Morphogenesis

Is He Ditching This Blog or Not?

2006-05-03T11:50:00.000-04:00

It's basically becoming a place to post conference abstracts, I guess.

Anyway, the abstract on Beckett that appears in the last post was promptly rejected, and I'm STILL waiting to hear back about the Faulkner abstract for the MLA (which I have to presume is a bad sign), so, that's that.

In the meantime, however, a friend and I have both been accepted into the Midwest MLA conference this November. Does that look like a concession? Probably. But, I wanted to go to this one anyway, since it's in Chicago.

I was accepted onto a panel called "Sonic Spectacles" that deals with the emergence of visual and audio technologies in the twentieth century. My proposal is as follows:

Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and the
Drama of Machinic Disjunction

Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” explores the emergence of photography and cinema and tries to gauge the transformation in the material bases, conditions, and possibilities of thought and action that coincides with these new technologies. The paper that I’m proposing will continue Benjamin’s effort to think with the new forms and possibilities of thought and action that attend new technologies, as it investigates Samuel Beckett’s short play, Krapp’s Last Tape. The majority of the dialogue in this play is pre-recorded and played back on a tape recorder onstage. The sole character, Krapp, speaks every now and then, but his more important role, as he listens to his own voice from years past, is to stop the tape periodically, fast-forward it, or rewind it. The results of this interaction between Krapp and the tape recorder are twofold: first, it disrupts the linear continuity of the storyline and the performance; and second, it allows two disparate historical moments to converge in a single present. These temporal disjunctions and conjunctions create new possibilities of thinking about history, or thinking historically—that is, thinking about the relation between the past and the present—possibilities that emerge immanently with the machinery of the tape recorder. This paper will examine the implications of this technology for thinking and criticism, along with the relationship between technology and the dramatic form.

Tune in again next month. Or something.

Oh, yes, I nearly forgot the big news: about two weeks ago, I passed my dissertation prospectus, so I am officially ABD. Hooray for me!

Update and MLA Abstracts

2006-03-16T01:01:00.000-05:00

I leave for Salt Lake City on Friday to present at the conference that I mentioned in the previous post. The Atlanta conference is next month, but I've already started thinking about that paper. In the meantime, the more pressing issue (since my Utah paper is finished) is the dissertation prospectus. I've already begun drafting it, and I'm convinced that I'm thinking too hard about it.

Also, as the title of this post advertises, I've submitted two abstracts for papers that I hope to present at this year's MLA conference. For those who aren't in the know, MLA is where the big boys play, so to speak, and it's where I'll have to interview for jobs at some point in the near future (yes, I know that that sounds terribly hopeful). In any case, the first abstract that I submitted is basically the Faulkner paper that I'll be presenting this weekend. My changes to the abstract are so minute that it doesn't bear a second posting. The second abstract is as follows:

"Samuel Beckett: The Last Snapshot of the Literary Mind

In Twilight of the Literary, Terry Cochran demonstrates how certain figures that constitute the modern European mind emerge with and are expressed materially and historically in the institution of the printing press. So, for example, the synthesis (that books embody) of the preservation of human thought through time and the possibility of thought’s infinite reproduction finds expression in the figure of geist: a “human spirit” that simultaneously demonstrates the continuity of humanity and its historical progression towards fulfillment. Cochran, thus, shows how the very bases and processes of thought are inseparable from the material objects and institutions that articulate them. The emergence of new media in the twentieth century, then, does not merely expand the range of representational possibilities; it expresses a historical transformation in the material bases and operations of mind, such that the figures that constituted the modern mind (geist, for instance) are no longer adequate to the present moment. The task of criticism—which must avoid such anachronism—as it encounters visual media is to think with the new figures of thought that emerge immanently in these transformations of technology and media.
This paper will assay this task by attending to the shifting figure of Samuel Beckett as he appears in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Beckett first appears in Anti-Oedipus (1972), as part of the literary preoccupations that pervade Deleuze and Guattari’s study of capitalism and its relation to desire; in this volume, the Beckett that appears is invariably the Beckett of the trilogy of novels. By the time Deleuze writes a full essay on Beckett, though, in the Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), the study of capitalism had already led him to the Cinema volumes; the Beckett who appears in the later essays, then, is the Beckett of the dramatic works, specifically those written for film and television. The latter book, though, returns to the problems of literature that had occupied the books from the ‘70s, thereby indicating that the work on cinema had not completely superseded the problem of literature, but had transformed and recast it. My paper will read the shift from the Beckett of Anti-Oedipus to the Beckett of the Essays Critical and Clinical as an expression of the historical transformation of the material bases of mind that, in Deleuze’s work, occurs at the intersection of capitalism and the technology of cinema."

So, there it is. Regardless of its fate with the MLA, this latter paper will find its way, in some form, into my dissertation. You know, somewhere down the road...

I Might as Well Post Something in 2006...

2006-01-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

...although, it is as yet unclear to me how much I will be posting. This site served me well as I was working on my project, but I'm not sure that it will continue to be useful to me as I work on my dissertation. And, since it's quite obvious that I'm the only one who reads this anyway, I'm sure that I can find more efficient and productive ways to take notes...or talk to myself, as it were. All of which is to say that this blog may have reached its end. I leave you all (that is to say, me) to mourn this in your own way.

That said, I might as well go out with a bang. So, here is a panel proposal that I wrote for a conference in Utah this March (acceptance to which is still pending, but which is all but inevitable, given certain personal connections):

"Rethinking the Boundary: Images of American Power in Poe, Faulkner, and Henry Roth

This panel seeks to evaluate the notion of 'boundary' as a critical category, focusing especially on its adequacy as a figure for thinking about the present configuration of knowledge and power in America. To pose the question of the possibilities of humanistic study in terms of 'boundaries' of knowledge is already to presume that power and knowledge operate in a particular way: by imposing a systematic and categorical framework of power/knowledge on life. Assuming such conditions to be the case, the possibility of change can only be imagined as existing in spaces that are outside of or in between categories of knowledge and power. That is to say, possibility can only be defined negatively under such conditions, as existing where power is not. We will argue that this figuration of American power and the possibilities of change is inadequate.

To that end, the panel proposes to examine literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, and Henry Roth, in order to trace, in the literary image, the formation of the present configuration of knowledge and power in America. Through these readings, the panel will seek to provide an image of American power that is adequate to its historical conditions of emergence, and define positively the continuing possibilities of emergence or historical change. More specifically, we will engage the question of 'boundaries'—and an alternate figure, 'limit'—in these texts in order to rethink the relationship between history, power, and the literary image."

Not surprisingly, my paper will be the one on Faulkner. Here's the specific proposal for that paper:

Light in August: System and Limit

William Faulkner’s Light in August provides an image of the formation of a particularly American configuration of knowledge and power that seeks to subordinate human life to a process of systematization that will render that life knowable and manageable. In Faulkner’s novel, this configuration of knowledge and power asserts and renews itself in the continual elimination of its own limits, particularly in the lynching and castration of Joe Christmas. These limits continue to emerge throughout the novel—in numerous figurations, including Christmas’s mixed blood, the proliferation of olfactory images, the abundance of neologisms and grammatical deviations, and so on—as a function of the effort to construct a categorical system of knowledge and power. The perpetual emergence of limits or moments of possibility within power itself, however, is counterbalanced by the seeming inevitability with which power annihilates these possibilities in the moment of their emergence. The image of power that emerges in Light in August, then, is that of a process that constantly renews its effort to destroy the emergent possibilities that it creates, in order to establish what only appears to be a static system. This power, far from being static or systematic, seeks coextensivity with the unpredictable emergence that characterizes life itself.

My paper will continue this reading of Light in August, in order to further elaborate the image of American power that appears in the novel and evaluate the continuing possibilities of criticism that emerge immanently from within this regime."

I would post the other two paper abstracts, but I don't think that I should do so without their respective authors' permission.

And, finally, a (very) preliminary statement about the direction of my dissertation:

"Samuel Beckett’s writings mark a pivotal point in the history of literary modernism and the twentieth century European intellectual scene, a point at which literature and philosophy turned away from the problem of consciousness that had preoccupied high modernists like James Joyce and Marcel Proust, avant garde aesthetic movements like surrealism, and philosophical trends like phenomenology, existentialism, and lebensphilosophie. Beckett’s works, by contrast, consistently try to dissociate expression from a human subject in whose consciousness expression can be said to originate. His dramatic works attempt, by various devices, to detach speech from a human speaker: words emanate from tape recorders or disembodied mouths, when there are words at all. The prose writings address the form of language itself, as they demonstrate how language constantly articulates Beckett’s 'narrators' as speaking subjects. These 'narrators' try to find a mode of expression that will efface their own subjectivity by stripping language of accumulated meanings, thereby displaying the conventional and historical character of those meanings. Language thus appears in these works not as meaningful communication disseminated by subjective intention, but as the inhuman expression of immanent historical conditions. Beckett stands, then, as a unique figure in twentieth century literary and philosophical thought, as his attempts to create works in language whose modes of expression are immanent to their historical conditions simultaneously pushes the Symbolist project to its limit and anticipates the later work of French Post-Structuralism. Biographically, as well, Beckett’s connections to high modernism, absurdist theater, and the nouveau roman (and other groups as well) make him a complex and central figure through which to trace the genealogy of the literary image in twentieth century continental thought. Beckett’s corpus, then, represents an important moment of transformation in this genealogy."

The difficulties of writing about Beckett are enormous and extend far beyond the near-inscrutability of his texts. There can be no question of situating him within a national tradition, nor does he neatly fit into specific categories of genre, mode, or period. In this sense, Beckett is quintessentially literary, since, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his essay on Proust, "all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one;" they are, in other words, "special cases." A particular difficulty with Beckett is that of language and translation, since he wrote in both English and French, and he translated his own works into both of those languages. So, the vast majority of his oeuvre exists in both French and English, and both versions are his; that is, both versions are the "original." (This is, of course, to say nothing of a work like Godot, whose most famous and influential performances were given in Berlin in Beckett's own German translation.) We have, then, a cosmopolitan, polyglot corpus that refuses any sort of "origin" of its own expression, an "author" least of all. All of which contributes to a secular, historical image of language and expression, and the possibility that such expression is not the sole province of the human; or, at least, this marks a transformation in the nature of the human. To study Beckett, then, is to study modernity and the history of secularism in the twentieth century.

I Have Reached the Other Side...

2005-11-21T14:57:00.000-05:00

...and it feels good. New posts coming soon.

Update

2005-11-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

Well, the paper is done, and I'm just reading frantically until my exams begin...in about a week and a half. Yes, I have arrived at that critical moment when sports cliches almost become appropriate. I'm sure I'll have more to say on the other side, but...

In the meantime, I've been accepted as a presenter at a conference in Atlanta (my nemesis, if a city can be a nemesis) next April. I'll be part of a panel on "Modernism and Fascism." I'm posting my abstract below:

T.S. Eliot, Order, and Modernity

'Ever since his early essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot posed the problem of modernity as a problem of the relationship between the past and the present, between tradition and the continuing possibilities for newness and creativity. This problem was especially difficult for Eliot, as he wanted to maintain the permanence of a tradition of classics while still permitting the inclusion of new literary works that did more than merely imitate the classical style. This problem finds its allegorical expression and solution, for Eliot, in the process of reading and interpretation. In his later essay on Dante, especially, Eliot’s return to the moment of first encountering the Divine Comedy allows him to dramatize the process by which the new is assimilated into an order of permanence; this process, for Eliot, mirrors the sinner’s journey towards salvation. Eliot’s analysis of the Inferno emphasizes the moment of terror that characterizes the first encounter with the singular originality of the Comedy. This terror in the face of the unknown or the utterly new marks a threshold of possibilities that the encounter with the Comedy opens up; significantly, this threshold corresponds, in Eliot’s essay, to the sin and punishment of the Inferno. By the time his analysis reaches the Paradiso, the twin movements of Dante’s journey and Eliot’s reading arrive at a state of perfect and beatific order: just as Dante reaches the climactic endpoint of his journey, so Eliot’s reading and interpretation attain a mastery of the Comedy that retrospectively assimilates the earlier moment of terror, the moment of possibility, into a static order of knowledge.

My paper will argue that the encounter between past and present that Eliot performs in the act of reading Dante operates as an allegory for the question of modernity, as Eliot understands it: the question of the relationship between the past and the continuing possibilities of creativity. In Eliot’s figuration of this question in the Dante essay, modernity appears as the struggle to attain a structure or order that can contain the possibilities of life and thinking that emerge with the moment of terror. Eliot’s decidedly conservative and anti-secular goal is to reconstruct the history of modernity and its relationship to his own moment (achieved in the act of re-reading Dante), in order to redeem modernity from itself, to restore order where he perceives moral and cultural decadence. He aims to destroy the history of secular modernity by turning its own instruments and modalities—close reading, philology, historical criticism—against it. My paper, then, will not seek to rescue modernity from Eliot’s redemption; after all, this would miss the point. Rather, it will attempt to continue the project of secular modernity—the proliferation of possibilities of life and thinking—in the performance of reading.'

So, there you have it. Coming soon (i.e., after exams), I'll probably post something a bit more mathematical than usual: something on limits, infinite series, Borges (who else?), and imagination.

Temporary Hiatus

2005-09-18T10:42:00.000-04:00

For the next couple months, posts on this site will be even more sporadic than usual. Since late July, I've been using this site as a sort of online journal of fragments towards an academic project. Well, the time has come for me to actually write the real thing, so, unfortunately, whatever creative and critical capacities I have must be directed elsewhere.

So...this site might not see another substantive post before December. See you all on the other side...

Montaigne, Humanism, the Essay

2005-09-06T18:21:00.000-04:00

What follows is the lecture that I'm giving in class tomorrow on Montaigne (with a short bit on Boccaccio). You'll have to forgive some of the stylistic shortcomings of this piece (e.g., its rather too-sweeping gesture towards the European Renaissance); as I say, I wrote it as a lecture for undergraduates. Many of my comments on the essay form are comments that I've written before on this site, so, again, I beg your patience and forgiveness. I felt that this piece was worth posting here, because much of the discussion of humanism, death, and passing time in this lecture directly pertains to my recent musings on boredom, waiting, convalescence, forgetfulness, and the like. In many ways, this lecture could just as easily be about Beckett. Enjoy...

The beginning of the Renaissance is typically dated around the 13^th century, as European scholars began to discover and translate literary and philosophical works from ancient

Greece

. Plato, in particular, was discovered and translated for the first time. Thus, the Renaissance is often characterized as a sort of return to the high artistic and philosophical ideals of humanity’s “Golden Age.” It is also important to note, however, the emergence of humanism at this time, by which I mean the idea that Man, not God, is at the center of life; human life and human action are valuable in their own right, not just as expressions of God’s will or God’s plan; and Man is capable of attaining knowledge of the world through human acts of mind, not through divine revelation. Of course, religion continued to be a powerful force in Europe for several hundred years after this, but we can see in the Renaissance the beginnings of Europe’s secularization, the implications of which extend both to institutions of power and politics and to institutions of knowledge. More generally, we see a complete historical transformation in the way that humans think about the world and their relation to that world.

We can see this transformation in the emergence of the novel form. The novel is typically considered to be a modern form of the epic. Both of these literary forms try to capture the world in its entirety and its diversity. For the epic, though, a complete picture of the world necessarily includes the gods, who dwell immanently on Earth. The novel, by contrast, does not supplement the world with the divine; the world of the novel is fully material and historical. So, the very possibility of the novel as a literary form is contingent upon the changing historical conditions of life and thinking in the European Renaissance.

While working with Boccaccio’s Decameron last week, we also saw the importance of the Plague and the changing attitude towards death that accompanied it. The vast destruction and imminent death of the Plague, which struck indiscriminately, drew attention to the fragility and unpredictability of life. Death ceased to be the gateway to eternity and became the limit of life and action on Earth. As a result, life ceased to be the work of storing up rewards in the afterlife and became valuable in itself and for its own ends. One’s time on Earth was no longer a matter of working towards an eternity after death, but of making time itself fruitful or productive. We see this figured in The Decameron as a question of how to pass the time as one waits for death. However, “passing the time” does not necessarily only mean “killing time,” waiting for a finite number of seconds to run out. Boccaccio’s characters tell stories for amusement, yes, but also to learn, to explore the diversity and variety of life, to refine their character; in a word, “passing the time” is also making their time productive, making something of their time, not just “killing time.” Time and temporality thus becomes a question of development, fruitfulness, productivity, creativity, and so on, instead of being merely the interval or the gap that stands between Man and Eternity. Similarly, in the figure of storytelling in The Decameron, we see that literature is not a matter of divine revelation, its interpretation, or, on the other hand, mere entertainment; rather, literature is an expression of time as human creativity and action.

This question of time and waiting for death is particularly pertinent with regard to Michel de Montaigne, who, at the age of thirty-seven, retired to his estates (which he had inherited from his recently deceased father) in order to spend his remaining years in leisurely study (this was in 1570). Here, we see again, in Montaigne’s life, a figure of human life and temporality in general, which appears as a question of how best to pass the time, how to make one’s time fruitful, as one waits for death. In fact, Montaigne’s essay, “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die,” addresses this question specifically. This essay argues that we must always prepare ourselves for death, since living itself is always in the process of dying. To evaluate or think about life or the world with any kind of honesty or rigor is necessarily to think or act in the face of our own finitude, our own impending death. For Montaigne, human thought and action must always be considered in its relation to finitude, not eternity; thus, to philosophize is to learn how to die, is to engage in a process of thinking that always keeps its own finitude and contingency in mind. Given the inevitability and unpredictability of death, how does one pass the time or make one’s time fruitful while waiting for death? This is, for Montaigne, the fundamental human question.

For his own part, Montaigne waited for death in leisurely study, as I mentioned a moment ago. His mammoth volume of Essays is the result of this study. The essay as a literary form is an invention that is typically attributed to Montaigne. This form takes its name from the French verb “essayer,” which means “to try;” the closest English equivalent, since we rarely use “essay” as a verb, is “to assay.” It is this sense of the essay as an effort or experiment of thought that I want to focus on. The essay is not merely an exposition of knowledge already acquired; it is, rather, the process by which one comes into or creates knowledge. The movement or unfolding of the essay, then, displays the movement of mind as it grapples with a particular problem. Hence, Montaigne’s claim in the Preface to the Essays that “I myself am the subject of my book.” Despite the wide range of topics that he covers in this volume, what we actually see as we read Montaigne is an image of his thinking as he works through these topics. Insofar as the book is about anything, it is actually about Montaigne himself thinking about whatever subjects present themselves to him in the course of his study; it is, in fact, a book about reading, studying, thinking, and making something of one’s time.

His essay “On the Cannibals,” then, is not only about the cannibals or “savages” that European explorers encountered in the New World. The essay is also, more importantly, about the European response to these cannibals and the ideas or prejudices that are at the foundation of that response. He begins by considering the Greek etymology of the word “barbarian” and finds that, in ancient Greece, just as in Renaissance Europe, “every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country” (231). He goes on to demonstrate that the practices and customs of Europe are at least as barbarous as those of the cannibals, but that they don’t appear to the European as such, since they are familiar to him. The European encounter with the inhabitants of the New World is, thus, only ostensibly the subject of this essay. In fact, this encounter provides the occasion for Montaigne to reflect on the nature of custom and prejudice and how these are significant aspects of thought and what we consider to be truth. This essay is, thus, a reflection on thought itself.

Bergson and Proust

2005-09-04T15:06:00.000-04:00

Habit, Pure Memory, Mémoire Involontaire, Forgetfulness

I have no intention of joining the long debate about how much Bergson influenced Proust; let it suffice to say that there are significant similarities and differences between the two and that, while these similarities and differences are interesting, the question of influence is not.

Both Bergson and Proust distinguish between habit as a form of memory and a different kind of memory through which one can attend to something like "real time" or duration: that is to say, the movement of thinking and becoming, of thinking as becoming. Habit works against this attention to duration, as it reduces the interval of consciousness to a motor reflex that is oriented towards present useful action. These habits are learned and formed in the process of action in the world, such that each habit expresses or is an image of the entire history of its formation, despite being indisposed to reflect upon or attend to itself as such. For Bergson, the intellect's orientation toward spatialization and representation is itself a habit of thought formed in action; the reduction of the world to a spatial simultaneity, which turns the movement of temporality into the fourth dimension of the homogeneous medium of space, is a reduction that is nonetheless useful.

The problem, then, for both Bergson and Proust, is to develop and elaborate a mode of thinking or attention that can, at every step, ward off habitual modes of thought, so that it can attend duration. Both treat this as a problem of memory, as the difficulty lies in simultaneously attending or lingering with the movement of duration as it is moving and considering the larger process of one's attention. That is to say, in order to elaborate a mode of thinking that attends duration, one must be able to remember this movement beyond the instantaneous coincidence of thought and action, or thought and life. Or, as I've said many times on this site, the difficulty is for thought to think about itself thinking while it is thinking. I've mentioned, as well, that both Bergson and Proust try to accomplish this without resorting to the dialectic and without thrusting thought outside of itself or outside of the world, where it can take up a posture of disinterested and ahistorical contemplation (see here and here). Hence, the importance of the figure of habit and the attention (or, as Bergson calls it, "intuition") that penetrates habit: by figuring thought in this way, it is not a matter of bringing thought into correspondence with the movement of life and duration. Mind and thought are themselves aspects of this movement, so they necessarily correspond to this movement. Habit, too, is a modality of the movement of duration, but one that does not attend to itself as a modality of duration. So, the problem, as I say, is not how to make thought correspond to duration, but how thought can attend to itself as a modality of duration. Such attention must be wary of habit, and it must be related to a different kind of memory than habit.

For his part, Bergson opposes what he calls "pure memory" to habit memory. Pure memory is the conservation of the past in the present, which does not require that the past is present to consciousness. Just as one knows that the other rooms of his house continue to exist regardless of whether or not they are being consciously perceived, so, Bergson argues, memory or images of the past continue to exist in the present even though we do not always pay attention to these images. We typically don't pay attention to them, precisely because they hold little or no interest for present action; the present, for Bergson, is not what is, but what is being made, and the past is certainly no longer what is being made (see here). Of course, by the beginning of the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory, it becomes clear that "pure memory," like the "pure perception" of the first chapter, is a methodological conceit that is pursued as an explanatory expedient; there is, Bergson argues, no perception that is not already memory, and no memory that is not in the process of being actualized as present perception. Thus emerges the "memory-image:" the images of the past rushing into the present to aid in present action. There is a sort of dual movement, then, one from the past coming into the present, and the movement of the present itself, always oriented towards the future. These movements converge as memory-image, as the past persisting in the present and orienting itself towards the future. It becomes clear, then, that memory, for Bergson, is itself duration.

But, Bergson doesn't think enough about forgetting. His account of pure memory manages to dissociate existence and consciousness, such that the past can continue to exist as memory without our necessarily being conscious of it; this is a blow to those who wish to dismiss Bergson as an idealist. However, he never manages to adequately explain how certain memory images are selected instead of others or how memory presents itself to consciousness in the first place, since it is not already necessarily present to or for consciousness. He can only describe this as a leap into the past or into memory; the criteria for selection of images remain vague. This leap into memory, however, indicates that the past must indeed be present to consciousness, that nothing can be forgotten; otherwise, how would we know where or how to leap? This is the fatal weakness of Bergson's notion of pure memory, which does indeed make a large concession, here, to idealism: presence must be presence for consciousness.

Proust's mémoire involontaire provides an immanent critique of the lingering idealism of Bergson's pure memory. He takes seriously Bergson's dissociation of existence and consciousness and pushes this to its logical conclusion: consciousness and memory must be based in forgetfulness. Freud makes a similar point, though directed towards different ends, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He argues that consciousness is only possible as a narrowing of perception; the majority of the sensory information that we receive has to be repressed or forgotten in order for us to attend to or be conscious of our surroundings in any way whatsoever. Consciousness thus appears as a kind of attention whose attentiveness requires forgetting.* What is forgotten cannot be recovered at will, with a well-calculated leap, but only by chance, by stumbling unwittingly upon the material object in the encounter with which the memory-image flashes up.** Hence, the famous madeleine scene in À la Recherche du temps perdu, in which the narrator tastes the cookie dunked in tea, and his childhood in Combray unfolds before him. Again, though, this memory, this past image, does not issue forth from the narrator's subjectivity (even though nearly everyone reads Proust this way), but is the actualization of the dual movements of matter and memory as they converge and fructify in a chance moment. As the narrator says, these images "sprang into being"...from his mind?...from his memory?...from his subjectivity?...no, "from my cup of tea" (Swann's Way, 64). Thus, Proust avoids Bergson's idealism. The memory-image that emerges was forgotten; present, but not for consciousness. À la Recherche du temps perdu, then, is indeed a book about memory, but only insofar as memory forgets. La recherche is not the search through one's remembrances, but the actualization of forgotten images.

The Proustian version of my perpetual question, then, would be something like the following: can thinking attend the forgetfulness that makes such attention possible in the first place? If one must stumble unwittingly upon the material object in which the past is "hiding," can one nevertheless stumble attentively? Or, to put it differently, how does one attend chance?

*Of course, Bergson and Proust would part ways with Freud when the latter localizes consciousness, memory, and the unconscious in the subject. For the former pair, consciousness and memory are not contained anywhere, but are functions of the movement of life and matter.

**Here is the pertinent passage in Proust: "And so it is with our own past. It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die" (Swann's Way, 59-60).

Quotations from:
Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Tr. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D.J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Bibliography (Part 4)

2005-08-22T12:31:00.000-04:00

Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, et al., Aesthetics and Politics
Charles Baudelaire, "On Wine and Hashish"
Samuel Beckett, Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett, "Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce"
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Proust"
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Marcel Proust, "About Baudelaire"
Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction"
Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown"

Modernism, Temporality, Crisis: The Possibilities of Secular Thinking

2005-08-17T14:44:00.000-04:00

So, once again, Richard's comments and questions have pushed me to such a lengthy response that I felt it necessary and appropriate to turn that response into a full-fledged post.

Ok, so here's the part where people are going to laugh in disbelief: my project is not really theoretical. The point is not to create a theory of temporality, but to interrogate notions of temporality as a historical index of the contemporary possibilities of secular thinking and criticism. Historically, notions of the secular, from the Renaissance on, coincide with the question of temporality and history, as secular humanists (from Montaigne to Spinoza to Vico, etc...) tried to understand the world in non-Christological terms, which necessarily meant accounting for change, development, and creativity without viewing these as manifestations of God's eternal plan realizing itself in the world.

Modernism expressed a sort of crisis, as the notion of historicality, pushed to its extreme, seemed to imply a relativism that would destroy tradition and continuity. At the same time, positivist science was in the process of reducing the world to mathematical formulae. And then, there was the First World War, which was completely unprecedented in the extent of its destruction and the mechanization of that destruction. All of which created a sense that European humanity was in danger of extinction. Hence, the reactionary attempts to preserve humanity by positing or re-positing a plane of transcendence (Fascism, the return to religion, Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, Zionism, T.S. Eliot's classicism, etc....). These reactions are, of course, interesting in their own right. More interesting, though, are the attempts to think WITH the extinction of European humanity (here, I'm thinking of Proust, Bergson, Deleuze, Benjamin, Beckett and all those others that I love to write about so much), realizing that such a notion ("humanity") is itself a sort of barrier against secular thought, despite having been instrumental in its formation.

So, the question of temporality is far more historical than theoretical, as I see it. But, it is also a literary question, and not just because modernist writers tried to "reflect" the historical crisis that I described above. Rather, I think that the literary attempts to think this crisis are at least as important as the theoretical or philosophical attempts, because literature is imagistic and figurative: it thinks itself and its historical conditions without assuming a posture or position of contemplation.* And, of course, thinking about the imagistic character of literature became a hallmark of modernist literature. However, literature as a modality of expression and thinking is inextricably tied to humanism, which puts it in an ambiguous position in this crisis.** So, modernist literature finds itself in the rather urgent position of trying to rethink its place in the world, which is not an easy thing to do once one has given up on things like literary "traditions" (of course, folks like Eliot and Lukacs never really gave up on tradition). The very ideas of history and the secular are at stake in such a crisis.

*This is, incidentally, Bergson's greatest downfall in Creative Evolution: his commitment to philosophical thought makes him try to raise intuition to the level of contemplation, which gives up much of the ground that he worked so hard to gain in Matter and Memory. But, more on this another time. This is also the downfall of dialecticians, as I've mentioned before; they thrust thought outside of itself in order to take up a contemplative position in relation to it.
**This is partly why people like Beckett and Borges are so interesting: they try to create something like a non-humanist literature.

A Point of Clarification

2005-08-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

I conceived the post on convalescence as part of my thoughts on boredom and waiting (oh, and there are more posts on this to come!), which have to do, in an odd way, with modernity and temporality. Proust, like his relative-by-marriage and quasi-mentor Bergson, is interested in creating an image of something like "real time," as opposed to the time of physics, which isn't really time at all, but a unit of measure that is fundamentally spatial. "Real time" has to be something other than the homogeneous, repetitive tick of the clock; it has to capture movement, emergence, becoming--in a word, duration.

It is not surprising, then, that both Bergson and Proust place a good deal of emphasis on memory, since thinking time as duration, as something other than the repetition of instantaneous simultaneities (the ticking clock) requires an attention that also endures beyond the instantaneous. So, it's always tempting to confuse "real time" with "psychological time" and thus dismiss the two of them as idealists. I don't think that this is right, though; both emphasize the material aspects and beginnings of thinking and memory, such that memory is, for both of them, not a faculty that the human possesses, but is rather a function of the movement of matter.

So, the proliferating temporalities that I talked about in relation to Proust are not atemporal; I'm not sure that I'd call it pan-temporality either. It's something more like an image of the convergence of temporalities that present themselves in the emergence of the new (something akin to Benjamin's dialectical image). That is to say, it is an image of duration, of the persistence of the past in the present as an active element in the creation of the new. Of course, to grasp such an image, one needs to be able to lay aside the habits of thought formed in and for the sake of action that make time appear as merely the fourth dimension of space. Instead, thinking must attend duration.*

Incidentally, the Bergsonian and Proustian projects, as I'm reading them and as I'm trying to describe them (all too briefly), are precisely what I mentioned at the end of my Theory and Practice post: they try to elaborate an image of thinking that attends its own movement without opposing thinking to itself or to matter. Unlike Lukacs and other dialecticians, Bergson and Proust don't begin by positing the opposition of interior and exterior. Proust's Recherche, for example, doesn't display the dialectical mediation of interiority and exteriority. Rather, the movement of involuntary memory that unfolds over the course of 3000+ pages is an aspect of the movement of matter itself; the madeleine, the narrator's consciousness, past events, etc., are all nodes or nexuses of movement.

And yes, I realize that this post may have become more a point of obfuscation than clarification. But, that's not necessarily bad either.

*I'll be talking about this more in an upcoming post on habit and memory in Bergson and Proust, as this is an extremely important point for both of them, albeit in different ways.

Proust, the Convalescent

2005-08-08T13:20:00.000-04:00

Proust's essay on Baudelaire is relatively forgettable in terms of its critical analysis, but it is quite remarkable in terms of the gesture that it makes. The essay takes the form of a letter, in which Proust begins by apologizing to his friend Jacques Rivière, claiming that his health did not permit him to write a satisfactory essay on Baudelaire; "a few casual remarks" would have to suffice (188). From here, Proust launches into a long and tortuous meandering through not only Baudelaire, but also Hugo, de Vigny, and a handful of now-forgotten French poets. The most immediately striking aspect of the essay is the ratio of quotation to analysis, which is heavily weighted in favor of the former, as Proust continually grasps specific lines of poems for comparison and judgment.

Throughout this main portion of the essay, Proust picks up a conventional third-person perspective, only resuming his second-person "dialogue" with his friend towards the end. Here, the essay makes a sudden and startling shift, as Proust steps back from the poets under scrutiny and asks, "But all we have tried to do today, you and I, is to read together out loud, trusting to our memories and to our critical sense: is it not so?" (207) The letter ends with Proust lamenting, "together" with Rivière, the average Frenchman's poor taste in poetry. The essay, however, continues for two more pages, as Proust, ostensibly at a later date, explains the circumstances of this letter to his readers and begs their forgiveness for any inaccuracies in his quotations, as he wrote the letter from his sickbed and did not have a single book within his reach. He finally closes the essay with a quotation from Voltaire that "is so amusing, false though it may be, that I regret my inability to quote it accurately" (210).

Proust wrote this piece in 1921, within a year of his death, so he was undoubtedly sick and bed-ridden at the time (for those who don't know, Proust spent the majority of his later years in bed, sick with chronic asthma, and he eventually died, at age 51, of pneumonia). What is interesting, though, is how he uses his convalescence both as an occasion for thinking and as the modality of that thinking. These two aspects, occasion and modality, correspond to and emerge with the essay's two gestures of supplication, of begging forgiveness--the first, directed toward his friend, and the second, directed toward his readers. In this first instance, Proust's sickness gives him license to abandon the formal constraints of writing a "study" or "even...an unpretentious article" on Baudelaire, which he claims, apologetically, to be unable to accomplish (188). Instead, he is forced by his condition to "confine" himself to an entirely different mode of writing and criticism: the passing, occasional musings of the erudite convalescent.

The convalescent, being bed-ridden, has all the time in the world; but his time is also running out, since he is dying. His problem, as he waits in boredom for death, is not how to kill time, but how to fructify it, how to actualize it, expand it, and transform it into something new. Proust, for his part, covered his windows, so that he could sleep during the day, and wrote at night, in that semi-conscious state of awakening in which habit has not yet managed to situate us in a specific space and time. À la Recherche du temps perdu famously opens with the narrator's musings on awakening, that moment when one does not know when and where he has awoken, whether he is in the bedroom of his childhood or that of his adult life. Multiple temporalities collide and proliferate in an instant. Then, purely by chance, the narrator stumbles upon a material object, the madeleine dunked in a cup of tea, that proliferates these temporalities in a moment of waking consciousness; and, with that, the novel embarks on 3000+ pages of wandering and elaborating the memory-images that flash up unexpectedly from this chance encounter.

These are the conditions--awakening, the proliferation of multiple temporalities in an instant, the chance movement of mind in relation to matter that disrupts habit--that Proust tries to create in his bedroom as he writes during his sickness. One might say that he forges an aesthetic, even an ethos, of convalescence. This becomes clear in his second gesture of supplication in the Baudelaire essay, where, under the guise of an apology to the reader for the possible inaccuracies of quotation caused by his necessary reliance on memory alone, the modality of the essay's thinking and criticism emerges. Free from the strictures of a formal study, Proust allows his mind to wander, like the narrator of his novel, across lines that he quotes from memory as they occur to him, and his analysis is forced to move in relation to these seemingly random leaps and bounds of memory. He often breaks off in the middle of a point, only to return to it a paragraph or two later, with a phrase like, "Socrates and Valéry intruded as an interruption just as I was quoting that poem about the poor" (192). The movement of thinking, here, attends chance and contingency, not form or law; such an attention, however, appears in this essay as both the provenance and the burden of one who has all the time in the world to wait for chance, but must nevertheless try to actualize this time before it runs out.

All quotations from:
Proust, Marcel. "About Baudelaire." A Selection from His Miscellaneous Writings. London: Allan Wingate, 1948.

The Timefulness of Waiting

2005-07-31T16:30:00.000-04:00

Attendre, Boredom, Le Temps

I'll begin with a brief explanatory note. Many of you may have noticed my tendency to use various forms of the verb "to attend," particularly when speaking about the work or the movement of thinking. In English, this word can be used in the sense of "taking care of" something, as in "attending to one's affairs." Here, the verb means little more than performing a task. But, it can also be used in the sense of "lingering with" or "moving simultaneously with." Certainly, we recognize this sense of the word in the noun "attendant," the person who follows someone else in order to address whatever needs or situations may unexpectedly arise. In this case, we actually see these two senses of "to attend" merge, as the attendant's "lingering" converges with his "taking care of" certain affairs, such that "attending" takes on the sense of "waiting upon" someone or something; here, the word's etymological connection to the French attendre ("to wait") becomes clear. It is this sense of active waiting that I'm drawing on when I speak about thinking as "attending:" thinking as an action that is timeful, that lingers with or waits upon historical becoming. This waiting is not passive, though, as it requires a kind of concentration, an "attention" or "attentiveness."

Boredom, in Benjamin's Arcades, is when one is not sure what he is waiting for. Benjamin's lingering hopes for redemption--whether Messianic or socialist is hardly relevant--prevent him from offering the more radical formulation that we see in Beckett's Waiting for Godot (En Attendant Godot): boredom is when one is waiting for nothing. In both cases, however, one waits or attends without having an object or goal of one's waiting or attention other than the process and timefulness of waiting itself. Benjamin notes that our thinking that we do, in fact, know what we are waiting for "is nearly always an expression of our superficiality or inattention" (The Arcades Project, 105). Both "boredom" and "waiting" emerge, here, as unlikely figures of the historicality of thinking.

Of course, it would be difficult to dissociate "boredom" from the dull and the mundane, from ennui and taedium vitae. This mixed aspect of the figure of boredom gets played out in the Arcades through the ambiguities of le temps, which refers both to "time" and to "the weather." Throughout the Arcades, the Parisian rain appears as a figure of the intolerable ennui of bourgeois existence (le temps as "the weather"), an existence marked by luxury and the ubiquitous logic of the commodity fetish. However, this boredom is still a figure of the historicality of thinking, in two respects: 1) it is an index of the historical conditions of life and thinking in bourgeois modernity; and 2) it expresses the timefulness of attendre (le temps as "time").

Can boredom be attentive, though? This bears further consideration.

Some Suggestions for Jon Stewart...

2005-07-26T09:57:00.000-04:00

...you know, in case he gets a second crack at Santorum.

1) Instead of conceding Santorum's premise--the primary structural unit of all societies is the family--try offering a counter-example, such as, oh, I don't know, the U.S., where, at least in principle (how poorly this has panned out is another matter), the individual is the primary structural unit of politics and is supposed to be able to rely on reason and judgment, not on arbitrary authority, be it religious or familial.

2) EVEN IF you concede his premise, it does not follow logically that homosexuals must be persecuted. It just doesn't. Sorry, Rick.

3) Falling back on the old "well, we can keep arguing this, but neither one of us will convince the other" platitude is a concession of defeat. It shows that you don't actually have a counter-argument, even though you disagree with the argument that you can't counter.

Way to go, Jonny...

How to Lose Debates Quickly

2005-07-25T23:25:00.000-04:00

Follow Jon Stewart's lead, which means conceding your opponent's argument before you even have the chance to counter it.

Honestly, Santorum just made Stewart look foolish...

Bibliography (Part 3)

2005-07-20T12:56:00.000-04:00

As usual, these are the texts that I've been reading and/or thinking about a lot lately.

Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life"
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"
Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"
Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"
Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
Paul DeMan, "Criticism and Crisis"
Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd"
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time)

Theory and Practice

2005-07-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

I am tempted to go on a tirade here. The persistence of this diad in leftist thought--where it is typically conceived as "theory vs. practice"--continues to contribute to shoddy intellectual work and an increased sense of the irrelevance of thinking. And how could it do otherwise? How could American critics, convinced that "agency" can be "located" by properly synthesizing the right theory with the right practice, possibly produce work that isn't irrelevant?

But, I'll try to leave the polemics off to the side, for the moment. Certainly, this distinction between "theory" and "practice" can be traced back at least as far as the Ancients' debates over the active life and the contemplative life. The specific formulation of theory and practice (or praxis) as dialectical opposites whose synthesis yields transformation, however, emerges from various strains of Marxist thought (well, actually, we should probably follow this back to Hegel). This is, of course, where the formulation acquires the form of the dialectic. Despite recent criticism's frequent disavowals of Marxism as an account of history and a model for action, the form of the dialectic persists in the theory/practice distinction that continues to inform much academic work, particularly work that considers itself to be political.

The consequences of the persistence of this dialectical opposition are significant. It separates thinking from action--in fact, they become each other's antitheses--and it assigns to thinking a purely speculative role. Thinking, in this model, has to become other than itself in order to contemplate itself, recognize itself in its Other, and reunite with action in order to achieve the unity that is the engine that drives history. Thus, we are back to the problems of philosophical realism and idealism, both of which posit a material world, on one hand, and consciousness or intelligence, on the other hand; they are then faced with the insurmountable difficulty of explaining the relationship between the two. Hegel, of course, finally solves this problem by introducing the dialectic, the transcendental process that synthesizes the universal with the particular, mind with body, consciousness with matter, in the inevitable march of Reason through history.

The task--which the likes of Spinoza, Vico, Bergson, Proust, Joyce, Deleuze, Nietzsche, and others take up--is to create an image of thinking that does not situate thinking outside of or in opposition to the world in a relation of correspondence. Or, to phrase it more succinctly (if more confusingly), the task is to think about thinking while one is thinking, without making thinking its own Other. Lukacs correctly identifies this as the problem of modernity--that is, "interiority," or thought reflecting on itself--and the dialectical form that he, following Hegel, uses to try to account for this problem is undoubtedly an expression of precisely this problem (the Self splits, becomes Other to itself in order to contemplate itself, and then strives to reunite itself with itself). But Lukacs, for all of his attempts to historicize the emergence of literary forms, does not recognize the historicality of the dialectical form; rather, the dialectic is a transcendental form that guides and shapes the historicality of all merely contingent or human forms. So, for Lukacs, the dialectic of interiority describes the historical transformations in thinking from a mythic world (in which man and nature exist in an organic unity, and the gods dwell immanently on Earth) to the modern world (in which man is opposed to nature, mind is opposed to materiality, interior is opposed to exterior, and so on), rather than being itself a formal expression of this movement. An immanent critique of Lukacs's dialectic (in The Theory of the Novel) makes this clear, as the dialectic of interiority can only begin once the organic unity of the mythic world is broken by the Fall into self-consciousness.* That is to say, the dialectic only emerges as an expression of interiority after or at the moment that this interiority itself appears.

This directly indicates the problem or task that I noted above: thinking about thinking and its history, while remaining attentive to the ways in which our forms of exposition and inquiry are themselves aspects of thinking that are not exterior to thought. Setting theory in opposition to practice fails in this task. Even though the dialectic is designed to account for thinking contemplating itself in its historicality, it still rests on the assumed and unexamined universality of its own form.

*The breaking of the mythic world and the Fall into self-consciousness closely follows the Biblical narrative of the Fall: recall that Adam and Eve, after eating the fruit, first become aware of their own nakedness. It is not surprising, then, that the dialectic of world history, like the Christology that it secularizes, ends with the redemption of man from himself and the restoration of the mythic world.

I Just Confronted the Analytical Mind, and It Wasn't Pretty: Thoughts on the Essay and on Language as Image

2005-07-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

Without going into a long explanation of foreign language requirements in the humanities, translation courses, and the like, suffice it to say that I've been spending 8 hours a week for the past few weeks (with a few more to come...) in a (terribly uncomfortable) classroom with a large handful of Pitt philosophy students. If you know anything about the reputation of Pitt's philosophy department, which is formidable (and not necessarily in the French sense of the word), you know that the department is almost exclusively analytical in its orientation. So, perhaps a confrontation was inevitable. I don't know. In any case, our instructor inexplicably decided to assign us Walter Benjamin's brilliant essay on "The Task of the Translator" (in English, fortunately), supposedly because it would help us in the work of reading texts in their original language. If you have read this essay, you know that the image of translation that emerges in the essay is diametrically opposed to the kind of weak language work that occurs in these 6-week crash courses in translation, in which the most important thing is to be able to "get the sense" of "what the text is saying." Without denying the utility and function (those of you who know me know with what suspicion I regard these terms) of such a class, this is very blatantly what Benjamin calls "bad translation." Nothing subtle there. So, again, it's unclear to me why we were reading this essay in this course. But, my point is not to berate the instructor here.

For those unfamiliar with the essay: Benjamin uses the occasion of his translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens to elaborate an image of language that disavows correspondence, meaning, and intent. In other words, at the heart of language is not a one-to-one correspondence with real objects in the world, nor is language merely the vehicle that delivers intent from one subject to another. Language is not, therefore, reducible to a logic of substitution, which becomes clear in the process of translation (the occasion of this moment of thinking); anyone who speaks more than one language knows the impossibility of merely substituting words when translating. In the encounter between languages and temporalities, the translator must concern himself with the historicality of each of the languages and their usage; one cannot assume, in translating The Iliad, for example, that there is information that Homer wishes to convey to us. Rather, in this encounter, an image of "pure language"--that is, language as historical process (not to be mistaken for something like abstract or formal language)--flashes up, displaying the relationships between languages and the histories of their formation and elaboration. In short, for analytical philosophers, the children of the likes of Carnap, this essay is a nightmare. (But, this should not be surprising; logical positivism can't really get around problems of translation.)

How does one deal with a nightmare? By dismissing it, of course, and by thinking about it in relation to our more accustomed waking consciousness, rather than trying to think it in its own terms (cf., The Arcades Project and the dream). Needless to say, this is precisely what happened in class, as one by one, the analytical mind fixated on the first paragraph in an attempt to "disprove" what they took to be the essay's premises. In particular, they attacked Benjamin's claim (as though it was a protocol sentence) that no work of art is intended for a reader; this can be proven false by enumerating counterexamples. Furthermore, they asked, how can translation forego the conveyance of meaning? Doesn't that miss the point (read: the function) of translation? And, finally, someone made the brilliant comment (which is worth mentioning only for its comic value) that the essay can't possibly be good, because it is completely unmarketable. In short, they vacillated between treating the essay as, on one hand, a theoretical treatise, geometrically arranged in accordance with the strictest codes of logic, and, on the other hand, an instruction manual for translation. It is difficult to imagine an approach that would more completely miss the point.

At this point, it is worth reflecting on the essay form, the beginnings of which are typically traced back to Michel de Montaigne, whose mammoth volume of Essais constitutes a landmark expression of Renaissance humanism. Not only does the volume's breadth of subject matter--which encompasses matters of history (e.g., Julius Caesar's methods of waging war, Virgil, the cannibals encountered in the New World), ethics (e.g., moderation, prayer, anger, and virtue), and knowledge (e.g., books, education, imagination, and the delightfully titled essay, "To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die")--reflect the enormity of the fields of knowledge that were opened up to secular, human investigation, but the emergence of the essay form as a mode of investigation expresses a transformation in the immanent possibilities of life and thinking at that historical moment. The essay, as formulated by Montaigne, does not exposit knowledge already acquired. It is, by contrast, the process by which knowledge is attained, the elaboration in language of problems that mind presents to itself. The essay is thus the image of the movement of mind in history. Montaigne makes this clear in his prefatory note to the Essais, in which he informs his reader that, despite the wide range of topics covered in the volume, "I myself am the subject of my book." In this way, Montaigne anticipates Vico's famous claim that men make history and can only know what they have made. The world, for Montaigne (as for Vico), does not stand in opposition to mind, whose task would be to represent this world to itself as objectively as possible (enter the logic of correspondence and substitution). Rather, mind is part of the world and thus cannot reflect on the world without simultaneously displaying its own orientation within the world. Each of Montaigne's topics thus appears as a figure of thought that expresses the movement of mind as it elaborates knowledge of the world through figuration, not correspondence. In a word, the essay is timeful.

I would argue that Benjamin is, in many ways, a belated heir to Montaigne. The movement of his (that is, Benjamin's) essays displays the unfolding in time of thinking as it elaborates a figure, whether that figure is the translator, the collector, the storyteller, the flâneur, and so on. In this sense, Benjamin's essays are far more literary than they are philosophical; or, perhaps it would be better to say that Benjamin's essays enact a literary or aesthetic modality of critical reflection. In any case, to approach "The Task of the Translator" as a treatise whose truth can be assessed in accordance with the degree to which it corresponds to or depicts its ostensible object is both to misunderstand the image of language that emerges in the essay and to ignore the formal and stylistic performance of thinking in which this image flashes up. Formally speaking, Benjamin's essay is more akin to jazz than to geometry. It eschews the geometric form, which deduces conclusions from the analysis of a given set of axioms. I alluded above to the occasional nature of this particular essay. This is not insignificant. The beginnings of this essay lie in the process of Benjamin's translation of Baudelaire. In the midst of the encounter between the French and German languages, an image of language as historical process (not correspondence) flashes up unexpectedly. Benjamin, like the jazz musician, grasps this emerging image in the figure of the translator and elaborates that figure through varying modalities, as a display of the movement of thinking as a process of historical becoming.

There is much more to say on this matter, particularly with regard to the constellation that this essay evokes: the Vienna Circle and logical positivism, Benjamin's own later work on the Paris arcades and Baudelaire (in conjunction with which the comment about Benjamin's marketability being a measure of his quality becomes strikingly apropos), and so on. But, this will have to wait for a different post, perhaps one on the figure of crisis in/and criticism, particularly as it relates to modernism.

Style and Movement, Style as Movement

2005-02-21T19:11:00.000-05:00

In order to appease the hordes that daily berate me for not posting, here's a tidbit from my project proposal. It still needs more revision, and this is only a small section, but all relevant comments are welcome, even (especially) those of a bibliographic nature.

I propose to begin my investigation where scientific and philosophical studies of consciousness and time come together with experiments in literary form in a transformative moment at the turn of the twentieth century. It seems to me, however, that formulating this constellation in terms of “representing consciousness” begs more questions than it answers: How does one “represent” consciousness? Is consciousness somehow an object that admits of representation? Is a “stream of consciousness” narrative a representation of consciousness or a performance of consciousness? My hypothesis is that these novels enact ways of thinking about problems of consciousness and time that differ from both quantitative experimental psychology (exemplified by Gustav Fechner’s psychophysics) and Freudian psychoanalysis, two divergent lines of scientific inquiry into consciousness that share a common premise: to represent consciousness is to know consciousness. While Fechner’s groundbreaking Elements of Psychophysics seeks to establish consciousness as a quantifiably measurable, and thus representable, phenomenon, Freud rejects such a notion, which leads him to conclude that consciousness must be fundamentally unknowable, except through the symbolism of dreams. Despite the voluminous body of psychoanalytic criticism on modernist fiction, I think that novels like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or As I Lay Dying begin from premises that radically differ from both the Freudian and the Fechnerian accounts. In their performance of consciousness, these novels demonstrate that consciousness is indeed knowable, but only in its historical articulation. That is to say, these novels do not offer pictorial representational images of consciousness; rather, the image of consciousness is articulated in the movement of the narrative between and in relation to contingent historical circumstances.

This question of movement cuts straight to the heart of the problem of time; after all, Einstein’s theories of relativity emerged from considerations of motion. Similarly, in his Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster poses this concern as a question of rhythm in the novel, which immediately ties movement and time together as functions of style and narrative form. Just as the revolution in physics dispensed with classical mechanics and its mechanistic understanding of time and space, so modernist fiction set aside the aim of representing discrete objects and characters whose actions proceeded along Newtonian lines, focusing instead on stylistic movement or the unfolding of time and narrative. Thus, the accuracy with which modernist novels depict time and consciousness is of little concern to me; after all, to pose the matter in this way is already to concede that “representing consciousness” and “representing time” are indeed the problems that modernist fiction sets out for itself and the rubrics by which I should orient my thinking toward these problems. By contrast, the modernist preoccupation with formal and stylistic experimentation suggests a non-representational aesthetic. It does not concern itself with representational accuracy; rather, it reads the aesthetic image as the formal expression of the conditions of its emergence. We have, then, two styles of engaging the image that differ in kind, not merely in degree: the former concerns itself with objects and representation; the latter concerns itself with style and movement, with style as movement. It is this stylistic distinction that is of crucial importance to my project.

Update/Redirection/Reaccentuation

2005-01-25T01:19:00.000-05:00

So, after a nearly two month hiatus, I'm back. I should begin, by way of a brief explanation, by saying that a major reason that I stopped posting was the realization that this blog was quickly turning into a repository of politically related news articles; I do not want to turn this page into that. Rather, I want to continue to use this to further my own academic work. So, until I was able to do just that, I stopped.

So much for explanations. On to the update.

The paper that I wrote for my Bakhtin class last semester turned out to be quite a bit different than what I had at first intended: an investigation of the problem of time in the novel by way of a reading of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (see below), in conjunction with a reading of the problem of thinking time and change in linguistics, as displayed in Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Bakhtin's "Problems of Speech Genres" essay, and so forth (see below). This changed dramatically as I read Bakhtin's essay on Goethe (which is basically what remains of a book-length manuscript that was destroyed), wherein the problem of time in the novel is far more pronounced and is more rigorously and philologically examined than in the abstract linguistic theorizations of other Bakhtinian works. So, I left Joyce off to the side, for the time being, and I focused entirely on the Goethe essay.

Bakhtin recognizes in Goethe's writings, particularly Wilhelm Meister, the emergence of historical time in the novel. That is to say, the form of Goethe's writings utilizes time and space in such a way that they are no longer the immutable, homogeneous media or setting in which the action of the novel takes place; rather, the hero emerges in real historical time, where the emergence of the character and historical emergence are inseparable. Time and space are no longer distinguishable from the action of the novel; they are incorporated into the action. This stylistic transformation in the novel, for Bakhtin, is an aesthetic expression of larger cultural and intellectual transformations during the Enlightenment, such that one can see at this time the emergence of a sense of time and historicality.

What is of greatest interest to me here is the way that Bakhtin engages the image. He is not concerned with what the aesthetic image represents; he is concerned, rather, with questions of form and style, wherein he finds expressed a transformation in ways of thinking. In other words, if one carefully attends to and takes seriously Bakhtin's reading of Goethe, we see an account of the aesthetic image that is not representational, that does not represent an object. Rather, the image displays the constellation of forces out of which it emerges; it expresses the relationship between a historically specific orientation or attitude of mind and its material conditions of existence. Hence, Bakhtin can read, in the form of the novel, an orientation of mind that belongs to the conditions of the Enlightenment.

Unfortunately, Bakhtin misapprehends the force of his own analysis, as his affinity for typologies gets the better of him. He realizes, in his reading of Goethe, that the narrative effects of time and space (the "chronotope," to use Bakhtin's term) in the novel are great, so he extends this insight to cover the entire history of the novel; hence, his massive subsequent essay, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," which is a historical typology of the genre on the basis of how time and space are represented in the novel. Rather than realizing that the problem of time in the novel is specific to a historically situated modality of thinking whose emergence Bakhtin finds expressed in Goethe’s writings and in whose duration he himself is still writing, Bakhtin turns the chronotope into a transhistorical formal element that constitutes the novel and that, in its variability, constitutes the history of the novel. As such, the chronotope can become, for Bakhtin, the organizing principle for a historical typology of the genre.

Briefly stated, the problem is that, in an essay in which Bakhtin so closely attends to questions of literary form and style as the expression of historically specific modalities of thinking, he does not give the same consideration to the form of his own engagement with the text. In the essay's better moments (which I will call "philological"), Bakhtin exhibits a non-representational understanding of the image; however, the typological form of his thinking does not permit him to sustain this philological reading; in the end, he falls back into a rigorously formalist and representationalist account of the history of the novel.

I won't try to summarize my paper on Bergson and Deleuze that I wrote last semester, in large part because I don't think that it lends itself to summary. And, I'm sure that I will write much more in the future on Bergson anyway. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that Bergson is thinking with an entire genealogy of thinkers--including Spinoza, Vico, and Nietzsche--for whom the image is non-representational; they form a sort of counter-genealogy of modernity, in opposition to the genealogy that we've grown accustomed to (Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, etc.). I will have much more to say about the image and representation in posts to come, particularly since my interest in modernism lies precisely here: I'm reading modernist literary aesthetics as a major and wide-ranging attempt to think and create aesthetic images in a non-representational mode. More on this to follow.

Lame Apology, Shameless Plug, and More

2004-11-29T20:05:00.000-05:00

First, apologies for not posting, not responding to comments, and the like. I'll try to pick up the pace again, but I'm not sure how well I'll be able to do that over the next 3 weeks or so. I will respond to comments, I swear!

OK, also, for those of you involved in the Strauss blog, recent additions have been made (and not all by me!), so check it out.

And, finally, here is an article from the L.A. Times on the emergent exurban phenomenon described (and debated) below.

There is more soon to follow, so bear with me...

Population Shifts

2004-11-15T19:03:00.000-05:00

While I normally disagree with this columnist (David Brooks), he got something right in this article, where he describes the continued decentralization and de-urbanization of populations in America. The Right won, he argues, in part by recognizing this, while the Left continued to target America's rapidly diminishing urban areas. Brooks argues that this decentralization has gone beyond suburbs, as a new population phenomenon which he calls the "exurb" is popping up in places like central Florida (hmm, did someone say "swing state?").

Many of you are familiar with my rants about the suburbs: the homogenization of life, the wide streets and large commercial lots which necessitate owning a vehicle and which impede social interaction, the eerie sense of ahistoricality, the lack of any socio-economic center in which possibilities of thinking can proliferate, and so forth. It will be interesting to see what trends of thinking/thought accompany the emergence of the exurbs. Unfortunately, the recent election might already be an expression of this change.

The Left's Failure to Think Historically

2004-11-05T15:23:00.000-05:00

Note: Much of what follows comes from a discussion on Post-Schna-ulations (Shannon's Blog).

"The masses continue to perpetuate their own oppression, because they don't know any better. Once they realize that they're getting fucked (or, once they are well informed about the conditions of their moment), they will rise up against their oppressors."

This has been the party line of the Left, in some form or another, since Marx, which, I would argue, is part of the reason why the Left continues to lose, while the Right continues to consolidate and strengthen its power. This line is exactly where this article is going, despite the fact that, at first, the author makes the insightful claim that "Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have profoundly different perceptions of reality." However, he then misinterprets the force of his own insight, claiming that the difference is that Bush supporters are ignorant, while Kerry supporters are well informed (or, at least, better informed), rather than realizing that we are looking at two entirely different orientations of mind. This is the point that the Left continues to miss, and so, the Left keeps losing: they assume that Republicans think in roughly the same way as they do, but with less information (or less accurate information); thus, victory is only a matter of disseminating the correct information. Confronted with the facts, how could these people possibly vote Republican? So goes the line of Leftist thinking that hasn't been truly victorious in recent memory.

This positing of the continuity of mind through time, which varies only in the quantity and content of its knowledge, is a grave historical error, and one for which the Left is paying dearly. To put it another way, the Right doesn't continue to win by withholding information from the masses (which is not to say that they don't withhold information); they continue to win by cultivating minds that DON'T WANT or DON'T CARE to be "informed." The fact that, for example, the public debunking of the WMD intelligence that justified the invasion of Iraq hardly made any difference in public opinion about the war does not indicate that this information was not adequately disseminated; it expresses an orientation of mind for which empirical evidence and rational disputation are not convincing.

That said, the Left cannot continue to target "voter awareness" as its first priority (although, this is certainly important). Rather, they have to target the orientation of mind that the Right has worked so hard to cultivate over AT LEAST the past 40 years. Without effecting a change in this configuration of mind, properly informing these voters will continue to be irrelevant. Of course, the first step towards changing the orientation of mind that the Right has cultivated is to try to understand it: that is, to reconstruct the genealogy of its formation. Hence, the importance of reading Leo Strauss.

Post-Election Musings

2004-11-03T13:47:00.000-05:00

Yes, I have returned from moving, weddings in Phoenix, long delays from Verizon, and the like. And what a joyous homecoming this is...

A few questions:

Q: Which is worse: George W. Bush getting a second term, or the knowledge that Bush's reelection strengthens Dick Cheney's candidacy in 2008?

A: It's too early to tell, but it's not clear that there will be anything left for Cheney to take over in four years...

Q: Which is more disheartening: Bush "winning" illegitimately in 2000, or Bush winning legitimately in 2004?

A: The latter. While Bush's "victory" in 2000 was a travesty of democracy, his victory last night proves that the majority of Americans (at least the majority that voted) not only think that Bush isn't a threat to life and thinking per se, but they think that, having seen what he could do in his first term, he is a good choice for a second term. This expresses a configuration of mind that is far more widespread, deep-rooted, and dangerous than anything that could have possibly come out of the 2000 Electoral Farce.

Q: What is to be done?

A: As I try to brush aside my despair long enough to think clearly, I can only conclude that my work as an instructor in the humanities, where I try to foster minds that are historically and philologically oriented, is more important than ever. More generally, the Left needs to realize that it was defeated again and, instead of pointing fingers, begin to seriously and rigorously figure out why and how this could have happened. In other words, it needs to undertake a critical genealogy of the forces from which the present moment emerged.

"Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue"

2004-10-19T13:44:00.000-04:00

OK, one more thing, but that's really it for me until I've moved!

Here, we have more on the Conservative war on knowledge. An excerpt:

"Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be presented in public reports or news releases."

Miscellaneous (Part 4 of n)

2004-10-18T14:18:00.000-04:00

Well, as many of you know, Shannon and I are moving later this week, so my work on this site will be on an indefinite hiatus. To tide you over until my return, however, I leave you with this delightful bit of Borgesian mischief.

Certainty and the "Faith-Based Presidency"

2004-10-17T13:34:00.000-04:00

Here, we have further evidence of the threat that religiosity poses to life and thinking. A few excerpts:

"'This is why[Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,' Bartlett went on to say. 'He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.' Bartlett paused, then said, 'But you can't run the world on faith.'

[...]

"This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, 'By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.'"

And yet, it is precisely this resolution and certainty that most Americans are looking for.

Joyce and Bakhtin: Thinking Time in the Novel

2004-10-16T19:40:00.000-04:00

Notes Toward a Non-Psychoanalytic Reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

As I mentioned in a previous post, my interest in the works of the Bakhtin School is related to the question of time and change. In particular, their attempt to elaborate a dialogic model of language that is sociological and historical (i.e., it can account for historical change in language) consistently faces the problem, in trying to articulate change, of having to synthesize synchronic, formal, static forces with diachronic, historical, kinetic forces. Only Volosinov, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, seems to be able to articulate change without relying on this dialectical synthesis, which describes change as a force that is working on language from the outside.

A similar problem arises in reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as the opposition between stasis and kinesis operates on many levels of the text, not the least of which is in Stephen's aesthetic theory at the end of Chapter 5. For the sake of brevity, however, I'll restrict my discussion here to the structure of the novel.

One of the first things that one notices in reading this novel is the way that the narrative language "progresses" in conjunction with Stephen's own maturation. To be clear, though, the novel does not proceed as a first-person stream of consciousness narrative of a character's development; rather, we are given a third-person narration in which the language of the narrative (and the logic of the narrative as well, that is, it's style of thinking--this is a significant point, as it indicates that the narrative is not a representation of Stephen's progressing consciousness [which is the commonplace in reading this novel], but is a representation of the process by which his consciousness forms itself in language and experience) corresponds to the language and styles of thinking that characterize Stephen's engagement with the world. In this sense, Portrait supercedes even the bildungsroman (I have in mind Bakhtin's definition of the bildungsroman in his essay on the topic) in its representation of the emergence of the hero in time, since it doesn't rely on an overarching outside narrative voice--whose discourse is divorced from the process of emergence that it is describing--to represent this emergence. To return to the point, however, this gradual "maturation" of narrative style gives the novel a feeling of progress, of kinesis.

At the same time, however, there is a seemingly contradictory movement of repetition in the novel. There are a small handful of figures that continually recur in each episode (already, the episodic structure of the novel breaks up its linearity), particularly women (e.g., his mother, Dante, the Virgin Mary, EC, the bird-girl from his "vision," etc.) and birds (this is particularly related to the Daedalus myth that undergirds the entire story), which are typically linked to religion and aesthetics, respectively--and here we have the grounds for another stasis (religion)/kinesis (aesthetics) opposition in the novel (although, Stephen himself thinks that the ultimate aesthetic emotions are static, not kinetic). Nonetheless, these figures constantly recur, but in differing configurations: so, for example, in their first instantiation, we see Dante's and Mrs. Dedalus's religious outrage at young Stephen's suggestion that he will someday marry Eileen (who we later find out is a Protestant) coupled with a childish poem about eagles pulling out his eyes if he doesn't apologize; later, Stephen's bird-named schoolmate, Heron, plays a sort of "Spanish Inquisition" game in which he tries to force Stephen to admit that Byron was not the greatest poet and that he (Stephen) is after Emma Clery; Father Arnall's diatribe on Hell at the Jesuit College retreat uses an example of birds pecking at sand to describe the idea of eternity, and he constantly exhorts the young students to become knights of the Blessed Virgin; Stephen's vision of the bird-like girl in Dublin Bay, when he gives up any thought of religious vocation and realizes his artistic vocation, is described in the language of religious ecstasy; watching the flight of birds outside the National Library, Stephen is reminded of augury, a religious ceremony of divination; after quarreling with his mother over performing his Easter duty, Stephen realizes that the actualization of his artistic vocation requires his "flight" from Ireland to the Continent; and so on. The relative weight that is given to the religious figures versus the aesthetic figures differs with each instantiation; my aim, at this point, however, is merely to describe the motion of repetition that seems to oppose the motion of progress that I described above.

Needless to say, psychoanalytic critics have had a field day with this novel, as they think that it 1) represents the growth of psyche or consciousness and 2) describes the way in which powerful childhood events continue to repeat themselves in our unconscious, which largely determines our actions in the future. From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, repetition has to be understood as static; recall that, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud's study of cases of traumatic repetition leads to his discovery of the death drive, which is precisely the drive towards stasis. Thus, the novel seems to lend itself to an entire series of sex drive/death drive typologies: progress=sex drive, repetition=death drive, art=sex drive, religion=death drive (I have to admit that I find this latter point difficult to argue with), kinetic emotions=sex drive (for Stephen, kinetic emotions are related not to aesthetic beauty, but to pornography), static emotions=death drive (hmmm, this one might prove a bit more difficult for the psychoanalytic critics to deal with), and so on. From a psychoanalytic perspective, then, the novel presents itself as a hierarchical field of stasis-kinesis oppositions--ranging in level from the content of the hero's ideologies, through the novel's metaphorics, to the very structure of the narrative's movement in time--that can only be resolved dialectically, that is, by positing a force of change that operates from outside the narrative.

The task, then, which I can only gesture toward at this point (partly because this post is already very long), is to read repetition as a kinetic movement of change in which the return of the figure in a differing configuration marks not a stasis of consciousness, but the very process by which the new emerges, as an already-existing orientation of mind "encounter[s]...the reality of experience," as Stephen says in the novel's closing moments. To frame it (provisionally) as a question of genre: Portrait departs from the bildungsroman in its representation of the hero's emergence in time, in part because it abandons "objective" narration that would describe this emergence from a position outside of its process. Thus, we could say that Portrait differs from the bildungsroman in its attempt to think emergence and change from a position that is immanent to that change; the structural unfolding of repetition in the novel, then, is another manifestation of this process of emergence in the novel, a process which need not be driven by an externally imposed dialectic.

Derrida and Deconstruction's Contribution to Thinking

2004-10-14T13:19:00.000-04:00

Sadly, I have neither the time nor the knowledge to adequately and rigorously gauge deconstruction's contribution to thinking. However, I wanted to both acknowledge the passing of one of the most important (certainly one of the most influential) thinkers of the past 50 years and post one of the few news articles (well, actually, it's an editorial) that I've seen that tries to, in any serious way, describe Derrida's significance. Too many articles (even in left-leaning sources like the Times) have chosen to trivialize his work by focusing for paragraphs at a time on nothing but the fact that his work is difficult to read; "he was one of those funny little French philosophers that only a small handful of people can read, and you don't need to know anything more than that," seems to be the attitude. However, rather than go off on a rant about American anti-intellectualism, which cloaks itself in the mantle of an egalitarian anti-elitism, I want to quote this reviewer, Mark Taylor, at some length:

"In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.

And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision. Many of Mr. Derrida's most influential followers appropriated his analyses of marginal writers, works and cultures as well as his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences and respecting others to forge an identity politics that divides the world between the very oppositions that it was Mr. Derrida's mission to undo: black and white, men and women, gay and straight. Betraying Mr. Derrida's insights by creating a culture of political correctness, his self-styled supporters fueled the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades and continue to frame political debate."

Among other things, we can find in Derrida's work (even if this is not his primary purpose) a genealogy of the either/or structures of thinking whose consequences we see working themselves out in terrifying ways lately. But, what I think is of crucial importance here is Taylor's description of the Left's misappropriation of Derrida's work (actually, one could speak even more broadly of the Left's misappropriation of post-structuralist thought more generally), which divests it of the vast majority of its potential and harnesses it to a weak identity politics (the hallmark of the Clinton administration) that, as Taylor points out, reinscribes the structures of thought that Derrida worked so hard to disrupt. In many ways, it is not inaccurate to suggest that the Left's intellectual laziness and identity politics over the past 25 years in the U.S. opened the door for the conservatives to continually consolidate power (even during what seemed to be an eight year hiatus from 1992-2000), so that their regime now seems to be virtually impenetrable. If the Left is to put itself into a position of power in this country (and, by this, I mean something far beyond electing a right-leaning Democrat into the White House), it needs to acknowledge that it has been defeated and that its tactics have been ineffectual, and then it needs to seriously consider how it was defeated; that is, it needs to create a critical history of the forces from which the present moment has emerged. Giving serious attention both to Derrida's works (as a genealogy of certain structures of thought in Western philosophy) and to the American Left's misappropriation of these works (leading to the formation of identity politics as the Left's central tenet and tactic) is, thus, of crucial importance.

Leo Strauss and the Politics of the Present

2004-10-10T15:40:00.000-04:00

This is the title of the blog that I've set up as a forum for the Strauss reading group that I called for here. Note that I've restricted comments to those who are members of the blog, and I've only extended invitations for membership to those who have expressed interest. Now, obviously, everyone else is welcome to read that blog, and you should let me know if you want to be a member involved in this reading project.

U.S. Report Finds Iraqis Eliminated Illicit Arms in 90's

2004-10-07T11:58:00.000-04:00

Just in case any lingering doubts remained in our minds...

Kerry as the Next Neo-con President?

2004-10-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

I'm interested in what those of you who watched the debate have to say to this.

Language, Aesthetics, and Time in the Writings of the Bakhtin School

2004-10-02T20:07:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I'm taking a seminar in Bakhtin School Rhetoric and Poetics. What follows here is a set of fragments of observations, ideas, and questions that I've been thinking about over the past few weeks in this course as I try to put together a paper for the class. As a point of reference for those of you who are at all familiar with Bakhtin and his colleagues, so far, we've read Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art" and Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, "The Problem of Speech Genres," and (for this week) "Discourse in the Novel" (from The Dialogic Imagination). Since my interests in the Bakhtin school differ greatly from the instructor's (i.e., he's more interested in the rhetorical aspects and it's application to composition, and I'm more interested in literary and aesthetic questions), and therefore, we haven't been assigned some of the texts that might be most pertinent to my interests and questions, I've begun reading Bakhtin's "The Bildungsroman and It's Significance in the History of Realism" (in the Speech Genres volume) and "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel" (in The Dialogic Imagination) on my own. That said, I'll just reiterate that the following thoughts are still fairly preliminary and subject to much future emendation, and I welcome comments.

Generally speaking, the Bakhtin school held that all language should be understood and investigated as verbal speech engaged in dialogue; in doing so, one cannot help but pay attention to the social, sociological, and ideological nature of language. Language cannot be studied as an abstract system or structure (such as those of Saussure, Chomsky, etc.), because it does not exist as such. Language exists in history and in social interaction as a formative element in history and social interaction. Thus, the fundamental unit of linguistic study cannot be the word, the sentence, the phoneme, etc., all of which are purely formal elements of an abstract system that is not the reality of living language; rather the fundamental unit of study must be the utterance, which includes intonation and every element to which the utterance is responding and to which it is orienting itself for future response. Fully elaborating this dialogic and sociological linguistics was, thus, one of the major problems that the Bakhtin school set out for itself.

A recurring problem in these texts (and a major point of interest for me) is the problem of time and change. This problem particularly preoccupies Volosinov in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, so much so that his attempts to differentiate his sociological materialist linguistics from "abstract objectivism," on one hand, and "subjective individualism," on the other hand, can nearly be defined in terms of how they describe the way that language changes. Abstract objectivism (i.e., Saussurian linguistics that posits an abstract system of language) cannot simultaneously describe how language works as a synchronic, hermetic system and how it changes; these two motions, synchronic and diachronic, require two irreconcilable logics. Thus, to put it plainly, linguistic theories that rely on the idea of an abstract system that is closed off unto itself cannot account for the idea that language changes. Subjective individualism (the idea that language exists solely as an expression of each individual's unique and creative consciousness), on the other hand, can describe how language changes through the agency of the individual, but it cannot account for the social nature of language; there must be some basis in social convention, at the very least, in order for understanding to be possible. Thus, the problem of change facing Volosinov is twofold: 1) he has to find a way of describing language as changeable, i.e., as historical, without resorting to subjectivist/metaphysical notions of individual creativity, and 2) he has to find a way to articulate change that doesn't resort to a dialectical resolution of the antithetical forces of stasis and kinesis, of synchronicity and diachronicity--if this resolution was possible, then Volosinov would have no basis for dismissing abstract objectivism, provided that it could devise a dialectic that could introduce change into the equation. (N.B.: Here, I begin to depart from orthodox readings of this text.) Thus, despite the cloak of Marxist terminology and the apparent dialectical structure of his argument (introducing two opposing but equally inadequate theories and trying to find a third way that synthesizes the best elements of each theory while discarding the worst elements of each), I would argue that Volosinov's description of change departs from the dialectic considerably; in fact, I think that, in many ways, his project is more Bergsonian than Marxist (although, I'm sure that he'd crucify me for suggesting that). His description of language as a continuous "generative process" that proceeds dialogically through social interactions (which are, themselves, constantly changing) in order to create new meanings and new utterances is, in my view, really quite remarkable in the way that it articulates a model of change that is immanent to the material process of change without being mechanistic and without imposing the uni-directional logical necessity of the dialectic on the process. Change in language, for Volosinov, doesn't have to proceed by way of the synthesis of the opposed forces of stasis and kinesis; rather, he's able to think of language as a continuous process of becoming in which something new is always being actualized.

Bakhtin's later essay, "The Problem of Speech Genres," is aptly titled with regard to this question of change: the introduction of the idea of "speech genres" into the dialogic model is, indeed, problematic. All language, for Bakhtin, passes through genres in its articulation; that is, there are certain set forms (whose flexibility varies, depending on the genre) through which all utterances form themselves. Thus, scientific discourse, literary criticism, letters to Grandma, blog entries, apologies to professors for tardiness, and so forth, are all recognizable generic forms of speech; most people, for example, wouldn't use the generic form of a scientific paper in a letter to Grandma, etc. The accuracy of the idea of speech genres seems to be fairly plausible, but, in my view, it introduces serious problems into the dialogic model of language that Volosinov describes; although, I have not yet figured out whether the speech genre merely stands in for the category of "the social" in Volosinov (in which case, Bakhtin's essay would be contributing virtually nothing beyond what is in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language), or whether the idea of speech genre is missing from Volosinov's analysis. If the latter is the case, then a serious problem arises: we either have to affirm Volosinov's analysis and dismiss the idea of speech genre, which doesn't seem like a satisfactory solution to me, or we try, as Bakhtin does, to incorporate the speech genre into the dialogic model. This, however, gives up some of the ground that Marxism and the Philosophy of Language works so hard to gain, since the speech genre is a relatively stable synchronic formal element through which all utterances must pass; thus, the speech genre reintroduces the problem of resolving the contradiction between static, synchronic, formal forces and kinetic, diachronic, historical forces. This is a problem that I cannot yet find a solution to, other than to leave Volosinov's analysis untouched and claim that the speech genre merely stands in for the "social;" this solution, however, isn't satisfactory in my view.

Bakhtin momentarily picks up this problem in a slightly different vein in "Discourse in the Novel," in the 1-2 page description of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the novel. Centripetal forces work on and in the utterance towards the centralization of language into a unitary, stable system; centrifugal forces, on the other hand, work on and in the utterance towards the decentralization of language and the proliferation of what he calls "heteroglossia," the coexistence of multiple languages and language forms within a single utterance (whether that utterance is a one-word sentence or a multi-volume novel). Bakhtin claims that both centripetal and centrifugal forces are at work in every utterance, to varying degrees. His object of investigation in this particular essay, of course, is the novel. Centripetal forces are at work at several levels, ranging from the need to centralize language for the purpose of making it understandable, to the impulse towards establishing something like a national literature. The centrifugal forces tending towards decentralization and heteroglossia, however, are the defining feature of the novel for Bakhtin (in fact, this is largely what separates the novel from poetry, in his view); multiple languages and voices proliferate in the novel, including the characters' speech, the objective narratorial voice, the narrator's appropriation of the characters' speech, or the general consensus of a particular social group, etc. Such appropriations by the narrative and/or authorial voice can lead to parody or satire, they can unmask the social convictions of a particular person or group, and so on. The open-ended tonal and linguistic possibilities of the novel as literary form depends on precisely this heteroglossia, which, for Bakhtin, is an expression of the social and historical linguistic reality of the world. In the opposition between centripetal and centrifugal forces, we can see, once again, the problem of the opposition between forces tending towards stasis (centripetal) and forces tending towards kinesis (centrifugal); in this model, speech genres would, in my view, exert a centripetal force on the utterance. This formulation seems to me to be a bit more satisfying than the formulation of the "Speech Genres" essay, as the static forces are, in spite of themselves, articulated as kinetic forces tending towards stasis, rather than as synchronic formal elements that cannot be incorporated into a logic of kinesis; thus, it is not a question, in this formulation, of synthesizing synchronicity with diachronicity, but of registering the movement of two equally diachronic forces. Whether or not the positing of centripetal and centrifugal forces solves the problem of time and change, the problem of the opposition of stasis and kinesis, is difficult to say, as Bakhtin's discussion of these forces is limited to only about a page and a half of a 160-page essay. At the very least, the question is far from resolved in my mind.

From "Discourse in the Novel," it would be quite easy to jump into a discussion of my second (yet related) point of interest in the Bakhtin school texts: their applicability in the analysis of Modernist literary aesthetics. However, I will save this--along with what will be a Bakhtin-informed (if not Bakhtinian) reading of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where this question of stasis and kinesis operates at the levels of narrative structure, linguistic style, intellectual content (particularly Stephen's aesthetic theory, which he gives in the fifth chapter), and so forth--for another post, as this may already be the longest post I've put up on this site.

"Flip-flop, Flip-flop"

2004-10-01T10:55:00.000-04:00

Many of you will recognize the above phrase as the mantra that Bush supporters chant at rallies with regard to Kerry, implying that he is inconsistent and, thus, unfit to lead. However, we could hardly say that Bush is resolutely on one side of all the issues; or, rather, he will claim one thing and act out the complete opposite. Here, for example, we see that, despite claiming that the U.S. will strictly follow Geneva Convention guidelines on torture (in response to the prisoner abuse scandal), this regime is approving measures to "round up foreigners on mere suspicions and send them home to nations notorious for engaging in torture and abuse," powers that will allow officials to "arbitrarily exile suspects who have not been tried or convicted of anything."

It's not quite accurate, however, to imply that this inconsistency between word and deed, which has become one of the hallmarks of this regime, can be ascribed to "flip-flopping" or lack of resolution; what's going on here is far more cynical and manipulative. This regime has been adhering to the Straussian distinction between esoteric and exoteric knowledge: knowledge that the masses can know (exoteric), and knowledge that the masses must never know (esoteric) for the sake of protecting the powerful. The philosopher-kings, for Strauss, must protect themselves from Socrates' fate.

Much more on this to follow once I get into Strauss's work in greater depth (see post below).

A Critical History of the Present: The Importance of Reading Leo Strauss

2004-09-29T14:30:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, in a post titled The Uses and Abuses of History, I wrote the following with regard to the neo-conservatives' ideological appropriation of World War II:

"Here, we certainly see a case of monumental history that is being used not in the service of life (despite conservative rhetoric about a so-called "culture of life," which apparently includes unjustified preemptive military strikes and systematic racial discrimination), but in an attempt to suspend life and history. The past, here, is being used to justify the perpetuation of present relations of power. By contrast, we need to work towards a critical history of the present."

I think that a major step in creating this critical history of the present moment would be to read the works of Leo Strauss, who, as many of you know, is a major philosophical figure behind the current right-wing coalition's political agenda; certain high-ranking Cabinet members, including Paul Wolfowitz, were actually students of Strauss's at the University of Chicago before his death in the early 1970s. In order to correctly evaluate the present and be able to take informed action, I think that we need to unearth the genealogy of the forces and ways of thinking that have constituted this moment; this is, in fact, what I have been referring to as a "critical history of the present."

So, I would like to, if possible, set up a reading group on Strauss in order to facilitate the construction of this genealogy. We needn't even meet in person; we could set up another blog or other online forum in which to discuss these works. Is anyone else interested in this?

Counter/Intelligence Part 2

2004-09-28T13:41:00.000-04:00

This article makes clear what we probably had already guessed: that pre-war intelligence predicted the absolute nightmare that Iraq has become, and that the Bush administration chose to ignore that intelligence and proceed with their already-scripted war. Combine this with the false WMD intelligence, and this should lead to Bush's direct removal from office. Yet, it doesn't (see "The Importance of Four Years" post on Shannon's blog), despite the fact that it's becoming increasingly obvious to what extent this administration has manipulated, fabricated, and ignored crucial intelligence in order to justify their war. Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of this, however, is that this regime is gradually learning that hiding their atrocities is unnecessary.

Corollary to Counter/Intelligence Part 2

2004-09-28T13:14:00.000-04:00

I've been saying for months now that the most terrifying thing about the prospects of a second term for Bush is that he will be able to act without having to worry about his popularity, since he won't face another election. It seems, however, that I've overestimated Americans on this point (see post above), which I didn't think I would ever do. It's clear that his popularity is already secure regardless of what he does.

Although, perhaps I'm just having a difficult time imagining how much worse things can get...

Bibliography (Part 2 of n)

2004-09-26T23:07:00.000-04:00

As with Part 1 of this bibliography, I'm trying to create a record for myself that will allow me to retrace the genealogy of my thinking as I move towards larger projects. I will probably post an addition to this every month, though, the first part covered about a year or so, which is why it was so long. It should also be clear that this bibliography does not cover everything that I have read, merely everything that I've read that has had any sort of profound influence on my thinking.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony"
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise
V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

The Instrumentalization of Reason in the University

2004-09-24T13:27:00.000-04:00

Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment begins as a philosophical critique of the way that enlightened thought carries within itself the seed of its own destruction and its reversion from civilization to barbarism. This is precisely because (as Horkheimer and Adorno explain in the first chapter, “The Concept of Enlightenment”) the goal of the Enlightenment—the liberation of men from fear by the methodical and complete acquisition of all possible knowledge about the world—requires that the world be known in abstraction, so that it can be comprehensible and calculable as a totality, a unified system. Thus, scientific objectivity is created by distancing the subject of cognition from its object; the subject/object relationship is mediated only by abstract rational categories. The actual object, then, gets liquidated, replaced by its abstract representation, the epitome of which is number. The world and its inhabitants are leveled, brought into conformity, by the abstraction of scientific reason. This, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, marks the “self-oblivious instrumentalization of science” (Dialectic, xii). The project of the Enlightenment, of knowing the world and freeing men from fear, turns to domination as science unquestioningly subordinates all life to its leveling scrutiny. Reason becomes a mere instrument in this progressive domination--which is both the domination of nature by man in the name of utility and progress, and also the domination of man by capitalists and cynical demagogues--as it has been stripped of reflection and is used only insofar as it bears utility. This instrumentalization of reason, for Horkheimer and Adorno, extends far beyond science and has become part of the configuration of our thinking that is a material condition of our existence at this moment.

The accuracy of Horkheimer and Adorno's account continues to be impressed upon me as I try to teach literature at the university level. It is becoming progressively clearer to me that the university no longer has any investment in anything like higher learning (at the undergraduate level, at least)--understood (very broadly) as learning and thinking for the sake of participating in the human endeavor of trying to know our world and our place in it--but is, instead, in the business of producing specialized labor. In other words, the university has become a trade school to which one goes to learn the skills of a particular vocation, not to think (I don't say this to denigrate trade schools; rather, I say this to argue that the university, insofar as it lays claim to being something other than a trade school, should have different goals.). Knowledge and reason have been directed away from humanistic and historicist thinking and completely subordinated to the demands of technology and utility; this is evident in the shift away from the philosophy department as the center of the university and towards the schools of engineering or medicine. I don't say this to demean these fields of inquiry or to stake out some sort of anti-technological position that is nostalgic for the "good old days" of the 19th century; rather, I am trying to register a certain amount of alarm and concern over the kinds of minds that are being produced at the university: minds that are convinced of 1) the irrelevance of history, 2) the self-evident given-ness of the present, 3) utility as knowledge's only significant attribute, and 4) the capacity of knowledge to subordinate the world to the demands of computation and calculation. To this habit of mind, the "humanities" are insignificant frivolities, because they don't teach skills that will be transferable to any particular vocation. To a great extent, the humanities themselves have internalized this sense of insignificance, as they try to market themselves as teaching "writing skills," "communications skills," and, my personal favorite (note sarcasm), "critical thinking skills" (as though thinking that is critical could ever be isolated as a set of transferable skills), in order to justify their existence in the university.

As I said, this is becoming increasingly evident to me as I teach lower-level literature courses to non-majors who take my class to fulfill a general education writing requirement. First of all, I'm continually amazed by the fact that, generally speaking, they don't read. At all. Beyond this, though, they are thoroughly convinced of both the insignificance of the intellectual project of the course and the harmless antiquarianism of its instructor. My attempts to engage them in styles of thinking with which they are not familiar (i.e., making them think about things to which there is no fixed solution) are typically met with scepticism and/or boredom, since such an effort will not necessarily help them to get a job. And, finally, they resist the act of interpretation, since it has neither a fixed methodology nor any assurance of accuracy or finality; literature is a set of indefinite data to them. The notion that reading/interpretation is an engagement with thinking across historical contexts that is creative, i.e., that contributes to the making of history (as Said and Vico would say) and the emendation of intellect (as Spinoza would say) is a notion that is not exciting to them, since they cannot put that engagement on a resume.

Again, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the consequence of this habit of mind that takes reason to be purely instrumental is domination. The prescience of that insight continues to be startling.

Miscellaneous (Part 3 of n)

2004-09-23T01:06:00.000-04:00

I couldn't resist. This article is just too damn funny. My apologies to those of you who have already seen this. To the rest of you: enjoy.

Preempting Intention

2004-09-19T01:27:00.000-04:00

This article describes the increasing danger of the doctrine of preemption, as a second weapons inspector confirmed the reports that denied the existence of a WMD program in Iraq. The Bush regime has, as a result, altered its ideological campaign of justification, claiming that they have evidence that Iraq intended to start a weapons program that could become a threat to the U.S.; of course, given the harsh economic sanctions that Iraq labored under during the 1990s, such a threat remained an unactualized and remote future possibility. Nonetheless, this ideological shift sets a dangerous precendent: the fact that this regime feels comfortable justifying preemptive strikes on the basis of intention alone--with or without any material bases from which these intentions may be actualized--indicates that the ideological groundwork is continuing to be put into place from which preemptive attacks on any sort of thinking that is considered to be dangerous may be launched.

Memory and Physiology (Bergson-Deleuze Part 5)

2004-09-19T01:12:00.000-04:00

Read the post below before continuing.

One of the aspects of Bergson's (and, following him, Deleuze's) work that I value is the way that they elaborate materialist philosophies in conjunction with and out of an engagement with the empirical rigor of the hard sciences and mathematics. Thus, much of Deleuze's work relies heavily on differential calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, and thermo-dynamics; Bergson's work relies (also) on calculus, embryology, evolutionary biology, physics (Duration and Simultaneity directly takes on Einstein's theory of relativity), and, in Matter and Memory, neuropsychology and brain physiology. The book is, in fact, riddled with case studies and scientific research on various aphasias and other forms of brain damage.

I mention this not only to commend what I think is, in many ways, an exemplary style of thinking and writing, but also to point out that, while Bergson's understanding of memory completely discards much of what continues to be scientific common sense regarding the topic, Matter and Memory certainly does not dismiss or deem irrelevant existing scientific research; on the contrary, this research forms the bases from which Bergson's arguments proceed. Thus, he was certainly well aware of studies linking particular kinds of memory to specific regions of the brain; likewise, he cites several studies in which damage to particular parts of the brain is connected to certain kinds of memory loss. However, Bergson does not conclude from this that these kinds of memories are stored in these parts of the brain; by the same token, brain damage does not destroy memories. Rather, these regions of the brain are the location of the processes whereby the past events that remain virtually in the present are actualized in the present. Brain damage, then, does not eliminate memories that are stored in the effected region; instead, it damages the processes that allow certain memories to be actualized. In drawing these conclusions from the relevant scientific research, Bergson is able to articulate a fully material and physiological understanding of memory that avoids the mechanistic tendencies that typically characterize neurophysiological thinking that understands itself to be "monistic."

Memory (Bergson-Deleuze Part 4)

2004-09-18T01:04:00.000-04:00

So, it seems that I'm going to have difficulty posting anything of significance (i.e., more than just posting links to news articles) during the week; I'm afraid that this site is quickly becoming a weekend project. So be it.

I think that one of the key insights of Bergson's Matter and Memory is the realization that the brain is oriented primarily towards action, not towards reason; so much of the book's content follows from this. Thus, philosophers who assume that the brain is oriented towards reason and knowledge mistake the way the world appears to them for the way that the world really is: a finite set of spatially located and spatially differentiated objects. Their error, to Bergson, is that they do not recognize that the brain perceives the world in this way in order to facilitate our action in the world; for, we also must realize that we perceive these objects in the world in relation to ourselves, so that we can orient ourselves towards these objects in order to act upon them. Mistaking perception for knowledge leads to a mechanistic view of the world as a series of synchronic systems in which the only change that is possible is change of position. Philosophy, for Bergson, has to start from different premises: the realization that philosophy's reliance on empiricism and what it takes to be rationalism creates false problems, and the need to think of change in the world as material, immanent to the process of change (i.e., not precipitated by divine agency), and as creative--in other words, the need to think of time as duration (I have written about duration at great length in many places on this site, particularly here), the need to think temporally instead of spatially (and to think time in a non-spatial way).

Thus, philosophers and psychologists who have dealt with the question of memory have, in Bergson's view, failed to adequately grasp the phenomenon, because they consistently pose the wrong questions: Where in the brain are memories stored? By what mechanisms are they stored and retrieved from storage? The presence of spatial thinking here is twofold: first and most obviously, memory is treated as an object that has a specific location in space, and psychology's task is to locate memory and explain how it got there; and second, the inability to think of memory as the coexistence of the past in the present expresses a spatial understanding of time, where the difference between the present and the past is articulated as a distance that cannot be traversed. The past, in this view, is in a different place in time that is not coextensive with the space of the present moment in time; therefore, the past can only be thought of as existing in the present as an image (I'm using this term in a non-Bergsonian way) that has to be stored in a specifiable location in the space of the present. By contrast, Bergson's view of memory, beginning from the premise of duration, understands memory to be the prolongation of past events into the present, even if these past events are not always present to consciousness. The present is not that which is, but that which is being made, a continuous process of actualization that doesn't solidify into concrete, divisible moments. Thus, Deleuze is right to call memory in Bergson the virtual coexistence of the past in the present; the past is not in the present as a set of fully actualized entities vying for space, but as the virtual singularities (and I mean this in the fully mathematical sense of the word) that continue to shape the actualization of the present. The proper question of memory, then, cannot be to ask where in the space of the present it is located, but rather, to consider at what level of contraction or expansion of our present consciousness the past is repeating itself in the actualization of the present moment.

This last point (on expansion and contraction of consciousness) requires more elaboration, I know, but that would require doubling or tripling the length of an already lengthy post; this will have to wait for another time. Suffice it to say, however, that Bergson is trying to get around the problem of finding the proper container for memory, as the problem of containment belongs to a style of thought that operates in purely spatial categories; such categories are useful for action, but they create false problems when extended to philosophy.

War and Memory

2004-09-12T19:42:00.000-04:00

I've written at some length (here and here) about the ways in which World War II has permeated (often by force) our collective imagining of the events of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. World War II continues to be an unambiguously "good" war, full of American heroism, in our memory (again, this is problematic, to say the least). But, with massive popular demonstrations against the current war emerging alongside the frivolous debates over presidential candidates' war records, Vietnam has increasingly become a shadowy figure lurking on the horizons of our consciousness, in spite of the fact that, for differing reasons, both candidates want to banish Vietnam from our memories; this article elaborates this quite clearly. Even though both candidates are trying to emphasize the strengths of their domestic agendas right now, it's quite clear that the current war will be the most significant voting issue in November. How we remember the past in the present will be of vital importance in this critical moment.

The Likud Doctrine

2004-09-11T13:16:00.000-04:00

This rather timely article (or, perhaps, it is untimely, in Nietzsche's sense) is worth serious consideration.

Morphogenesis

2004-09-11T02:02:00.000-04:00

In a recent and unfinished conversation with a friend, I was asked to give an example of change as the creation of new elements, as opposed to the rearrangement of existing elements. I now, belatedly, offer this (somewhat morbid) example.

As those of you who know me (which I assume is almost everyone who reads this) are aware, my (insert appropriate euphemism here), Shannon, does research in neuropsychology. Specifically, the study that she is involved in is investigating the cognitive effects of AIDS and aging. There are certain cognitive deficiencies (or dementias) that attend both old age and AIDS; this study is one of the first to look into the interaction of these two dementias, hypothesizing that the overall effect will be greater than simply the cumulative effects of AIDS and aging. The reason why this study hasn't been done yet is that it has only been within the past five years or so that there has emerged a significant population AIDS sufferers over the age of 55. There are numerous factors that have contributed to this: advancements in treatments that permit those with AIDS to live longer, massive "safe sex" campaigns that have primarily targeted people under 25, major reforms that have made infection by blood transfusion practically unheard of, and so forth. As a result, the percentage of new AIDS cases in people over 55 (many of whom don't realize that birth control does more than simply prevent pregnancy) has jumped exponentially in recent years, people are living longer with AIDS, and so, as I said, a significant population has emerged within the past few years (Shannon will be able to offer more specific numbers here). This is causing major problems in the medical field, as these people are slipping through the cracks of current diagnostic criteria for dementias: despite their age, they cannot be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or any other age-related dementia, since they have AIDS, which is a complicating factor; however, they cannot be diagnosed with AIDS-related dementia, since they are old enough for their age to be a complicating factor. Needless to say, this makes diagnosis and treatment difficult, which is to say nothing of the problem of what health insurance companies will agree to cover. These, and other, problems are what prompted the study that Shannon is now involved in.

Again, this is not the most inspiring example, although, in many ways, this particular example prompted me to create this blog. My point in mentioning it, though, is that this study is an expression of morphogenesis, of new conditions and forms emerging through material change in the world. While much labor and invention over the past two decades has yielded medical technologies that are increasingly capable of dealing with this disease, these very technologies have created (in fact, they cannot help but do so) a new set of problems and a new population that did not exist just a few years ago. Thus, as I've said so many times on this site, this requires thinking inventively and eventfully in order to adequately address what have become the new material conditions of the world.

The question of change is, to my mind, extremely significant right now (hence, this blog), as I think that many predominant forces and trends of thinking today (and I'm referring to more than just the current political regime, their policies of preemption, and their war on thinking, all of which I will address fairly generally in an upcoming post) are tending towards the assumption that the world is indeed static, that history has ended (the first George Bush's regime actually announced the end of history, for those who remember it), that the subsumption of the world under a globalized governance (nevermind the fact that that hasn't exactly happened yet...) will turn war into a bureaucratic, managerial issue of police action, and so forth. Naively positivist strains of science (which are, unfortunately, the strains that are most frequently taught, even at the college level) contribute to this as well, as they seek to represent the world as a finite set of elements that humans will eventually know in their entirety. In this view, history and time are completely insignificant; if each passing moment is merely a particular arrangement of a fixed set of elements, then everything is already given in advance (since there would necessarily be only a finite number of possible arrangements of these elements), and returning to any previous arrangement is theoretically possible, thereby rendering the contingency of history and the weight of the past on the present completely irrelevant. This remains true even if we imagine that all possibilities are not necessarily real in the present moment, but exist in the concept prior to their realization; again, this merely masks an understanding of the world in which change is not possible, except as the realization of what the world has always been.

This is why, in my estimation, a return to Bergson's work is so significant at this moment. His thinking of time as duration--as the processes of actualization being prolonged into the present that is continually being actualized--expresses an attempt to think about change as immanent to the material process of change (i.e., we don't have to posit God or some other transcendental force that imposes change from outside) and as the creation of form (i.e., change is more than simply the rearranging of what is already there) that bears with it and is entirely contingent upon an entire history of creation (for more on duration in Bergson, see below). Here, time is not an empty spatial element in which pre-existing parts move and arrange themselves, but is rather an active part of morphogenesis.

Warrior Poets

2004-09-08T23:14:00.000-04:00

Yes, this title is ironic. Using the term "poet" to describe our current president can only be ironic. In any case, this article and this article are both meagerly encouraging, in that they finally recognize that, in order for the current regime to be overthrown in November, Kerry cannot continue to play the "I'm-a-resolute-war-time-leader-like-Bush-but-better" card and must, instead, deflate Bush's heroic image (which covers over an abysmal record on health care, employment, and the like) by emphasizing the corruption and cynical manipulation that justified the invasion of Iraq.

Miscellaneous (Part 2 of n)

2004-09-06T18:56:00.000-04:00

Many apologies for leaving this site untouched for a few days; I had friends in town visiting me. In any case, here's a few interesting articles from the past few days.

This article is a review of a new book by Sam Harris called The End of Faith (a book that I haven't read myself), and, while it seems that Harris makes a number of naive assertions and that the book generally lacks any real sort of scholarly rigor, the reviewer points to two major points of value: 1) the realization that fundamentalist religious belief, which understands a single document as a moment of divine revelation/law that has determined all subsequent events and has established an immutable order, is a threat to life itself, as it denies the possibility of change in the world as the very condition of life; and 2) the assertion that the leftist pluralist approach of tolerating all religions as equally valid is not a viable solution, since it places religion beyond the reach of criticism and rational reflection.

This article provides an interesting look at the make-up and rhetoric of the Republican party as it has developed over the past few years (let alone the past two decades). Among other things, the author describes the party as "the political expression of the 'misplaced power' of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower famously warned as he left the White House in 1961."

And, finally, this article, written by Umberto Eco, promotes scientific thinking as an antidote to all varieties of religious fundamentalism. While I agree with Eco's description of scientific investigation as a continuous endeavor towards the attainment of knowledge which may, in the end, be wrong (thus, science operates by trial, error, disputation, and often failure), I think that he takes a misguided step in the following moment:

"The problem is that in many critiques of the ideology of progress (or the so-called spirit of the Enlightenment) the spirit of science is often identified with that of certain idealistic philosophies of the 19th century, according to which history is always moving on towards better things, or toward the triumphant realisation of itself, of the spirit or of some other driving force that is forever marching on towards optimal ends.

[...]

But these days, in order to substitute a whole series of ideologies in crisis, some people are flirting more and more with a school of thought according to which the course of history is not leading us closer and closer to the truth.

According to these people, all that there is to understand has already been understood by long-vanished ancient civilisations and it is only by humbly returning to that traditional and immutable treasure that we may reconcile ourselves with ourselves and with our destiny."

Eco's error comes in the latter two paragraphs: he incorrectly assumes that if we don't presuppose some sort of teleological progression of knowledge towards truth in history, then we are necessarily consigning ourselves to religious fundamentalism and an understanding of history as completely static and constantly referring back to an immutable text or tradition that has preset all possible forms of action in the world. Thinking about history as dynamic does not necessarily mean that it has to progress; obviously, this entire blog is dedicated to thinking about life and thinking as material and historical (i.e., as necessarily being confined within certain limitations of one's historical situation; such limitations include the very configuration or organization of human thinking at that moment) without presupposing an over-arching teleology of history. Also, Eco does not consider that, in order to posit an understanding of history wherein we progressively move "closer and closer to the truth," he has to assume that this "truth" is indeed finite and static; if it was dynamic, how could we possibly move closer to it? Thus, the world, for Eco, is a static set of knowable elements that continue to rearrange themselves in order to create the appearance of change; only the human mind changes, as it progressively comes to know this set of elements. It follows from this that the human mind cannot be part of the material world, since it can do more than simply rearrange its parts. So, the logical consequence of Eco's insistence that history must be thought of as progressing towards truth is that the material world is actually static, and mind (or, perhaps Reason) must be thought of as transcending the materiality of the world in order to be able to know the world.

I have no doubt that Eco did not intend to advocate this particular picture of the world; this is not my point, though. What we see here is a failed attempt to think historical change as material. This is, in many ways, precisely the problem that Spinoza (and those who followed after him, including Vico, Bergson, Deleuze, and Delanda) tried to deal with: how do we think about the universe as fully material but as something that changes without resorting to metaphysical explanations?

Spinoza and Materiality

2004-09-02T13:51:00.000-04:00

I've recently been reading Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (circa 1670) for a class (in fact, I'm writing this now as a way of preparing for said class), and I'm finding it to be quite fascinating. Those who have even a cursory knowledge of Spinoza's philosophy know that he thinks of God as coextensive with Nature. This should not be mistaken for mere pantheism, where God is assumed to be everywhere in Nature; rather, for Spinoza, there is only one substance in the universe: God. This claim is far more suggestive than it first appears, and I'll return to it momentarily. Taking this as a point of departure, the Theological-Political Treatise undertakes close Biblical interpretation in the hopes of elucidating the nature of things like prophecy and miracles. Spinoza refutes the idea that miracles are God's interruption of the natural order; since the natural order and Divine Law are, in fact, the same thing, such a view becomes absurd. Rather, "miracles" are fully natural occurrences, but ones that surpass the limits of human understanding. Similarly, prophecy may indeed be the revelation of Divine Knowledge, but Divine Knowledge must be understood as the laws and order of Nature; prophecy thus becomes the realization of knowledge in the world through the imaginative faculty (N.B.: this does not mean, in Spinoza, that the prophets "made it all up," but that their highly developed imaginative faculties allowed them to think inventively about nature, and thus create new knowledge). The whole of Scripture, then, for Spinoza, expresses the eternal truth of God as the only substance in the universe, but it couches this truth in a series of stories or narratives that make this truth comprehensible to the understanding of humans; therefore, we should not take literally poetic devices in Scripture that, for example, personify God as a being who gives laws and punishes, even though, poetically speaking, God (as the natural order) does indeed "punish." Furthermore, Spinoza's reading of the Bible is exemplary in the way that he attempts to account for linguistic idioms, so that, for example, he realizes that the phrase "x, y, or z of God," has a variety of uses in Hebrew, among which is to indicate the superlative degree (e.g., "mountains of God" simply means "really big mountains").

I don't intend to speculate on how much credence we should give to the still religious overtones and terminology of Spinoza's thinking (we should recall, too, that this was written around 1670). What I think is most valuable (and even radical, at least for its time) about this work is that, in claiming the coextensivity of God and Nature, Spinoza is trying to think about the nature of the universe as fully material (God is natural) but not completely accessible to human knowledge (after all, to know everything, one would indeed have to be God). In doing so, Spinoza sidesteps both 1) orthodox Judeo-Christian thinking and the idealistic philosophy that later appropriated it, and 2) the myth of the Enlightenment, that human Reason will eventually be able to know everything through empirical investigation (of course, my separation of idealistic philosophy and the Enlightenment is for demonstration purposes only). Instead, he articulates an understanding of human being in the world as material and finite; at the very heart of ethics, of human endeavor, for Spinoza, is the search for knowledge of God, which must be understood here not as the adherence to immutable moral laws, but as a style of living and a habit of mind that, even in its finitude, tries to imaginatively create ways of thinking with the materiality of the world, despite the impossibility of ever knowing the world (or God) directly or in its entirety.

Islam and Orientalism

2004-09-01T11:33:00.000-04:00

As an aside, before I begin, I wanted to say that the rate at which I post on this site will most likely begin to slow down now that the semester has begun. I do intend to keep working on this, though, as this site has more than merely peripheral significance to my work.

The subject of this post won't be quite as grandiose as its title. I came across this article this morning, written by Tariq Ramadan (whose work I am generally unfamiliar with), a Western Muslim thinker, activist, and teacher at Notre Dame, in which he describes the unexplained revocation of his already-granted work visa allowing him to teach in the U.S., which Ramadan understands to be an indication that the U.S. considers him to be a threat of some sort. Ramadan rejects claims (which have, apparently, been numerous) of his anti-Americanism and his supposed support for radical Islamic fundamentalist groups, instead describing his critique of U.S. policy as being in the interest of reforming relations between Islamic states and the West (I use both of these terms under erasure; more on this in a moment). The whole article is worth reading, particularly since my paltry description of it here does not do it justice, but I also wanted to quote a particular passage at length here:

"In the Arab and Islamic world, one hears a great deal of legitimate criticism of American foreign policy. This is not to be confused with a rejection of American values. Rather, the misgivings are rooted in five specific grievances: the feeling that the United States role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unbalanced; the longstanding American support of authoritarian regimes in Islamic states and indifference to genuine democratic movements (particularly those that have a religious bent); the belief that Washington's policies are driven by short-term economic and geostrategic interests; the willingness of some prominent Americans to tolerate Islam-bashing at home; and the use of military force as the primary means of establishing democracy."

There is much that one could talk about in this passage: Ramadan's refusal to assume that the terms "Arab" and "Islamic" mean the same thing, the rejection of the assumption that a critique of U.S. foreign policy is tantamount to "anti-Americanism" (or even terrorism) or a rejection of "American values" (a phrase that I still don't understand), the contradictions inherent in the U.S. support of authoritarian human-rights-violating regimes (e.g., Saudi Arabia) while supposedly "liberating" Iraq from such a regime, and so forth. I won't linger over any of these points, as I'm confident that I'm preaching to the converted, so to speak.

Rather, this article (or the conditions that prompted its writing) makes it clear that what the late Edward W. Said described in 1978 as "Orientalism," a way of thinking and a style of imperial government that begins from the premise of a fixed ontological and epistemological distinction between East and West, is still very much intact, particularly in the U.S., where we have been drawn into "either/or" structures of thought that continue to thwart efforts to imagine the state of the world without frivolous "clash of civilizations" theses (I think, here, of Benjamin Barber's hilariously titled Jihad Vs. McWorld as an instance of this kind of thinking) that pose a monolithic, modern West (lead by the U.S., of course) against its polar opposite, its "other," as Said would say, Islam. Not only does such thinking create the sort of reactionary response to any critique of U.S. imperialism that prompted Ramadan to write this article, but this kind of thinking ignores history. In particular, Western Europe (and, by extension, the U.S.) continues to forget that it has not been very long (relatively speaking) since Spain (let alone much of Eastern Europe) was a predominantly Muslim country. I say this by way of arguing that much of "our" thinking has been permeated by and has fructified by and emerged from the encounter with Islamic thinking; to pose a diametric opposition between Islamic and Western thinking is simply inaccurate. This is not even to mention the extent to which decolonization and mass migration of populations over the past century have dispersed people all over the world, further complicating the impossible task of accurately categorizing people as one of "us" or one of "them."

All of this is to say that we need to find ways of thinking with the material conditions of the present moment that will allow us to finally break out of the Orientalist structures of thought that continue to dominate Western geopolitics.

Melodic Dissonance

2004-08-31T15:58:00.000-04:00

This is an unashamed plug for Josiah's new blog, Melodic Dissonance, which, though new, looks to have interesting potential, as he seeks to use music and dissonance as a metaphor for thinking and aesthetic expression that is singular, inventive, and emergent.

Conference Abstract (Benjamin-Ondaatje)

2004-08-31T00:36:00.000-04:00

I was inspired by my own last post (evidence that this site is working as I hoped it would) to submit a proposal for a second paper to the conference in Hawaii. I'm posting the proposal below. It's largely copied and pasted from the previous post, but I figured I'd post it anyway:

This paper will take as its point of departure the hypothesis that the act of reading can be thought of in terms of “historical monads,” as described by Walter Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and The Arcades Project. That is to say, in the act of reading, moments from the past are blasted out of the continuum of history and brought into the present in a way that forces a moment of crisis. Such moments, for Benjamin, are always simultaneously moments of revolutionary possibility and moments of great danger, the danger that nothing will happen, that the status quo will be maintained; this is, in fact, the very definition of “catastrophe” for Benjamin.

Beginning with this hypothesis, I will closely read Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, a World War II novel that was written during the first Gulf War, as a way of thinking about reading as an engagement with history that could potentially open up new lines of thought and action. When reading The English Patient today, in 2004, several moments are blasted out of the continuum of history to form a constellation with the present moment: World War II, the first Gulf War, the current war in Iraq, and the events of 9/11. This latter is largely due to the ways that conservative rhetoric over the past three years has forced on our collective imagining of 9/11 specific images from World War II: images of unjust attack (Pearl Harbor), American heroism, and the “fight for freedom” against a tyrannical supervillain. Thus, the constellation formed by World War II and 9/11 has so far served to justify American imperialism abroad; here, we clearly see the danger in this particular historical monad. But, I will argue that The English Patient offers us other possibilities. The novel’s portrayal of the Second World War strikingly omits any mention of the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, and virtually every other signifier of World War II that has saturated the American imagination. Rather, the trauma of war is registered through two parallel events in the novel, both of which enact a sort of inhuman logic of fire falling from the sky (it is in this sense of complete incomprehensibility that I call these events “traumatic”): the first is at the beginning of the novel, when the “English patient” crashes a burning plane into the North Sahara, describing it with the hauntingly simple phrase, “I fell burning into the desert” (Ondaatje, The English Patient, 5); the second is at the end of the novel, as the main characters learn of the annihilation of Hiroshima. In the former case, the patient's fiery fall into the desert and "rebirth" from out of the flaming wreckage initiates a mystery surrounding his identity and his past that motivates the entire novel. In the latter case, the dropping of the A-bomb immediately follows a long exposition of the defusing of the city of Naples, which was meticulously and thoroughly rigged to explode if its electricity was turned on; yet, even though these mines may have collectively carried the destructive power of an A-bomb, they were still set up according to a human logic which, no matter how devious, could be reconstructed, decoded, and thus, counteracted. The A-bomb, which we learn about in the subsequent section, by contrast, operated by a completely inhuman logic, as it dropped fire from the sky on a city that could not counteract its destructive power.

Given these particular images of World War II, set in relation to both Gulf Wars and 9/11, I will argue that what emerges from this encounter is a critique of U.S. imperialism over the past 50+ years and an imperative that we find new ways of thinking that will be adequate to the material conditions of the present.

Corollary: The Uses and Abuses of History, Benjamin, Ondaatje

2004-08-30T18:05:00.000-04:00

Walter Benjamin, in "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress" (in The Arcades Project) describes moments when certain past events are blasted out of the continuum of history and, in a "Messianic cessation of happening," form a constellation with the present moment (it is important to note that this is not the work of human intention); it is the job of the materialist historiographer to recognize these pregnant moments, these "historical monads," as moments of crisis or potential moments of great change. These moments of crisis, for Benjamin, are always simultaneously moments of revolutionary possibility and moments of great danger, the danger that nothing will happen, that the status quo will be maintained; this is, in fact, the very definition of "catastrophe" for Benjamin.

If we take 9/11 as such a historical monad, as a moment that blasted WWII out of the continuum of history to form a constellation with the present, then the danger is easy to see; I discuss it at length below. In what ways can this be a moment of possibility, though? How can bringing WWII into the present moment open up lines of thinking or action?

I've thought about this quite a bit over the past year as I've taught Michael Ondaatje's excellent novel, The English Patient, which is a WWII novel that was written during the first Gulf War. Interestingly enough, the Holocaust is not mentioned, nor is Pearl Harbor. There are, in my mind, two parallel traumatic events in the novel, one at the beginning, the other at the end: in the beginning, the "English patient" crashes a burning plane into the North Sahara, describing the event with the hauntingly simple phrase, "I fell burning into the desert" (EP, 5); and, at the end of the novel, the main characters hear the report over the radio that an atomic bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima. I call these events "parallel" and "traumatic," because both seem to enact a sort of inhuman logic of "fire falling from the sky." In the former case, the patient's fiery fall into the desert and "rebirth" from out of the flaming wreckage initiates a mystery surrounding his identity and his past that motivates the entire novel. In the latter case, the dropping of the A-bomb immediately follows a long exposition of how Kip, a sapper (i.e., one whose job it was to dismantle bombs and mines), and his military unit had to more or less defuse the entire city of Naples, which was meticulously and thoroughly rigged to explode if its electricity was turned on; yet, even though these mines may have collectively carried the destructive power of an A-bomb, they were still set up according to a human logic which, no matter how devious, could be reconstructed, decoded, and thus, counteracted. The A-bomb, which we learn about in the subsequent section, by contrast, operated by a completely inhuman logic, as it dropped fire from the sky on a city that could not counteract its destructive power. It is in this sense of an inexplicable, inhuman logic that I call these events "traumatic."

When we read The English Patient today, in 2004, then, several events are blasted out of the continuum of history to form a constellation with the present moment: WWII (specifically, the bombing of Hiroshima), the first Gulf War (when the novel was written), the current Gulf War, 9/11, and so forth. All of these moments rush into the present, not because we call them up, and not because Ondaatje could have had the foreknowledge to intend this. Given this particular image of WWII, though, set in relation to both Gulf Wars and 9/11, what emerges is a critique of U.S. imperialism over the past 50+ years (rather than the justification that the neo-cons are taking from WWII) and an imperative that we find new ways of thinking and acting (which includes the undertaking of a critical history of the present that I called for below) that will be adequate to the materiality of the present.

The Uses and Abuses of History

2004-08-30T12:18:00.000-04:00

In his early essay, "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life" (in Untimely Meditations), Nietzsche describes three modes of historiography: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Monumental history looks at the past and sees a series of monuments of human achievement that one should emulate or be inspired by. Antiquarian history focuses on the past as a tradition to be venerated. While Nietzsche claims that these two modes of historiography are useful in certain instances (e.g., being inspired by a classical work of art is not necessarily a bad thing), it is important to note that they look at the past as something that is over and done with; history is not something that continues to be made, except as monuments of human greatness or as the continuation of tradition. The third mode of historical reflection, critical history, on the other hand, seizes the past as an active part of the present that requires judgement; it recognizes that the present is wholly contingent upon the violence and volatility of the past, and it seeks justice or retribution as a way of shaping the present that is emerging.

Nietzsche's essay came to mind this morning as I read this article, in which a handful of G.O.P. leaders describe the Republican strategy for the impending convention: mention 9/11 early and often. And, as has been the case since at least September 12th, 2001, the invocation of 9/11 always coincides, in conservative rhetoric, with the invocation of World War II. Here, in only the third paragraph of the article, we have the following:

"Winston Churchill saw the dangers of Hitler when his opponents and much of the press characterized him as a warmongering gadfly," Mr. Giuliani plans to say, according to excerpts from his speech released last night. "George W. Bush sees world terrorism for the evil that it is, and he will remain consistent to the purpose of defeating it while working to make us ever safer at home."

Thus, in our collective imagining of 9/11, we are given images of unjust attack (Pearl Harbor), American heroism, and the "fight for freedom" against what has become an almost mythological supervillain (Hitler); note that our dropping atomic bombs (WMD's) on two Japanese cities has completely escaped our memory of WWII. In the present moment, then, the neo-cons want to repeatedly bring WWII and 9/11 back into the present, but they seek to do so in such a way that monumentalizes them as "great American achievements;" naturally, since the latter great achievement was "accomplished" by the incumbent candidate, we will want to vote for him. Here, we certainly see a case of monumental history that is being used not in the service of life (despite conservative rhetoric about a so-called "culture of life," which apparently includes unjustified preemptive military strikes and systematic racial discrimination), but in an attempt to suspend life and history. The past, here, is being used to justify the perpetuation of present relations of power. By contrast, we need to work towards a critical history of the present.

Blog Revision

2004-08-28T15:36:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have noticed that I (slightly) revised the description of this blog on the left. Where it used to say "i.e., as historical change," it now says "i.e., as thinking that is coincident with the process of thinking and the materiality of historical change." This change is not insignificant, and I think that it bears elaboration. I realized that the previous formulation seemed to suggest that I thought of historical change as occurring only at the behest of human agency, which I did not mean to imply. The new formulation will hopefully emphasise an understanding of historical thinking as the attempt to think with (not about) the material conditions of historical change. This requires thinking that is dynamic and inventive, and it must resist the impetus to stasis or the fixation of knowledge as a stable and immutable object.

Counter/Intelligence

2004-08-28T14:02:00.000-04:00

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A POLITICALLY CHARGED RANT. You've been warned.

I'm not sure how to be disturbed by this article, in which the FBI claims that Israel has a spy in the Pentagon who has influenced U.S. foreign policy towards Iraq and Iran over the past couple years. If this is true, then it is, of course, disturbing in its own right. However, the timing of this revelation--in the midst of committee reports denouncing U.S. intelligence prior to 9/11 and the WMD intelligence that justified the Iraq war, talks of intelligence reform and the creation of a centralized intelligence director (yeah, that's all we need: give more unchecked power to the executive branch), and the prisoner abuse scandal that has worked its way up to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld--could not be more suspicious. One thing that this administration has consistently done well is that they create perfectly timed spectacles or scandals (read: distractions) to divert attention away from their unabashed travesties of justice and seizures of arbitrary unilateral power. Such spectacles and/or scandals include the monstrous Reagan funeral, the attempted constitutional ban on gay marriage (I'm not saying that this isn't a real issue, just that it's being used as a distraction), and the frivolous and irrelevant debate over presidential candidates' war records (this, on the other hand, is not a real issue). If I am slow to lend credence to these reports, which divert blame for what is now recognized to have been an overly aggressive policy towards Iraq (that was probably the most generous way that I could have said that) away from the executive branch, at the very moment when faulty intelligence and prisoner abuse are being linked directly to the Cabinet, it is because the timing, again, suggests that this is yet another in a long line of calculated diversions. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is that, judging by the latest electoral polls, these diversions are working.

Literature and the Contemporary

2004-08-28T11:59:00.000-04:00

This is the somewhat nebulous title of the course that I'm teaching this year, which begins two days from now. This should not be mistaken for "contemporary literature;" rather, this particular course is supposed to deal with literature and history somehow. As I said, it's a bit nebulous. In any case, this class will no doubt be the source of many a rant on this site, so I figured I'd introduce it now. Here's the course description and reading list that I've created for it (we're given pretty much free reign to design the course however we see fit):

"The project of a course such as 'Literature and the Contemporary' is to critically examine the relationship between literary/aesthetic expression and history. This does not mean merely retracing and cataloguing the ways in which, throughout history, writers have tried to represent life, the world, the infinite, and so forth; rather, it means engaging literary attempts to think with the conditions of a particular moment or event. In other words, we will read literary works not as 'timeless classics' that are beyond criticism, but as the material, historical traces of moments of thinking and configurations of mind that are no longer fully present to us (then what is meant by the term 'contemporary' in the course title?). Thus, a central concern of the course will be thinking about how to read in a way that affirms the historicality of the text and of thinking itself. This term, we will engage these questions by way of a small handful of primarily high Modernist texts (written roughly between 1890 and 1940) which, in different ways, attempt to come to terms with the rapid technological, aesthetic, and social changes of modernity that completely reorganized life and thinking."

Reading List:
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Franz Kafka, "Conversation with the Supplicant," "In the Penal Colony," "The Metamorphosis"
Edward W. Said, "The Return to Philology"
Patrick Süskind, Perfume

Conference Abstract (Bergson-Deleuze Part 3)

2004-08-26T20:39:00.000-04:00

This is the first draft of the abstract/proposal for my Bergson-Deleuze project that I will be submitting to this conference. Any and all feedback is welcome, as I need to get this to a point where I feel comfortable submitting it. Here it is:

This paper will focus largely on the distinction that Deleuze finds in Bergson’s work between, on one hand, the possible and the real, and on the other hand, the virtual and the actual, in an attempt to articulate a way of thinking about thinking itself and the project of the humanities as creativity, invention, and historicality.

Despite enjoying immense popularity during his lifetime, Bergson has since been pushed to the margins of the history of philosophy, which I believe is largely due to a misreading of one of the central features of his thinking: the idea of duration. Those who wish to dismiss Bergson as a vitalist or irrationalist typically understand duration to be nothing more than the lived psychological experience of time. Duration, rather, is a notion of time that understands that the past is not something that is over and done with; it continues to be present to us, both as memory and as the diverging paths along which life continues to actualize itself. Duration is time not as a fourth dimension of homogeneous empty space in which pre-existing elements merely rearrange themselves in order to generate the "new," but as genuine creation, as bearing within the present moment an entire history of creation, each moment of which is contingent upon the series of creations that preceded it. In this sense, time is truly irreversible, as it is not simply an empty spatial element in which parts move and change positions (in which case, all previous arrangements are always possible), but it is, at each moment, the actualization of something new.

From this understanding of time as duration, Bergson realizes the inadequacy and the error of “the real” and “the possible” as terms of modal logic that describe the relationship between the present and its formation; Deleuze treats this point at length in Bergsonism. They discover that the “real” is merely a particular arrangement among several “possible” arrangements of pre-existing elements that happens to be selected to come to the fore and pass into reality. Then, as Deleuze says, “the sleight of hand becomes obvious” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 98): the “possible” is simply an image of an already realized “real” projected backwards as the grounds of possibility from which the “real” emerged. The failure of historical thinking implied by this error will form a focal point of my discussion. By contrast, the “actual” emerges from the “virtual” (which consists of tendencies and memory; i.e., the entire weight of the past on the creation of the present) not by the selection and arrangement of pre-existing elements, but by differentiating itself along divergent lines, so that each actualization is truly creative and inventive.

Proceeding by way of close readings of Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Matter and Memory and Deleuze’s Bergsonism, this paper will attempt to investigate and elaborate on the implications of this modal distinction for thinking and writing in the humanities, with discussion constellating around questions of historicality (in what ways can we think of the past as continuing to be present in humanistic work?) and invention (how can we conceive of academic work as the actualization of the new, rather than as the mere rearrangement of already existing ideas?). I take Deleuze’s book on Bergson as an example of such work, as his reading brings Bergson’s work into the present in a way that allows something new to emerge.

Eternal Recurrence

2004-08-25T15:59:00.000-04:00

Jackie emailed me an interesting question regarding Bergson, Deleuze, and Nietzsche. I'll quote her at length here:

"In response to your posts on Bergson and Deleuze and most recently Nietzsche, how do you fit the idea of 'eternal recurrence' or 'eternal return' via N[ietzsche] into these ideas of duration and historicality? This concept has been one that has been brushed aside by many because the terms used to identify it suggest an infinite rather than finite possibility (as a counter to your post-ja?). This idea has always intrigued me and I kept thinking of it while reading your posts on Bergson."

Eternal recurrence is undoubtedly central to Nietzsche's later thinking; remember that, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the realization of eternal recurrence is a burden of such gravity and import that it nearly kills Zarathustra. I think that it would be a mistake, however, to read eternal recurrence as a transcendental reiteration of the same. Rather, it's something more akin to Deleuze's notion of repetition (we might say that, if Deleuze developed his ideas of difference through Bergsonism, then he largely developed his ideas of repetition through the encounter with eternal recurrence in his Nietzsche and Philosophy), a repetition of the movement of differentiation by which the new constantly emerges. Likewise, in Nietzsche, we have the recurring figure of the throwing of the dice: while it is certain that the dice will continue to be thrown, each individual outcome remains uncertain. In this figuration, eternal recurrence is far from transcendental or infinite; rather, it affirms chance, contingency, and (as Nietzsche himself would have said) fate in historical transformation.

Beyond this, though, each moment or action recurs eternally in precisely the sense of repetition that is inherent in Bergson's idea of duration: namely, that every moment, action, transformation, and creation of the past continues to be present at every passing moment of the present. Every repetition of the past in the present is not, therefore, simply a reiteration of the same, but is the very movement by which the present actualizes itself as a new form that is entirely contingent upon its past. In this sense, eternal recurrence is historicality itself. I'm tempted even to say that eternal recurrence is duration, and vice versa. In any case, eternal recurrence has to begin with the premise of radical finitude (which I know seems paradoxical), since it describes the movement by which finite life perpetuates itself by invention.

Gods and Finitude

2004-08-25T03:11:00.000-04:00

For a number of reasons which I won't recount (as they aren't my stories to tell), I've had the opportunity over the past couple days to reflect a bit on my (fundamentalist) Christian upbringing. As I try to imagine myself as I was, say, ten years ago (or, as I try to imagine my dad's configuration of mind), I'm continually struck by the absolute incommensurability of that way of thinking with my current thinking. I'm reminded, as I often am, of Nietzsche's account of the origin of the gods. According to him, the fact of pain and suffering is bearable for man; what is unbearable is the idea that our pain and suffering have no meaning. Thus, man creates gods, so that he can ascribe his pain to a divine plan (or, at least a divine whim) that is unfolding and that he is a part of. He must justify life with an appeal to the transcendent. This, of course, is why Nietzsche thinks of Christianity as nihilistic (as paradoxical as that may sound): it has completely given up on the world as a field of possibility, so it seeks justification and redemption outside of history.

A truly secular, critical, historical thinking has to begin, I think, from the premise of finitude and the relinquishing of any notions of transcendental justification. This leaves us with what is, perhaps, the Nietzschean question par excellence (and, perhaps, the human question par excellence): how do we think finitude without being nihilistic?

Duration Clarification (Bergson-Deleuze Part 2)

2004-08-25T02:17:00.000-04:00

WARNING: READ THE POST BELOW BEFORE READING THIS.

I offer this point by way of clarification. Bergson's idea of time as duration stems from the realization that, while it may be useful for scientific investigation to think of time as isolable in each particular instant so that an instantaneous "snapshot" of life may be studied, we should not extend this scientific notion of time to our everyday or philosophical understanding of the world. To do so is to think of the world as a series of instantaneous systems that are born and that die at every moment. Bergson's work, to a certain extent, begins with an attempt to think about the world and the universe as something that endures through time (hence, "duration"). To my mind, this is an attempt to think about the present historically, not as an isolated system whose relationship to the past is negligible.

Duration (Bergson-Deleuze Part 1)

2004-08-24T23:44:00.000-04:00

As the title suggests, this is the first in a series of posts on Bergson and Deleuze, as I'm currently in the very early stages of putting together a paper on these two (focusing specifically on Deleuze's book on Bergson, called Bergsonism), which I plan to use for a seminar this semester and submit for a conference in Hawaii that will take place in January (submission deadline for abstracts is a week from today). These posts will not necessarily include excerpts from the (as yet, unwritten) paper, but will serve as a kind of notebook from which the final paper will eventually emerge.

A little background: Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher in the latter half of the 20th century who is widely respected, if not widely read, this latter being due to the immense difficulty of his work, which relies heavily on concepts from differential calculus and non-euclidean geometry (for a good explication of Deleuze's work and its relation to mathematics, see Manuel Delanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy). One of the few major thinkers of the past thirty years to take Bergson's work seriously, Deleuze (like Bergson) incorporated the findings of quantum mechanics, theories of relativity, and modern mathematics into his philosophy at a time when much of philosophy continues to think about space and time in Newtonian or Kantian terms.

Henri Bergson was a French philosopher in the early 20th century who was extraordinarily popular during his lifetime (it would hardly be an exaggeration to call him an "intellectual celebrity") and whose influence on Modernist writers, such as Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and Proust, is practically immeasurable. However, within the past 40-50 years, Bergson has been pushed to the margins of the history of philosophy, as his work is generally understood to privilege lived experience over rational reflection. While this is partially accurate, I think that the charge largely relies on a misreading of what was a major feature of Bergson's thinking, at least from Time and Free Will (1889) to Duration and Simultaneity (1922) (a period in which Bergson also wrote his most important works, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution): the idea of duration.

Those who wish to dismiss Bergson's work as vitalist or irrationalist typically understand duration to be nothing more than the lived psychological experience of time (as opposed to, say, a mathematical or scientific notion of time), which amounts to little more than the impossibility of experiencing time as a series of separate instants that are too quick for consciousness to be able to take notice of them; rather, time is experienced as a "flow" in which the past is prolonged into the present. While Bergson certainly takes the lived experience of time as his starting point (Deleuze would point to this as an instance of Bergson's philosophical method of intuition, which I will return to in a subsequent post; this is certainly a place where Bergson significantly departs from rationalist traditions of philosophy), his understanding of duration does not stop there. Duration is, rather, an understanding of time as "the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances" (Creative Evolution, 4). The past is not something that is over and done with; it continues to be present to us, both as memory (which I'll probably have to devote another post to) and as the diverging paths along which life continues to actualize itself. Duration is time not as a fourth dimension of space in which pre-existing elements merely rearrange themselves in order to generate the "new," but as genuine creation, as morphogenesis. Creative Evolution describes life as a perpetual creation of new forms (by way of differentiation, a theme that Deleuze picks up in his own work, particularly Difference and Repetition), an idea that requires that we think of time as duration, as bearing within the present moment an entire history of creation, each moment of which is contingent upon the entire series of creations that preceded it. In this sense, time is truly irreversible, as it is not simply an empty spatial element in which parts move and rearrange themselves (in which case, all previous arrangements are always possible), but it is, at each moment, the actualization of something new.

The implications of this for thinking should, I hope, be relatively clear. If we think time as a fourth dimension of a homogeneous empty space in which pre-existing elements rearrange themselves, then we consign ourselves to an understanding of history in which everything is already given and nothing is contingent upon the volatility of chance or history, as every possible arrangement of the universe is, theoretically, conceivable and knowable at every moment, and it is only the frailty of the human mind that prevents us from knowing all of these arrangements simultaneously. If, on the other hand, we think time as duration, then we understand the present moment as being contingent upon an entire history that continues to be present to us; each moment expresses change not as merely change of position, but as creation of form that is only possible given the specific contingencies of history and chance.

I apologize for the length of this post. Obviously, subsequent posts won't require the amount of background info that I provided here.

Bibliography (Part 1 of n)

2004-08-23T18:37:00.000-04:00

I'm posting this list of books, essays, and films that I've been reading/watching/thinking about over the past few months for a couple of reasons: first, I want to create a record for myself of the different directions that I've been inquiring into as I begin to put together progressively larger projects (I'm nearing the end of my coursework); and second, I want to provide, for those who are reading this, a genealogy of much of the content on this site, as thinking does not simply emerge ex nihilo. So, I apologize if this looks like a narcissistic gesture; but then, perhaps this entire blog is precisely that.

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity"
William Faulkner, Light in August
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"
Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended:" Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976
Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Patrick Suskind, Perfume
Giambattista Vico, New Science

Films:
"The Man Who Wasn't There," dir. Joel Coen
"Coffee and Cigarettes," dir. Jim Jarmusch
"Adaptation," dir. Spike Jonze
"Lost Highway," dir. David Lynch

More on Technology and Thinking

2004-08-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

This article describes the ways by which search engines, primarily Google and Yahoo, control web-surfing: "The influence of search companies in determining what users worldwide can see and do online is breathtaking."

It seems to me that much of the possibility of the internet lies in its relatively decentralized format (Deleuze and Guattari might call it "rhizomatic"), which allows for the proliferation of communication and experimentation along divergent lines. While I don't mean to deny the usefulness of search engines (I use them quite often myself), it's a bit disconcerting to think that such a vast and sprawling network can be so easily centralized and, thus, controlled. What should our response to this be?

Of course, I'm understanding the internet in more than simply utilitarian terms; if I thought of the internet only as a convenient resource, then this probably would not be a troubling question. As I said below (in the "Technology, Benjamin, and the Internet" post), I think of the internet as a "Promethean achievement," a technological advance with the potential to open up new lines of thought and perhaps even completely reorganize thinking and life. The centralization of the internet is, to my mind, a threat to these emergent possibilities. Thoughts? Does anyone else find this troubling?

Miscellaneous (Part 1 of n)

2004-08-22T22:59:00.000-04:00

Film: I highly recommend both "Garden State" (think "Igby Goes Down," but sillier) and "The Anniversary Party" (think "Gosford Park," but set in contemporary Hollywood with drugs, movie stars, and no murder).

Music: I have now officially become the last person on the planet to purchase the White Stripes' "Elephant," and, while it has some great tracks, it's nowhere near as good as "White Blood Cells." Oh well. Blonde Redhead's newest album, "Misery is a Butterfly" (which I also just bought), is also quite good. In many ways, it's much denser and more complex (with almost a shoe-gazer Slowdive/My Bloody Valentine feel to it at times) than much of their earlier work, but it's also missing some of the aggressive rock action of those albums.

Medicine/Culture:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22DEPRESS.html?th

Here, we have an example of 1) language's development as an expression of the relationship between intelligence and the world, and 2) capital continuing to reorganize life and thinking as it continues to expand. Sweet dreams...

Ockham's Razor

2004-08-21T19:20:00.000-04:00

WARNING: WHAT FOLLOWS IS A RANT, albeit a small one. Many of you are already familiar with my disgust for the likes of Dr. Phil and his ilk: the pop psychologists whose method is to "tell it like it is," which typically means no more than telling their would-be "patient" what they don't want to hear. However, due to the sheer force of their simplicity and abrasiveness (along with the reiteration ad nauseum of certain key words, such as "freedom"), these hacks are taken to be founts of wisdom and truth.

Of course, it would be easy to dismiss these people as mere pimps who pander their "advice" to a flock that seeks escape from things like difficult decisions, except that their popularity seems to me to be symptomatic of a trend of thinking (extending far beyond the domain of Dr. Phil's influence) that takes a bastardized version of Ockham's Razor as its motto: "the simplest answer is always the best answer." No one bothers to notice, however, that what Ockham means by "simplicity" is entirely different from the kind of simplicity that flows like excrement from the mouths of talk show psychologists; the former has to do with removing redundant features or arguments from a solution, whereas, in the latter case, "the simplest answer" is merely the most familiar.

The failure of historical thinking here is twofold: first, in a phenomenon that I call "philosophical sound-bytes," the entire content of a particular thinker's work is condensed into a sound-byte ("Oh, Nietzsche/Descartes/Kant/etc., isn't he the guy who said x?", where x=the most famous quotation of the thinker in question) that is completely divorced from the context of its emergence, thereby creating a gross misinterpretation; and second, what is familiar is taken to be simple, a given, as though the everyday is just there naturally, instead of expressing an entire history of labor, invention, thinking, and chance.

Technology, Benjamin, and the Internet

2004-08-21T01:28:00.000-04:00

Among other things, Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" critically examines the relationship between technology and history. Technological breakthroughs, for Benjamin (and, of course, his main examples are photography and cinema), should not be interpreted as indicating the progress of reason or human knowledge in the world; in fact, thinking about these advances in any sort of cumulative way (i.e., as adding to an already-existing store of knowledge) is faulty. Rather, these changes express the complete reorganization of perception and thinking, so that, for example, to speak of life in the 16th century, we cannot simply assume that they thought the way that we now do, but with less information; instead, we have to understand that we are attempting to engage with a configuration of mind that is no longer present to us (here, it is clear how deeply Benjamin's thinking is influenced by Vico). Thus, the advent of cinema, for Benjamin, marks a threshold at which aesthetic perception and social relations in general were completely reorganized, thereby completely altering the relationship between the species and the material world (Patrick Suskind's novel, Perfume, collects such acts or moments of reconfiguration under the figure of Prometheus).

So...what about the internet? Is this, too, a technological advance that has reorganized our thinking? When we consider the new possibilities for communication, publishing, music and video file-sharing, and so forth, the answer seems to be "yes." However, the rash of copyright lawsuits over the past few years (Napster being probably the most high profile) indicate a desire to keep thinking locked in a static legalistic framework, rather than understanding that laws regulating intellectual property are no longer adequate to the material reality that has emerged since the advent of the internet. I don't mean to build a conspiracy theory on this single point of evidence, but this seems to me to be symptomatic of a configuration of mind that resists thinking of itself and the world historically (this will be a major theme of this blog...).

In any case, this article spurred my thoughts on this topic, which is why I'm writing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/technology/20digital.html?th

In this particular case, companies that produce file-sharing software (e.g., Grokster) were found not liable for copyright infringement. And, while I think they got off on a technicality, one of the judges seemed to accurately grasp the nature of the issue: namely, that trying to force the creative and inventive possibilities of the internet into an outdated framework of copyright law cannot work. Rather, we need to find new ways of thinking that will be adequate to this Promethean achievement.

"Transformation, Not Transcendence"

2004-08-20T15:26:00.000-04:00

This is the title of an essay by Stathis Gourgouris that I read just a couple of days ago in the most recent issue of boundary 2, which is a special issue on "critical secularism" that particularly emphasises the work of the late Edward W. Said as a point of reference and departure. A point in Gourgouris's essay that I find to be of particular value is his insistence (which one can surmise from the essay's title) that historical transformation need not and should not entail any notion of transcendence. To my mind, this can mean two things: first, to postulate God or an afterlife as a metaphysical agency of change is to exit the realm of history altogether; and second, to think that historical change must necessarily progress, so that each transformation arrives at a stage that transcends the previous stage (of course, such an understanding of history is tantamount to postulating God) is equally ahistorical. Rather, Gourgouris argues (following Said) that transformation must occur within the materiality of language and culture, within the domain of what humans know and make (and have made): that is, history.

And...I'm Online!

2004-08-20T14:02:00.000-04:00

I plan on using this site not just to record my daily rants about the world (and, trust me, I have plenty of those), but to create a sort of online notebook of fragments and experiments related to my academic work, which will hopefully aid in its completion. Comments are certainly welcome, although, if this site ends up just being me talking to myself and working through ideas on my own, I won't consider my efforts to be in vain. If nothing else, it will perhaps justify the inordinate amount of time that I spend in front of the computer.

I should say, as well, that I'm not the most technologically savvy person in the world, so you'll have to bear with my incompetence until I've figured out how to work this properly.

Enjoy.