whether comforted in the tired evenings with benign satire, or with a sensational collage of vulgar stereotypes and reactionary, semi-coherent plot lines and mediocre dialogue, the difference is, as they say, the same. The actual workings of power and ideology have received a fresh round of immunizations, safely assimilating again the potential real menace of meaningful critique.

In fact, "After Theory," the populist left has started marketing a new commodity: the uncritical reading. "Uncritical" is, for the populist left, the code of brave defiance against reason and critique and a celebration of what it represents as the people's wisdom. "Uncritical reading" is the Left's latest attempt to naturalize by spontaneity the ideological working of capitalist cultural politics. Through "uncritical reading"—which is the sign of "reading from the heart" (and a not-so-secret attack on science, critique, and objective understanding of the world)—it posits a pre-critical authenticity that precedes all reading, and celebrates an uncritical thinking (a resistant irrationality, a pre-textual essence or experience that cannot be conceptualized, etc.) that is present in all critical thought. Uncritical reading critically trains the student to turn away from objective class interests and toward values, religion, and even superstition, all in the name of the spontaneous. Uncritical reading is a continuation of the left's interpretive strategy that in the 1980s and 1990s found in every quietistic text a moment of resistance and argued that power was actually in the hands of the weak. After the disastrous end of that project, resistance reading has been transformed into uncritical reading—a reading that resists the knowledge of the world (which might be used to transform the world) and embraces instead matters of affect.

I don't know. I certainly agree with the general spirit of this. At times I've found myself arguing just such a line, querying the general disposition of much hypertext and self-styled postmodern "theorists," calling for a much-needed critique in terms of economic class, and invoking Zizek on the cynical, ironic viewer. (Incidentally, proclaiming oneself "postmodern" is just not, you know, something one does, if one wishes to be taken seriously, as I think Caterina Fake once pointed out, back when I first started reading blogs.) But then there's also a sense in which these (especially Internet) tendencies toward uncritical, light (light as in Terry Gilliam's terrorist-stricken restaurant in Brazil), affective reading represent more than just a passing trend or a still deeper entrenchment of habitual cynicism and denial. They are also of course indicative of real and substantial changes in the 'tele-techno-media' texture of our environment. Which is not for a minute to suggest that they are merely natural, or that a disservice to critical thought isn't done every time they are spoken of in a way that somehow naturalizes them. Whether these evolving tendencies represent anything like an End of History or not, as some proclaim...is a notion hardly worth dignifying with a response. (Without my response they are already striving hard to become a self-fulfilling prophesy (is there any other kind?) And in a sense, one cannot help but respond, and every day.) But keen observers are those who recognize a red flag (as they say) whenever the word "failure" is invoked as self-evident, beyond all doubt (as in the "failure of Theory," "failure of Communism," "failure of the 60's," etc.) Such phrases often betray an entire host of common, clichéd prejudices--in short, a worldview--whether they intend to do so or not. And the phrase "failure of the left" is not always untouched by this tendency. As the film Control Room concludes, on a Howard Zinnian note, the tragedy is in people remembering only one thing: Victory (whether "History" or disengenuous, attempted performative utterance). Another such prejudice would be that 'deconstruction' somehow dogmatically priveleges affect over fact. Nothing could be further from the truth.

new posts, new to the page

...down below the long Derrida quote. (Granted one is another excerpt.) Was just the order I was composing them in; sorry. Usually just don't announce this practice at all. Well the game is up! Read farther down the page if you like.
Update: I've also just added two rather old, short essays to my little page, one on Eagleton, The Russian Formalists and Bakhtin (fixed) and the other on Nabokov. The second one especially is stunningly mediocre. Bear in mind they were written a while ago. Just thought some might enjoy the first. That is all.

there is no meta

Matthew Kirschenbaum:

It got even more interesting after the talk, when I went up to ask what happens when my desire to save a copy of every song I’ve ever listened to collides with the iceberg of DRM. At this point Gemmell said that ultimately MyLifeBits may not seek to preserve actual media content but rather metadata—what’s important are not the bits in the song itself, but a record of the fact that I listened to such and such a song on a gorgeous, 65-degree afternoon on such and such a day when I attended the MyLifeBits talk, etc. etc.—if I then wanted to hear the song the presumption is that there will be a digital service to make it available to me (for the appropriate micropayment). This is not, I think, a small point that should emerge only with a walk-up question after the formal presentation is concluded...

jetty

There have been a number of intelligent and provocative weblog discussions on "theory" of late (see for instance here, here, here, here, here and here). With all due respect, I do still find that Derrida's thinking (which has yet to be quoted at any substantial length, although his name is often carelessly invoked) still sort of best transfigures this debate. Of course "theory" (or "Theory") is not a universal, self-evident term, but rather something of a 'watchword' and especially in America. So maybe the question becomes, then, what happens when the watchword no longer ap-plies?

From a section in Counterpath written by Catherine Malabou (in working towards a blog post to-come on this strange, beautiful, and rather helpful book):

The Deconstruction Jetty and Its Resistance to Theory

The text "Some Statements and Truisms..." again takes up this set of reasons. The word "theory," Derrida says, is "a purely North American artifact," which refers to disciplines taught in certain American university departments of "literature." He groups together a set of "-isms": "New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, new historicism, and so on," as well as "deconstruction" and "deconstructionism." From that point of view, the general title of the colloquium he is addressing, "The States of 'Theory,'" can have real meaning only in the United States. What is at stake here is not, as one might understand from a European perspective, scientific (physics or mathematics), epistemolical, or even philosophical theory. "Theory" corresponds to "the opening of a space, the emergence of an element in which a certain number of phenomena usually associated with literature will call for trans-, inter-, and above all ultra-disciplinary approaches" such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminist studies, structuralism, or deconstruction.

These disciplinary fields act as forces. In order to characterize them, Derrida convokes the figure of the "jetty," a word that should be understood in two senses: in the first place, the jetty designates a movement (one can hear in it the French verb jeter, "to throw"). Derrida calls this "first" jetty a "destabilizing" one:

By the word "jetty" I will refer from now on to the force of the movement--which is not yet sub-ject, pro-ject, or ob-ject, not even rejection...that finds its possibility in the jetty, whether such a production or determination be related to the subject, the object, the project, or the rejection. [1]

Each theoretical jetty has an antagonistic relation to the other. Whereas it could not simply be part of a whole, it nevertheless projects itself as a whole. It cannot comprise itself without attempting to include and englobe all the other parts, without trying to account for them. For example, what, in the field of "literary theory" in the United States is these days called "Marxism" appropriates to itself fundamental concepts borrowed from psychoanalysis, from structuralism, and from poststructuralism. By means of this operation the jetty at the same time stabilizes what it names and transforms it into a "state":

Each theoretical jetty is the institution of a new statement about the whole state and of a new establishment aiming at state hegemony. Each jetty has a hegemonic aim, which isn't meant to subjugate or control the other jetties from the outside, but which is meant to incorporate them in order to be incorporated into them. [2]

The second sense of the word "jetty" then comes into view, that of the "stabilizing jetty," which, like the construction in a harbor that is designed to protect ships anchored at low tide, fixes a set of axioms. In the order of theory, the stabilizing jetty

proceeds by predicative clauses, reassures with assertory statements, with assertions, with statements such as "this is that": for example, deconstruction is this or that.
For instance, one assertion, one statement, a true one, would be, and I would subscribe to it: Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth. Deconstruction is the case. I say this not only because I think it is true and because I could demonstrate it if we had time, but also to give an example of a statement in the static form of the jetty. [3]

Since it is clearly possible to formulate assertions on the subject of deconstruction, it remains subject, like every other theory, to the law of the stabilizing jetty. In other words, it is capable of being transformed into "deconstructionism," the formalization and systematization of technical rules, of teachable methodological procedures, into the codification of a discourse, etc.

There is deconstructionism in general each time that the stabilizing jetty closes and stabilizes itself in a teachable set of theorems, each time that there is self-presentation of a, or more problematically, of the theory. [4]

Yet, to the very extent that the statements or assertions that deconstruction gives rise to fundamentally oppose or resist "theory," it remains a destabilizing jetty even within its rationalizing and controlling structure. Because it destabilizes the conditions of possibility of objectivity, of the relation to the object, of everything that constitutes an assured subjectivity in the form of the cogito, the certainty of self-consciousness, etc., deconstruction proves the impossibility of closure, of totality, of a system or discourse of or on method. Deconstruction is not a theory of theory. And California, the seismic state of theory, is not its only homeland. (Malibou, Counterpath, 224-226)

[1] Derrida. "Some Statements and Truisms," in The States of Theory, 65
[2] Ibid., 68.
[3] Ibid., 84, 85.
[4] Ibid., 88.

Malibou then turns to a brief discussion of "The Time Is Out of Joint," in Deconstruction is/in America, thus concluding an entire chapter entitled with the question, "Deconstruction is America?"

So it is a question again, for Derrida, of two potential forces -- "stabilizing()destabilizing" that cannot be reduced one to the other, but at the same time never cease to condition each other. Of course as easy as it may be to state, such is in fact extremely difficult to think. One may well grasp that 'deconstructionism' may be subjected to theory, or to theorizing, but that this occurs simultaneously along with the action of the "destabilizing" force (of the very conditions of possibility!) is harder to swallow. Derrida insists on giving these two forces equal weight. But at the same time neither of them may add up to their potential, which remains hidden, or in a sense secret. That is, Derrida's purpose is not simply to demolish a pseudo-concept vulgarly employed as "Theory" in America. Rather 'theory' in America, in some unique but unclassifiable, un-localizable sense (unattached to any nationalism, religious dogma, or Schmittian state) needs to be defended. A space needs to kept clear and thoughtfully preserved--cared for--so that it may come into being. As 'democracy,' perhaps.

The concept of 'autoimmunity' that Derrida appears to formulate rather late in his career may in fact be seen to run through his work, and in particular as it relates to his reading of the site, or rather nonsite/place-name, 'khora' (transformed from the Timaeus). I will try to draw on the passage in Counterpath entitled, "The Khora--Nuclear Catastrophe" in a future post.

nb. Some more thoughts on 'theory' are helpfully compiled here: Theory's Empire: Dissenting With Dissent

counterpath

Athens, 18-21 December 1997

...saw all the friends from "Demeure..." once again, those you talk about in your chapter on "The Greek Delay." You know them now. Still in the same hotel, on the Lycabette. Didn't sleep last night: the Acropolis, visible from the balcony, illuminated through the mist until sunrise, I loved...I also love "through," the word "through" [a travers]. What if one were to perform the shibboleth of this viaticum? Just about untranslatable, like the subtle difference between a travers and au travers de, or de travers [sideways, crooked], like the nouns le travers [foible] and la traversee [crossing] (by sea rather than by air or land, except for crossing the desert, and the desert within the desert was referred to on an island, Capri, during the first of two trips there). The crossing is the figure for every voyage: between the trance or transport, and overdoing it, the extravagence [outrance] that crosses the frontier. But if one traverses (traveling, crossing, or going through the Latin memory of) this word, one finds in it, besides the idea of a limit being crossed, that of a deviation [detournement], the oblique version of the detour. It says, in a word, everything about my crosstruths. My little truths, if there are any, are neither "in my life" nor "in my texts," but through what traverses them, in the course of a traverse that, right at the last moment, diverts their encrypted references, their sidelong wave, down a counterpath [le salut en contre-allee]. From him or her--to the other. Cross-cut-reference [reference de traversee], that's the edge the texts of imminence I was talking to you about last time are written from; en route toward the uninscribable that is going to come--or that has just come [vient de venir] to me, but always without horizon, without prior announcement. At least without my knowing it, and neither "in the text," nor "in life," but between and through. When all is said and done, the work of this crossing is what I have always called the trace: traveling itself....Someone asked me the other day what my "influences" were then, stupid question. Replied quick as a flash: "none, none that might tell you anything," but it is true that I always write "under (the) influence," most often through my two sons, toward an encounter with them. They are my sole judges in the long phantasm, as one says "in the long run," that's all there is to it, th esole influence I recognize, oblique but intractable. Two metabolizers of hyperbole; the formula? negotiating more than one superego. to be influenced by one's sons is not a simple narcissistic circle as those in a hurry to reach a conclusion might allege, presuming to know what narcissism is. And the Odyssey. There is there, in the infinite detour, really another origin of the world, an insurmountable secret, and death on the way, the other that is the least reducible to the inside (careful, not the other "inside," but th eother least reducible to the inside). The one that commands us through a transversal, or transverified deviation: the poem of the wholly other. For we are indeed talking about a poem, a whole poem, theirs, they know it before me, they know everything before me. You will see what authority Felix holds over you already...(Derrida, Counterpath, 23-24)

War Crimes in Fallujah: Photographic Evidence

From Socialist Worker and via 'lenin':

In some places we found bodies of fighters, dressed in black and with ammunition belts.

But in most of the houses, the bodies were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats, many of the women were not veiled—meaning there were no men other than family members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges.

It became clear to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians.

Nobody knows how many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the neighbourhoods to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity. The whole world must be told the truth.

And then there is this part:

I also found survivors of another family from the Jolan district. They told me that at the end of the second week of the siege the US troops swept through the Jolan. The Iraqi National Guard

used loudspeakers to call on people to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their belongings with them. They were ordered to gather outside near the Jamah al-Furkan mosque in the centre of town.

On 12 November Eyad Naji Latif and eight members of his family—one of them a six month old child—gathered their belongings and walked in single file, as instructed, to the mosque.

When they reached the main road outside the mosque they heard a shout, but they could not understand what was being shouted. Eyad told me it could have been “now” in English. Then the firing began.

US soldiers appeared on the roofs of surrounding houses and opened fire. Eyad’s father was shot in the heart and his mother in the chest.

They died instantly. Two of Eyad’s brothers were also hit, one in the chest and one in the neck. Two of the women were hit, one in the hand and one in the leg.

Then the snipers killed the wife of one of Eyad’s brothers. When she fell her five year old son ran to her and stood over her body. They shot him dead too.

Survivors made desperate appeals to the troops to stop firing.

But Eyad told me that whenever one of them tried to raise a white flag they were shot. After several hours he tried to raise his arm with the flag. But they shot him in the arm. Finally he tried to raise his hand. So they shot him in the hand.

The five survivors, including the six month old child, lay in the street for seven hours. Then four of them crawled to the nearest home to find shelter.

Watching the documentary "Control Room" this evening, I am struck by how the Senior Producer at Al-jazeera comes off as intelligent, courageous and genuinely likeable. Courageous not only in the face of missile attacks against the station of course, but also in his articulation of what an open media in an active democracy should be. The pitiful blue-eyed boy at CentCom doesn't come off as any of these things. At one point he nearly has an epiphany--(about the, gasp, humanity of Iraqi civilian casualties, and ironically enough brought about by the same Al-jazeera coverage of interviews with captured US soldiers that he has just been criticizing as "propoganda")--a critical awakening that should have come sometime in sixth grade, say. It's a fleeting moment. The organized propaganda spectacles of the Jessica Lynch affair, of the 12 men (without Iraqi accents) waving their shirts as the Saddam statue falls, of Kurds tearing up Iraqi currency that isn't used in their region, of the US general who holds a press conference to announce a "deck of cards" (of the 55 "most wanted" Iraqis) that he first agrees and then refuses to let anyone actually see, etc. etc. basically shows the U.S. media as no more than an effective propaganda machine. Surprise, suprise. But the documentary is well worth seeing for the behind-the-scenes look at Al-jazeera, and as an interesting study of a young press organization feeling its way in a particularly fragile, if also unprecedentedly influential moment. Of course so much has happened since then that another documentary probably deserves to be made.

Fat Controller Update

That's an overly ambitious title, but this is just to follow up on an enormously popular quiz a bit:

In an age in which steam trains have all but died out, their stories have not only endured but have become a driving force for a worldwide publishing, television and merchandising phenomenon.

"Children identify perfectly with the characters," said Catherine, a French expatriate living in London whose two boys, aged three and six, collect Thomas locomotives. Like youngsters their age, she said, "Thomas and his friends don't always listen, they do things that end up in catastrophe, and they end up getting punished by the Fat Controller — the parental figure."

Thomas the Tank Engine started its journey in 1941 in the imagination of the Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry, an English clergyman telling stories to his ailing three-year-old son Christopher, down with measles in the dark days of World War II. He penned 26 'Thomas' adventures, and his son Christopher another 40 more, with more than 80 million books sold worldwide — on top of Thomas cartoons, toys, clothes, children's furniture and the obligatory website.

And still doing well, it might seem. He's even inspired a poem or two (that is, Will Self's transpetation has).



But I really don't know much at all about the history of this figure/icon in Britain. Images that spring to my American-grown mind would include: J.P. Morgan's coach (or are those the letters "H.P." -- from the first scene in which Harry Potter appears in It's a Wonderful Life), the monopoly-man icon (again, based on the Morgans/Rockefellers?), the grouchy cartoon baby with a cigar in his mouth, always either insulting women or throwing tantrums (his tears obscenely visible, strange caricature of repressed jouissance? but what's his name--does he even have one?), Citizen Kane and William Randolph...

Americans of course fly into an instant fit (like instant coffee...instant anxiety) whenever one makes allusions to an alleged European lineage. (Either that or perhaps what is worse: they habitually, hypocritically accept the worst sloganized condemnation without a critical blink.) Are there even grounds for such a lineage with regard to this figure? In Gore Vidal's apt phrase: "The United States of Amnesia." A phrase that doesn't quite do justice to the ingrained, default bigotry here. The thinly disguised nationalistic hubris. And it's true, nobody seems to have any time for historical continuities anymore. History being ended, and all. Chant on, ye delusional euphorics, ye spoiled anorexics, ye obsequious, mono-personality mega-workers, ye aspiring megalomaniacs, ye dismal apocalyptics, ye throwbacks and jerknees. Why oh why do we hate our freedom? Come on now, chant together. Stomp your feet, stomp your boots. Stomp you stompcruisers down the street. Young (Signifier) on the march!

Before we were ranting against predictable targets, there was a simple silly question being formed: Which came first, The Fat Controller or The Fat Cat? Sir Topham Hat or Harry Potter (not the neo-epic neo-Tolkein, neo-Narnia, blockbuster)?

You see:

Thomas the Tank.


I see:


Is it just me or have the eyes changed?

Burden and anxiety of Empire. So much conjuring-away to come. This has all helped me to understand Will Self's book immensely, I must say.
Incidentally, the hit song, "Ain't we got fun" was first popular back in the roaring '20's? It then slept for around 40 years until eventually being revived by The Beatles (via Kerouac, I personally suspect). Is there an economy to these images, or 'in' these eternally recurring signposts? This is why the cultural/linguistic/philosophical archeology practiced by Eco, by Benjamin, and by Derrida is so important. Without seeking to conceptualize--critically, but not too critically--an economy of these images, to view them critically and so begin to see them for the first time maybe, not stripped of their charm and aesthetic content necessarily (that would be the worst!) but also as inextricably bound to an economy of sorts (as historical artifacts) -- without such analysis, such rigorous, serious 'play'... the future is preemptively condemned, the horizon closed off. Victory declared and cake eaten -- too soon.

The greatest and sickest irony of my divided life was that if I acknowledged that it was I who had done these things, I was free from all remorse. Instead, like my mentor, I held myself to be beyond all morality, a towering superman whose activities could not even be observed from the grovelling positions of mere mortals, let alone judged. Yet it also remained perfectly plausible for me to deny that I had done any of theseawful things at all. Most of the outrages had been committed during little odds and sods of borrowed time, they were will o' the wisp happenings, scraps of the Holocaust, left-overs from the Gulag. Although I had liked to torture my victims, I seldom indulged in so long a session as I had with the pit bull. Usually I would call it a wrap, after a leisurely hour or so of soldering flesh, pulling nails and shooting up strychnine.

And if I willed it, really believed it, then the knowledge of the little outrages vanished from my memory, wiped out as surely as a computer file. Ah, but then the septic tank hit the jet turbine, I became craven, culpable and driven. More than worried for my own sanity. Perhaps I was the borderline personality Dr Gyggle had said I was, all those years ago at Sussex?

My eidesis, I now realized, had been upgraded. The next generation made my mind a cheap bit of virtual reality, allowing me only two basic game modes. I could play mad or I could play bad, and although the two simulations might parallel one another all the way to infinity, they would never touch. Moreover, unless I remained vigilant I would sneakily flit like a cheating kid between the two: mad/bad, bad/mad, mad/bad. It could be quite bewildering.

[...]

I could style myself the very Demiurge of Dissociation, if I so chose, because of my delightfully separate centres of self; and when they commingled fully there was a sweet melancholia engendered alongside the terror of the dark and the arrogance of the justified sinner...(Will Self, My Idea of Fun, 291-293)

public service announcement

Some folks might be interested in today's announcements on the Site Jacques Derrida.

Gilbert Garcin

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...also has a blog
(via wood s lot)

Passion for the Real, or So Says Martin Amis #2

Pussies are bullshit. Don't let them tell you any different.

"Answer me something," I said to John Stagliano. We were stepping out of the porno home--onto the porno patio with its porno pool. This was Malibu. Down the slope and beyond the road lay the Pacific Ocean; but the Staglianos have no access to its porno shore. In the evening they can watch the porno sunset with its porno pink mauve and blood-orange, and then linger awhile, perhaps, under a porno moon.

"Answer me something. How do you account for the emphasis, not just in your...work but in the industry in general, how do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex?"

After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, "Pussies are bullshit."

Now John was bing obedient to the dictionary definition of "bullshit," which is nonesense intended to deceive.

With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated--well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jacknifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?

With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it, "Her personality comes out." He goes on: "You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more...virile." "Virile," of course, means manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King's English. You want the girls to show you "their testosterone."

[...]

"It looks like violence, but it's not. I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right? Rocco is driven by the market. What makes it in today's market place is reality."

And assholes are reality. And pussies are bullshit.

[...]

After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at acting, are very good at acting in one particular only: they can keep a straight face. But then humorlessness, universal and institutionalized humorlessness, is the lifeblood of porno...

If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex-drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And--probably--you need damage in your past. You also need to be humorless...

As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbor a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a copraphagic pigfarmer--or an undertaker...

Later that afternoon I journeyed from San Fernando to Pasadena: I was expected at a conference on "The Novel in Britain, 1950-2000" at the Huntington Library. After some prompting, I told a gathering of delegates about my recent experiences. "Pussies are bullshit" became the (unofficial) conference slogan.

If pussy is bullshit, then bullshit is pussy. On the second night, I played a regrettably sophomoric parlor game on this theme with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Hitchens. What's New Bullshitcat? Bullshit in Boots. "The Owl and the Bullshitcat" ("Oh lovely Bullshit! O Bullshit, my love, / What a beautiful Bullshit you are"). Bullshit-whipped. Bullshit-wagon. Bullshit's in a well. Someone mentioned the character from Goldfinger: Bullshit Galore. Salmon Rushdie paused; his eyes widened, and he said, suddenly,
"Octobullshit."

Jokes have been defined (by Nietzsche) as epigrams on the death of feelings. In other words, the best jokes are always a new low. It is utterly characteristic that the coiner of "pussies are bullshit" had no idea that he was joking. In any case, porno is littered--porno is heaped--with the deaths of feelings.

-Martin Amis, Porno's Last Summer