Maddalo

Two Types of Nakedness

2012-01-31T00:13:00.002Z

Reworking an article on Donne, I have recently been immersing myself in a strange but compelling world of eyes, hands, flesh, beams, mediums and membranes: that is, the world as seen through the speculative prism of pre- and early-modern anatomy and medicine. Among other things, I have been trying to work out what it meant to touch, and to be touched, in the early modern period, in order to sharpen my (apparently interminable) account of Donne's erotic verse. One thing that immediately seized me was an initially unpromising question in Aristotle's treatise On the Soul: the question as to whether touch, almost uniquely among the senses, does not need a medium: that is, something interposing between the organ of sensation and the object to be sensed.

The necessity of a medium was taken as axiomatic by Aristotle and hence by virtually the whole of Western thought on perception: the Renaissance anatomist Helkiah Crooke described it as 'an Oracle 1,000 times repeated' that if the object was directly touching the organ, no sensation would occur.* If you press a marble right up against your eye, you see no marble. The air, across which something crosses (that 'something' was not clear to either the Greeks, nor to early modern science), acts as the medium. However, touch seemed different: quite obviously, you have to be in contact with an object to feel its tactile qualities (hardness, shape, smoothness etc), and therefore it appears to do without a medium

Or does it? Aristotle, at least in On the Soul, attempts to maintain 'a complete analogy' between all the senses, which requires that an object should affect a medium, transferring and translating a quality.** His solution is to argue that the skin is itself the medium, a medium which happens to be permanently attached to the edges of the body: 'flesh is the medium of touch, the real organ being situated further inward'. The skin does not touch anything, it is merely an interposing surface between the real organ of touch and the object, transfering the affect: 'the flesh plays in touch very much the same part as would be played in the other senses by an air-envelope growing round our body'. The upshot is that the skin (from the perspective of the phenomenology of touch) is not strictly part of the body at all, but a periphery or margin - a membrane in which nature has sheathed our real, touching body. It is not coincidental that Crooke calls this outer layer of flesh 'this Curtain or Skarfe' under which 'lieth the true & genuine skin' (p. 71), for it is indeed a kind of garment (something Crooke reinforces when he suggests its second function is to add smoothness and beauty to the raw flesh, as if it were a type of cosmetic).

This idea fascinates me. In the Donne article, I am using it to argue certain things about what happens to the category of 'world' when two surfaces of flesh come together and abolish the relevance of the external. But what also struck me when considering Aristotle's description was the possibility that visual nudity did not coincide with tactual nudity. If there is, as Crooke suggests in his early modern picture of the body, a 'true skin' underneath a 'scarfe-skin', then true nakedness would have to lie in being-touched, in gifting and exposing the openness of a field of responses that pulsate beneath the visible skin. (I realise, problematically, I am suggesting this nakedness is approaching a certain kind of inviolability - in that it requires consent - but that is partially because I have Luce Irigarary's theorising of the caress at the back of my mind).*** It would be a nakedness that referred to a play of interior affects and translations made across and between surfaces, rather than a nakedness predicated on a single binary stroke, of the veil unveiled, of a body either seen or hidden for a gaze. It would be possible to be tactually naked whilst clothed, and tactually hidden whilst supposedly stripped. The stakes around the skin, and the flesh, would be altered.

One further thing. Aristotle argues that we continually forget that our flesh is but a medium, because it's so close to us, and the sensations so immediate: 'we perceive what is hard and soft, as well as the objects of hearing, sight and smell, through a medium, only that the latter are perceived over a greater distance than the former; that is why the facts escape our notice'. Whilst the anatomies of Aristotle and Crooke are both obsolete, their phenomenologies of touch are not (and, indeed, the sensory receptors identified by modern medical science are underneath the epidermis, some relatively deeply, so in a sense Aristotle was entirely correct...)

Gustave Caillebotte, Reclining Nude (1880?)
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I wonder if in modernity there might be greater forgetting than in the Renaissance of the fact that our skin is but the liminal part (or non-part) of our embodied self and that a nakedness of its depths might be possible. Firstly, since the early modern schema of humours and the like was overturned by a modern mechanistic understanding, there has been a loss of that porosity and permeability of the body that was taken as an early-modern given. Where the early modern body was conceived as relatively open, the 'modern' self is enclosed: preoccupied by an absolute, sometimes terrifying, boundary between inside experience and outside experience. (Renaissance anatomy, which found the 'secret' of the body by opening it up through practices of dissection played its part in creating this narrative.) Secondly, our modern culture is saturated with technologies of distance (tele-technics, as Derrida would put it), media, communications and the like, and the visual image tends to be sovereign here. Tactility is subject to a kind of evanishment. It is no surprise in a world saturated in lurid images of the nude or partially nude (usually feminine) body that tactual nakedness might be occluded and forgotten: lost amongst the gleaming and unreal visual surfaces of fashion, pornography and celebrity culture.

Claudia Benthien, in a rather wonderful book on the phenomenology and cultural history of flesh, calls for an anti-vésalisme (opposing the anatomical model of penetrative knowledge associated with Vesalius, and, I would also argue, thus with the eye).**** The idea of reconceptualising the body so that one is not bound by only one understanding of boundary, surface and skin, of inside and outside, is powerful in both philosophical and ethical terms, I think. Whilst the stakes that interest Benthien may be somewhat different, I think the 'second nakedness' of tactility, of a nakedness that cannot be reduced to the visual, is one place where such a reconceptualisation could very definitely be pursued.

*Helkiah Crooke, Mikrocosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: W. Iaggard, 1615), p.663.
** All quotations from II.11 of De Anima, trans. J.A. Smith. The more complex reason for his position here is to maintain not only the unity of the senses, but the unity of touch with itself. Because tactility seems to encompass a more diverse range of qualities than the other senses, he concludes that it is the medium that gives it the unity, whereas (presumably) he assumes there are different organs for different aspects of touch underneath the flesh (which is, in fact, very close to the modern understanding of cutaneous receptors). He speculates that were an envelope of air permanently attached to our body, so that we took it to be as integral to our body as the flesh, then all the senses which use air as a medium (sight, hearing, smell) would be conceived as a single sense.
*** See Luce Irigarary, Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 13-22.
****Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2002).

Reflection: Digital Humanities

2012-01-12T15:05:00.000Z

Yesterday, a friend posted this article by Stanley Fish. She researches specifically in the digital humanities, at NUI Maynooth's An Foras Feasa institute, and we exchanged a few ideas (appropriately enough, on Facebook) about the role 'information and communication' technology plays in arts and humanities research.

In one sense, Fish is self-evidently right. Digital culture is, and has already, changed the academic humanities. As a Romanticist, who works within a series of critical paradigms largely dating from the second half of the twentieth-century, and on fairly traditional and 'canonical' poetry, I am not obviously part of the digital humanities. Yet even in the last 24 hours, I have:

Had the above exchange on Facebook, and discussed setting up a research network with someone on the same site (an academic from UCC) who had just 'added' me. I also had vaguely academic exchanges about Wordsworth and touch, and illustrations in Victorian magazines, with people from different countries.
Read some of Timothy Morton's (UC Davis) blog, and listened to the first ten minutes of one of his podcast lectures on literary theory, out of curiosity. (I first 'met' Tim Morton when he gave a paper 'virtually' to the University of Exeter from California, over a video-link.)
Spent a number of hours reading about eyesight and membranes in Helkiah Crooke's 1615 anatomy treatise Microcosmographia, which costs around $9000 in the original, but which I had downloaded casually in facsimile from the Early English Books Online archive, or EEBO.
Used Google, and ended up skimming the following article from academia.edu, in order to check the precise definition of 'intentional species' in Scholastic philosophy.
'Borrowed' Jonathan Goldberg's recent monograph on Lucretius, materiality and sexuality, The Seeds of Things from Ebrary (an online library) and did a few keyword searches to determine it didn't really have anything of use for my research.
Read significant stretches from a John Donne biography and George Eliot's Middlemarch on a Kindle, marking key passages electronically in the latter (in preparation for lectures later this term)
Updated a Moodle module description for students, and checked that the Victorian periodical the Strand Magazine is still available free online, so I can use the text for teaching.

That is not to count six or seven e.mails to undergraduates (and this is outside term) and two or three to colleagues. All of the above was done across a series of spaces: my campus office, on the train between Dublin and Maynooth, in my own apartment, and in Starbuck's.

However, despite all this, I still hesitate. As I put it to my friend, are the digital humanities an instrument, or a true methodology? Do they actually alter the interpretation of the text? There is no doubt that the digital has made my research faster, more efficient and more extensive in its reach: but is this just a quantitative effect? Whilst I spent many months last year collating well over a hundred 17th and 18th century texts (sermons, essays, manuals, guides) on prayer for my next monograph, using the digital archive ECCO, I could have done much the same manually, pouring over texts in the British Library. Indeed, that is precisely what I had to do with the period 1800-1820, which is after the ECCO cut-off date.

I want to think here about what a qualitative shift might look like. One possibility, I feel, lies in the digital humanities altering our sense of textuality: not just to expand it, but to transform it.

Literary studies always attempts to map a field of textuality: it attempts to understand what was written, and what was read, and how this played out. This has been long understood, and even the most close reading must concede that things like genre or form depend on a relationship with other texts e.g. the fact that the writer of a sonnet must have read other sonnets. More generally, literary critics will often attempt to reconstruct the textual world of an author: would x have read y, what was in z's library, is A an explicit allusion to C? The pseudo-mythic figure of the 'last man to have known everything' or 'to have read anything' - Leibniz? Coleridge? - is a proxy for how we divide this question into the biographical and the cultural. For example, is it necessary for Wordsworth to have read Kant for us to bring Kantian ideas to bear in our readings, or is it enough to say Kant was 'in the air' in his circle?

However, the structure of textuality and intertextuality has often been (re-)constructed in a fairly stilted way. Traditionally, it consisted almost entirely of what we might call a primary and a secondary canon. The primary canon would have been the 'literary tradition', evoked as the field of allusion. The limited world of poems, novels and plays studied in the three years of an undergraduate degree was self-referential: Wordsworth cited Milton, Keats cited Wordsworth, Tennyson cited Keats. The strictest iteration of this structure would be the familial structures studied by Harold Bloom. The secondary canon was the field of context: major works of science, philosophy, political theory (etc) could be brought forward as intellectual backdrop. Now, since the late 1970s at least, this neat and controllable textuality has been taken apart from one side. French theory suggested the field of intertextuality was fluid and potentially infinite: you couldn't simply contain references within an obvious circle of 'great authors'. Feminism, postcolonialism and the like eroded the boundaries of the canon, made them porous, showing that huge swathes of what was read had been previously overlooked. New Historicism was willing to drop both primary and secondary canons down into a more general circulation of language, reading a Shakespeare play alongside an account of a hanging or a medical treatise.

Yet, despite this, academics arguably continued to read in similar ways: by which I mean, our own material acts of reading. The material embedding of the research (what Edmund Husserl would call the Lebenswelt of the Humanities researcher) hadn't changed much at all. It was still bound to certain institutional sites: the library, the university press. One identifies texts of interest, through a title catalogue (or some form of subject keyword), one reads them through, one makes notes. In many cases, the texts of interest are rather limited: to what has been printed and, in the case of literary texts, to what has been made available in scholarly editions (notwithstanding variorums and concordances). Obviously, it is possible to access rarer texts, manuscripts and the like, but it is difficult: if one does not rely on the secondary material that may 'read' those texts for you, you have to access an archive (which itself has a very specific material institutionality).

I think what interests me here is not so much which texts are rendered available, but the way we reconstruct reading (in general) in such a predictable way. Catalogue search - order from the stacks - read through - take notes. Yet, if this is the way we are reconstructing the textuality of the past - especially the reading of the past - it is almost parodically shallow. It's arguably only recent work on the History of the Book (rather than the schools of criticism mentioned above) that has really begun to address this. Reading happened in so many ways. Sometimes it was silent. Sometimes it was aloud. It was bound up in gift-giving and showing off and status. Other times it was illicit. The advent of the circulating libraries changed the very notion of the reading object; serialisation across months, even years, imposed its own temporality to the reading experience. Who is to say that everyone read a whole text? What of the fragments of the commonplace book and marginalia, or the way that texts and bits of text were transmitted through letters? What of the fact that some books were read and re-read and re-read again? That some books were never read at all? Our one (academic) way of reading - not in terms of our rules of interpretation, necessarily, but as a lived experience - is a shadow compared to this.

The Renaissance humanists often claimed to have composed on horseback. It was just a trope, a rhetorical flourish to signify spontaneity, but it draws attention to the imbrication of reading (and texts) in the materiality of everyday life. Reading is an activity. A text is an object. Reading possessed a certain friction - phenomenological, social, moral - against other activities; texts would have been experienced within a dense medium of other texts, other writings, other voices. Language has a real texture. (Coleridge's notebooks are wonderful instances of this: juxtaposing laundry bills with poetic quotations; philosophical reflections with accounts of illness).

Whilst I am not claiming that reading on Kindle, or through EEBO, is a better 'reconstruction' of the reading experience of, say, the 17th century, the digital humanities does open up reading. The space and time of reading is less restricted and restrictive: two texts may appear curiously next to each other in a full-text search; we can track a term or a concept or a quotation across a whole corpus, we may download and choose our own speed of reading (academic reading generally has only three gears: skim-reading, poring over something, and the panic-reading induced by the annoucement 'the British Library is closing in 30 minutes'). And as such, it takes us away from the narrow experiences of reading we previously had, bound logically to the narrowness of our material institutions and what we could do in them (and when, and for how long, and with what level of difficulty and patience). Things like (I go on examples from my own period) the fabulous Blake archive or the Romantic Circles e-edition of Lyrical Ballads have already started this process. If we search EEBO or ECCO, we get a much better sense of the chaotic nature of early modern or eighteenth-century textuality. As I've tried to emphasise, this isn't just about the range of texts, or even types or genres of text, but of pulling our reading away from a single model: in particular, the library-based catalogue-order-read model, itself further determined by the physical sense of the published book in its twentieth-century form.

The fluidity that the digital humanities offers in finding and accessing texts - how they emancipate the archive - should hopefully make us aware, once more, of the historicity of reading, and show us that our reconstruction of previous patterns of reading is just that: a reconstruction, a mimicry. We can never read exactly like a medieval scholar, or a 19th century tradesman, but strangely enough if we read through the digital humanities, perhaps we may be able to read more closely to them than with a Oxford University Press edition in our hand. If such a sense of textuality could be awakened, then it would have properly completed a revolution as a critical term.

100th Post

2012-01-10T01:30:00.000Z

As well as offering me enticing geographical statistics (I'm always excited when Maddalo gets apparent readers from somewhere like Iran or South Korea), the blogger interface has also pleasingly noted that I have now posted 99 times: making this the 100th.

This is mixed news. Obviously, I'm happy that something I almost did on a whim (probably first envisaged in NumberTwenty over a Becks Vier or three) has gone so far. It gets a respectable amount of page views (academic impact, perchance!), and has really helped me to draw out ideas and readings, and to think outside my own academic niche. I hope it's helped some students along the way too. On the other hand, with a rough length of 1000 words per post, and thus 100,000 words of text, I realise there is theoretically more than enough text here to constitute a respectable second monograph....Hmmm.

Anyway, to mark the century, I thought I'd pick six of my favourite posts from the last three and a half years.

1. A Note on Language (May 2011). Although I think I've done some decent blogging whilst at NUIM - two readings of De Quincey, some fair posts on feminism, and a piece on irony and capitalism - this fragment is my favourite. It is an idea that I think is powerful, and I'd love for it to find some better place in my own work. Drawing on my passion for Kristeva, once the notion that there is only materialism in language - whether of book, or letter, or breath - came into my head, I couldn't shake it.

2. From the Millennium Bridge (July 2010). This post has sentimental importance for me. I think the argument is sound enough, and came out of some work on Wordsworth that is imminently to be published by the European Romantic Review. But, to me, it was a post of endings. After nearly five years of studying the sublime in one shape or another, it was a kind of coda: the sublime is a concept I have had quite enough of! On a more personal note, this was written at a time I was kind of saying farewell to London, a city with which I was once consumingly in love. Being at the centre of that city used to be an unspeakable joy, and this was one way of (obliquely) speaking it.

3. Dracula and Postmortem Photography (March 2010). One of my last posts for Exeter undergraduates, and - I think - from a particularly rich stretch of my intellectual life when I had both first and second years in cracking seminars, and a staff-student reading group was sparkling. This isn't brilliant in any sense, but I think it is a lot of fun, in a creepy, gothic way.

4. Hamlet (December 2009). I'm not sure which reading on this blog I am most personally satisfied with. A number of blogs have helped provide important staging posts in my own research, and, as my own work never covers novels, I feel pretty happy by interpretations I've given of Jane Eyre, Bleak House and The Road. However, Hamlet is a text that poses an irresistible challenge to any critic, and I like this post a lot. It works out ideas that began as undergraduate ones at Oxford (e.g. Hamlet-as-scion and the hollow state), and I am still taken by the idea of foils, mirrors and play, and the possibility of reverse-anagnorisis.

5. New York Notes 3: Sculpture, Flesh, Art (November 2009). I love the opportunity this blog gives me to look at the other arts (e.g. I still like this post on music), and this one also evokes my other major post-doctoral interest - embodiment. At a time when my thoughts were full of Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I suddenly found myself absorbed into a form, sculpture, I had never really noted before, and obsessed with the idea of a human statuary. It's a thought I've come back to recently, thinking about the privilege of sculpture in Keats.

6. A Poetics of Tears (May 2009). One of my earliest posts, and one special to me. Throughout the last few years, I've been drawn back to a common thread of thinking about Donne - about eroticism, touch, the body, affectivity, intimacy - and that series of blog posts begins here. Recently, I've taken the plunge and tried to construct and extend this material into a journal article, and it will be great if it finds a place from such fragile beginnings.

Literary Effect

2012-01-09T23:56:00.001Z

'We murder to dissect'. William Wordsworth.

Love of literature is a strange thing (as Donne says, pleasure is none, if not diversified). Ever since I abandoned the idea of studying a BA in History and turned to English Literature instead, under what turned out to be the rather misguided proposition that I was a 'poet', there has been no doubt in my mind that what I do, as a student then a lecturer and I suppose, now, a literary critic, is a passion. It is a vocation. The relationship is visceral: closer, I imagine, to being a priest than a estate agent (and I also have no doubt that were I born in the 17th or 18th centuries, I would have been a priest...) Nevertheless, there is a continual stream of students who feel that what is done at university is antithetical to their own passion for literature: that analysis rips the beauty apart, that it stills the string of the violin to measure the tautness, that the life - as Wordsworth intimates - flows instantly away under the tedious blade of lecture and seminar, monograph and 2000 word essay.

I've been thinking about this reaction, which seems to me so deeply strange. Why would you not want to burrow to the core of a line of poetry, and find out that abstruse comes from the Latin abstrudere, to thrust away or conceal? Why would you not want to re-read Middlemarch and trace its intricate architecture? Why would you not want to turn from Donne, to Ficino and Castiglione, and back again, and appreciate all the more the richness, the profuse sense, of the image of a lover's face reflected in the eye of his beloved? To not do these things, for me, when you could, is like looking at a glass of wine, and refusing to taste it, and yet it is highly common.

One answer, I think, comes with the idea that literature (or any art) is a machine constructed to produce an effect. If you understand the mechanism that produced the effect, then you no longer feel the effect.

In some ways, I think this is a very dubious definition of any art form, although it's superficially coherent. Some of the objectionable places it goes might include art as mere stimulant, art as pure surface, art as personal therapy, or art as a stylistic accessory. The engagement would be glancing at best: one would listen to Telemann to be sprightly, Schubert to indulge sadness. It is art as drug.

Yet, effect is a deeply ambiguous category, given the way that art has come to exist in the modern world, and partially I think that has to do with the increasing dislocation of art, since Romanticism, from clearly conceived 'ends' or purposes (or, effects) - be they religious, moral or civic. If you look at something like Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, then you see a repulsion (continued into something like Adorno) at literature that exists purely to create an effect, to be a spectacle, to be consumed: the 'degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation', as he puts it. Yet, equally, if you follow the progress towards a purely aesthetic sphere (art for art's sake), then this can end up offering something that is ironically - yet remarkably - similar. If art deliberately rejects its old purposes, then what can it be but another kind of pure style, a void or merely hollow effect: involuted, turned in on itself, and concerned only with playing and experimenting with the means of its own construction (colour, tone, rhyme, whatever).

I think one way to think about the fraught relationship of art to effects is to go to Kant's epochal Critique of Judgement. One of Kant's concerns is to analyse beauty and - as always - he wants to identify what is its purest form. He gives, somewhat bizarrely, two options. Initially, he argues that arabesque and the like - purely abstract patterns and shapes that 'signifying nothing by themselves...do not represent anything, no object under a determinate concept' - are the purest instances of the beautiful.* Things like musical fantasias, flowers and elaborate borders fall under this category. Yet, a few pages later, he turns around and says that an even higher beauty is to be found in the human figure which is the embodiment of morality and freedom. One seems to evoke something that has no real purpose (just form, just pattern); the other seems to embody the highest purpose (the human individual, which is defined ethically as an end rather than a means, that is, a free being whose purpose is their own choice).

What Kant's two apparently polarised evocations of the beautiful suggest, I think, is that art is not to be judged within normal sets of purposes or effects: he deliberately chooses one category which does not cause anything specific, and one which is above causality. And this is perhaps because whatever art does in the modern period, it appear to do uniquely. Art, of course, can have many functions and many effects, but it cannot exhaustively be explained by them or reduced to them: a poem, a painting or a concerto is a gesture that only really exists according to its own internal logic. Its effect is only itself, its own existence.

What I mean by this, I think, is that each artwork is a world unto itself. Yes, artworks can have effects in the real world, and can be judged according to real calculations based on those effects. A Dickens novel can create a social consciousness about poverty. A string quartet can move an audience to tears. Yet the novel or the string quartet is not therefore defined by the consciousness or the tears, in the way we might define a candle by how brightly it burns, or a knife by how sharply it cuts. It is not to be used, to be bent to a purpose (emotional, utilitarian, or otherwise). The alternative formulation is for the reader (listener, viewer etc.) to bend themselves to the artwork (to be used by the artwork?): to inhabit it, like a world. This is the basic contract of fiction, I suppose - to give oneself over to the imagined world - but it is also the basic contract of, for instance, music - to accept the tonalities and temporalities of the music in place of the intensities and speeds of the real world. You do not take it inside of you (consume it, introject it); it takes you inside of it.

Where this leaves us, I feel, is with a conception of art which understands that any poem, novel, painting (etc.) makes many effective gestures, but is reducible to none of them. Ultimately, it 'causes' nothing but itself, its own world, which it offers up for us to inhabit. This, for me, is why analysis, re-reading, and the like, are forms of love: because I enjoy inhabiting these other worlds (more accurately, these reflections, projections, re-imaginings and critiques of our world), and experiencing their details and recesses. Because I do not wish to identify any artwork absolutely with an effect outside of itself, least of all its effect on me, I do not see such experience as destroying, but rather enriching. Any investigation, or study, or re-reading, merely makes the 'world' more profuse and meaningful, rather than revealing some kind of trick or mechanism that will abolish my own delight.

Yet, that is not to entirely disregard the opposing viewpoint. Artworks do create effects. There is a certain pleasure in being affected by the whole, without necessarily understanding or seeing the intricacy of the parts. One can hardly have a conception of narrative without a conception of suspense (and the time of an artwork is perhaps the trickiest category of all here). We might conclude by noting this is a debate which has been going on since the very origin of the Western tradition. Aristotle's Poetics defended tragedy on the basis that such plays involved a purging of pity and fear, or katharsis, a scouring of emotion beneficial to the city-state or polis. It was a theory of literature founded profoundly on the effect of literature in the world. Plato, in the Republic, by contrast, had exiled the poets: poetry was dangerous precisely because it lured people away from real things to representations, it offered up other worlds. The question between them is the same one I have been considering above: the question of what we experience when we experience art. What does literature cause, if anything? What is it for, or are we for it? Which world affects which?

* Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 114.

Notes and Thoughts on Genre

2012-01-01T21:30:00.000Z

1. Excellent by Susan Wolfson: 'Even poster-boys for the figure of the great poet - Wordsworth and Byron, in different poses - wrote of truths less in the absolute than in the multiple, variable, doubtful, and wrote of themselves with more questions than certainties about the origins and stability of poetic authority'.*

2. As Derrida understood, the centre is perhaps the strangest place of all. The intervention of Echo, the echo of Echo, by the side of Narcissus.

3. As if 'lyric' is ever really monologic: the careless critical gesture passing on to the allure of the margin (although doesn't all literary criticism demand a straw centre somewhere?) How could a voice with no absolute addressee and always breaking on the difficulty of saying 'I', always a little out of time and sometimes fully in love with easeful death, be anything but haunted? If the purest lyric would simply be 'I am', je suis, آنا‎, then this instantly dissolves in a choral sparkle: where? when? for whom?

The idling spirit / By its own moods interprets etc.

How enigmatic, to seek the caress of this second, doubled body, the poem: this second skin of language, this other way of touching, and feeling oneself feel. 'Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other...language experiences orgasm upon touching itself; on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words' (Barthes)**

4. Isn't all genre, the question of genre, self-evidently insufficient, at least in terms of literature? Who would want to read a purely conventional lyric? An absolutely predictable pastoral? A gothic novel with nothing but slavish imitation of the type? Would these texts be unreadable: both literally, in the sense of being tedious, but philosophically insofar as, paradoxically, an exemplary instance of a genre would cease to be itself, and become a parody (its identity would fracture just at the moment it supposedly attained perfect self-identity)?

Like Weber's 'ideal types', a legalistic model of literary genre would seem to understand a field in terms of deviations from a standard which no element actually possesses.***

5. Additionally, in a dialectical literary history (Tynyanov etc) there can be no purity, axiomatically so. All texts would fall on the interstices on genre, or act as hybrids. The possible exception would purely originary texts, but aren't these retrospective inventions? We are back to Narcissus: for instance, Homer-as-Narcissus, who lacking poetics looked to his poetry and found(ed) poetics there.

6. Possibly: literature is the suspension of genre, just as it is the suspension of referential/instrumental language. In fact, such suspension would become its essence (if genre is law, then literature is unlawful). 'Everyday' genres (the love-story, the heroic, the song) would be inhabited by literature, or literariness, parasitically. Literature happens in the spaces, the pauses, the interrogations, the reflections: most clear in something like Hamlet, something temporal or narrative, which extends a pause in the genre of revenge tragedy across five acts.

7. Not sure about this notion of 'everyday'. Doesn't it reinstate the boundary between high or low art, despite the logic of inhabitation? Also, some literary genres involve heavily legalistic or formalist tendencies.

Perhaps better: literary genre is not a space of rules, but a space of questioning. Codification may obscure this arche-questioning, but, primordially, isn't tragedy the genre in which questions of loss are asked, and comedy, questions of resolution. Fort-da. The lyric is the question of self. Pastoral, in its widest sense, is the question of time.

Under such a model, would it be true to say that, until secularity and the novel, the question of narrativity itself had never been seriously asked? Or asked with such coherence?

* Susan Wolfson, Romantic Interactions (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2010), p. 8.
** Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: A Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 83.
*** See Max Weber, 'The Nature of Social Action [from Economy and Society]' in Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W.G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)

Religious Desire

2011-12-04T18:29:00.001Z

I gave the following paper at the 8th ECLRNI (18th Century Literature Research Network in Ireland) symposium at Trinity College Dublin. Seeing as it represents the earliest stages of some contextualising research, and as it isn't particularly long, I feel that Maddalo is as good as place as any to share it...

Religious Desire in Isaac Watt's Horae Lyricae and Elizabeth Rowe's 'Devotional Soliloquies'

This paper comes out of a wider research project on prayer and poetry, one chapter of which is focused on Felicia Hemans’ late verse. In thinking about Hemans, I became interested in the extent to which a female devotional tradition stretched back, and in what ways women writers appropriated various models of prayer and devotional selfhood. Seeking a circumscribed way of comparing male and female religious verse, Isaac Watts (who revolutionised hymnody and decisively shaped dissenting devotion) and Elizabeth Rowe (arguably the best known female religious poet of the 18^th century) suggested themselves immediately. The fact that they came from very similar Nonconformist backgrounds, and knew and corresponded with each other further recommended them. As such, I read Watts’ collection of sacred poems, Horae Lyricae, alongside Rowe’s poetry, specifically the confessional lyrics, both rhyming and blank verse, collected under the rubric of the ‘Devotional Soliloquies’.[1] My focus today shall be the use of erotic and amatory vocabulary in that pairing of texts.

A good starting point is Sharon Achinstein’s description of so-called ‘romances of the spirit’.[2] She argues that when sexual figures appear in religious writing, it is the genre of romance, with its approaches, seductions, pleas, and above all calculated deferrals of pleasure, that is crucial for understanding how the ‘double register’ (p.414), the crossing of spiritual and physical, actually works. Watts, I would argue, is far more likely to insert a straightforward romance temporality: that is, a temporality of delay that keeps the erotic at arm’s length because the present is constituted by the patience of the courted. For instance, in ‘The Heart Given Away’, Watts announces:

Now I can fix my Thoughts above,
Amidst their flatt’ring Charms,
Till the dear Lord that hath my Love
Shall call me to his Arms.

Watts is willing to inhabit what he calls in ‘The Fairest and the Only Beloved’ ‘my Remnant-Minutes’ in a state of impassioned submission. Embedded in self-conscious pastoral settings and tonalities, we meet stylised laments such as:

While of his Absence I complain,
And long, and weep as Lovers do,
There’s a strange Pleasure in the Pain,
And Tears have their own Sweetness too.
(‘Love to Christ Present or Absent’)

A temporality of delay also conditions less straightforward texts. ‘The Welcome Messenger’, for instance, is perhaps the most erotic text in the Horae Lyricae:

Away these interposing Days,
And let the Lovers meet;
The Angel has a cold Embrace,
But kind, and soft, and sweet.

I’d leap at once my Seventy Years,
I’d rush into his Arms,
And lose my Breath, and all my Cares,
Amidst those heavenly Charms.

Whilst this appears to demand a traversal of romance-time, and immediate erotico-spiritual fulfilment, the sexual subject here is not strictly Watts himself but a dying Christian, the body of whom Watts imagines himself inhabiting:

How we could e’en contend to lay
Our Limbs upon that bed,
We ask thine Envoy to convey
Our Spirits in his stead.

As such, the consummation of spiritual desire happens purely in the conditional: ‘I’d leap’, ‘I’d rush’, ‘I’d lay this Body down’. Watts himself, once more, waits. The saint’s delicious death is a desired state, but it is one to be met at a proper time (Watts himself considers he is currently to ostained with sin to meet intimately with his God). Rowe’s relationship to the temporality of romance is rather different. Whilst she is sometimes happy to embrace spiritual patience, her more common position is that exemplified by ‘BVS III’:

Absolve the penance of mortality,
And let me now commence the life divine.
I sicken for inlargement.

‘Dance on, ye hours’, she complains in ‘Soliloquy XII’, rejecting the day's ‘useless light’; in ‘Soliloquy XVIII’ she beckons death: ‘I come, ye gentle messengers, I come!’ At times, her ‘courtship’ of God (in curious contrast to the more passive role often inhabited by male poets, including Watts) become forceful and aggressive, most notably in ‘BVS XVIII’ which once again demands spiritual fulfilment in terms that are as much marital as they are theological:

I will not leave thee; bid me not gone,
Repulse me not, for I will take no nay.
As tho dost live, I will pursue thee still,
Nor e’er let me go my hold: I’m fix’d on this,
To wrestle with thee till I gain the blessing.
I cannot be deny’d; thy word is past,
‘Tis seal’d, ‘tis ratify’d; thou are oblig’d
Engaged.

Continually anticipating ravishment, Rowe is more insistently and intensely erotic than Watts, and far more likely to relish such eroticism as a concrete, present experience: or, even, to consider the space of anticipation as itself erotic, as in ‘Soliloquy VI’:

O Speak, and in the music of thy voice,
My soul shall antedate immortal joys;
The tempting calls of sense shall be drown’d
In the superior sweetness of that sound;
…
O let me hear thee but in whispers break
Thy silence, and in gentle accents speak!
Such accents as ne’er ravish’d mortal ears
Such as the soul in calm retirement hears.

The unveiled soul evoked at the end of this poem plays with an eroticised sense of divine surveillance (modified from the common closet and privacy commonplace found in all discourses of prayer at the time) also found in ‘BVS VI’ and, most sensuously of all, ‘BVS XIII’:

Come to my longing soul, that I may know
My union with thee in immortal love:
This is the secret language of my heart,
I dare appeal to thee, my awful Judge,
Whose eyes can penetrate my inmost thought
Thou art my first desire.

In short, Rowe inhabits the figural economy of religious desire more fully and more literally than Watts does, frequently demanding an ‘ante-dating’ of bliss that demolishes the patience of romance-time, and addressing God with all the intimacy – and impatience – of a young lover:

Thou taught my infant lips thy name,
And didst my first desires enflame:
Recal the kindness of my youth,
When first I have my plighted truth;
Ev’n then I felt the fire divine,
My young affections all were thine.
('Soliloquy XIX')

Now, the distinct ways that Watts and Rowe tend to inhabit the romance temporality create different organisations of affect. In Watts, the deferral of ravishment positions religious desire as, perhaps ironically, a kind of counter-desire: that is, a horizon for desire, the correct centering of the self that regulates all other desires:

Seize my whole Frame into thy Hand
Here all my Pow’rs I bring;
Manage the Wheels by thy Command,
And govern every Spring.
Then shall my Feet no more depart,
Nor wandring Senses rove;
Devotion shall be all my Heart
And all my Passions Love
(‘The Comparison and Complaint’)

The lesson here is the one of ‘The Hazard of Loving the Creatures’: ‘Tis dangerous to let loose our Love / Beneath th’Eternal Fair’: desiring God corrects other desires, and centres the soul. The poem ‘True Wisdom’ foregrounds this disciplinary aspect, so much so that although ‘dear God, shall fill my vast Desire’, this is presented precisely as an ascetic experience: ‘Come heavenly Fire, / Come to my Breast, and with one powerful Ray / Melt off my Lusts, my Fetters’. (It is also painted as a very masculine experience, one of courage.)

This regulatory sense of desire – God as the proper object of love, not inconsequentially twinned with romantic patience – recurs again and again in the Horae Lyricae: ‘While I am held in his Embrace / There’s not a Thought attempts to rove’ (‘Love to Christ Present or Absent’). It looks forward to the dominant eighteenth-century paradigm of prayer: a development of Puritan understandings of spiritual discipline in increasingly rationalistic and psychological – even therapeutic – terms. The notions, ultimately empiricist and Lockean, of attention, object, frame and proper organisation of the passions which play important roles in Watts’ lyrics ('frame', 'manage', 'govern', 'spring') would be developed into an entire understanding of devotional ‘habit’ in writers on prayer from both Anglican and Nonconformist traditions.

Now, this economic or disciplinary function of desire is not entirely absent from Rowe’s work, as in her poem ‘On the Divine Attributes’:

...Be thou my life,
Its spring, its motion, constant as my breath,
Dwell on my tongue, and govern all my soul,
Till faith and love be swallowed up of thee

The fixity of the divine love-object, and its affective sovereignty over all other passions, is shared by both Rowe and Watts (one again, 'spring', 'motion' and 'governance' are key terms). However, if Rowe sometimes understand religious desire as a centering of self – ‘all serene…spent in works of love and praise’ (BVS XXI) – then her tendency to eroticise her present subjectivity, and to ‘ante-date’ ravishment, creates a more predominant self-representation as lovesick, distracted and disordered. Ironically, by pushing the idea of God as a centring love-object to its absolute limit, Rowe explores precisely the opposite psychological states to those that devotional treatises would evoke as among the chief benefits of prayer. The following extract, from ‘Soliloquy XIII’ captures both the excess, and the subsequent decentering:

O tell the glorious object, whom I prize
Beyond the chearful light that meets mine eyes.Beyond my friend, or any dearer name,
Beyond the breath that feeds this vital frame,Beyond whate'er is charming here below,Beyond the brightest joys that mortals know,Beyond all these, O tell him that I love!Tell him what anguish for his sake I prove;Tell him how long the hours of his delay,And what I suffer by this tedious stay;Tell him his absence robs my soul of rest,While cruel jealousy torments my breast.O let him know that my distracted mindNo real joy, while he withdraws, can find;That all my hopes are center'd in his love,How lost without it, how undone I prove!Tell him that nothing can that loss repair,Nor help the soul that dismal stroke to bear.

In ‘BVS IV’, we find the same dynamic of love, withdrawl and anguish. The centering of the soul on the divine object – ‘Do I love happiness? / ‘Tis sue I do! And oh! ‘tis full as sure / I love my God’ – is a defining truth but one folded into a restless motion of questioning and self-questioning. Whilst Rowe correctly subordinates her enjoyment of earthly things to the centre, to God, the sum effect (or affect…) is one of unhealthy languishment, of being undone: ‘Lo! Here I am! --- but oh! The most undone / And wretched thing that the creation names’. ‘BVS VIII’ is also constituted by a tension between the centering of prayer and the decentering of the erotic. Although she is ‘center’d in thy love’ and she will ‘fix / My full attention on thy bright perfections’, she is also ‘inebriated in the vast abyss’ and thrown into an erotic amnesia, ‘forgetting ev’n myself, forgetting all’.

I would argue that Rowe’s impatience with the romance-temporality, and the psychological states her poetry consequently involve (languishment, demand, sickness, erotic anticipation and fantasy, even jealousy), does distinguish her treatment of religious desire from Watts. Despite both of them using amatory and erotic metaphors to bring prayer, desire and psychological attentiveness together, they end up in rather different places: where Watts fixes his self by fixing on God, Rowe unfixes her self by fixing on God. Although the polarity is far from absolute – we sometimes see Rowe evoking prayer as framing a harmonious economy of self, just as we see Watts sometimes inhabiting the persona of a panting, impatient lover – there is enough of a rhetorical difference to understand a constellation of the texts’ concerns – temporality, deferral, erotic metaphors, devotional affectivity – in this way. However, the further question is to what extent this difference is conditioned by the obvious difference between the writers, i.e. gender.

I believe there are two ways of answering this question. The limited proposition would be to acknowledge that, certainly, no element in Rowe’s enactment of religious desire is unique to her, or to a tradition of solely female spiritual writing. Nevertheless, when Rowe deploys these tropes, they resonate in a context where her readers would identify her voice as female. The intensity and directness of her eroticism would have, and did, raise suspicions about the true source of the ‘vehicle’ in her metaphors. Most interestingly for me, would be the gendered resonances of her insistent repudiation of worldly things. Again, this is not entirely absent in Watts, but incessantly present in ‘Devotional Soliloquies’: time and again, she asserts – beyond even an understanding that the world cannot mean anything ‘abstract’ from God, the hollowness of the world altogether: ‘I’m sick of this vain world, / Its tiresome repetitions load my sense’ (‘Soliloquy XXVII’). Indeed, Rowe herself draws attention to a blasphemous edge to her impatience:

I have no treasure here, ‘tis all above,
And there my heart in fix’d attention dwells.
With just disdain, I cast a languid look
Around the vain creation; then repine,
And half pronounce these various products evil.
(‘BVS XXVII’)

In ‘BVS II’, she begins my admitting ‘surely paradise is around me’ and identifying the beautiful earth as a ‘delicious land of love’, but still – paradoxically and self-consciously – rejects it, despite the recognition it is a gift from her beloved. This anti-worldedness, I think, strikes an interesting note in terms of gender. What would a male reader make of the following, deeply anti-familial, lines in the ‘BVS VI’, for example:

I’ve known the names of father, husband, friend;
But when I think thee, these tender ties,
These soft engagements vanish into air.

A more extensive hypothesis might suggest that there is something about the unfixity of her praying self that attracts Rowe to it – as a woman writer, or, indeed as a woman. All desire implies lack, as The Symposium teaches us. Yet, with their subject-positions marked by exclusions across a range of social, economic and political spheres, is it not likely that women have historically experienced ‘lack’ differently – and perhaps more fundamentally? In her recent 2010 study on Romantic Narrative, Tilottama Rajan reads Mary Hays’ romance novel The Memoirs of Emma Courtney in terms of a twofold desire: the plot-based desire with a precise referent exists on the surface, but encrypts a deeper desire constituting the female subject as a rootless one: ‘a desire for the enunciative position within the social order’ (p. 90), as Rajan puts it.[3] I wonder if we might proffer a similar reading in Rowe’s case. Her uncompromising desire for a transcendent object causes her to violently reject the world: is this not, by proxy, a repudiation of her ‘worlded’ position in the symbolic order, constituted by vain amusements, love of nature and limited relationships (sister, wife, friend etc) – i.e. the elements of stereotypical eighteenth-century ‘femininity’. Could the exorbitance of her desire suggest a constitutive lack to her identity: indeed, does her subjectivity, in prayer, become almost identical with desire, desire for subjectivity itself, and for the absolute object that would dissolve all lack? To conclude with Rowe’s words: ‘these infinite desires must find an object / Or thou has made thy noblest work in vain’.

[1] Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae. Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, 2^nd edn (London: J. Humfreys, 1709) and Elizabeth Rowe, Poems on Several Occasions (London: D. Midwinter, 1759). 'BVS' stands for the numbered selection of lyrics in the 'blank verse' section of the collection.

[2] Sharon Achinstein, ‘Romance of the Spirit: Female Sexuality and Religious Desire in Early Modern England’, ELH 69.2 (2002): 413-38.

[3] Tilottama Rajan, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010).

De Quincey: Irony, Addiction, Culture

2011-11-23T15:59:00.001Z

It's been a year since I lectured - and blogged - on de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Well, it's come around again and although I didn't manage to reflect it in the imperfect repetition of the lecture, I do wonder if I'm now seeing a different kind of text (as always, the text that is always new as we re-read is the one with the true value...)

One thing I'm becoming interested in is the lightness of touch - and the flamboyance of prose - that we find in the Confessions. From the way that the text suspends itself teasingly above the very genre of the confession ('guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge' (p.2), he claims) to the way it is shot through with Greek and Latin references, de Quincey initially occupies a position of textual and linguistic control. One dimension of this mastery is irony. Although he poses his own personal experience as an alternate authority to the contemporary medical discourse around opium, he does so with characteristic humour: 'if you eat a good deal of [opium], most probably you must - do what is particularly disagreeable to any man of regular habits, viz. die' (p.40). Equally, he both asserts a certain profundity to his drug experiences as well as sceptically acknowledging more mundane realities, as when he describes his chemist as both 'in sympathy with the rainy Sunday...dull and stupid' as well as 'an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself' (p.38). The text never really lets opium become too heroic, despite his assertion that it is the hero of the narrative.

All this playfulness in the text seems, to me, to reflect the way that de Quincey is asserting his own control over the opium reverie itself. There is a paradox in every drug, or at least a kind of twisting logical spiral, insofar as intoxication may begin by stripping away social inhibitions and barriers (in vino veritas) but concludes in inducing a false self, founded on chemical modifications of mental states. De Quincey identifies the geometry of this paradox when he argues wine begins by 'brighten[ing] and intensify[ing] the consciousness' but 'beyond a certain point...volatilize[s] and...disperse[s] the intellectual energies' (p.41). De Quincey's philosophical claims for opium are based on his ability to resist the negative phase: an opium-eater can control their own intoxication, so that the phantasmic states induced by the drug remain in a harmony, legislative and aesthetic, with the real self. As he asserts, 'wine robs a man of his self-possession: opium greatly invigorates it' (p.40).

However, if de Quincey's textual mastery mirrors his pharmacological mastery, there is of course a state in which the harmonious manipulation of 'real' and 'induced' forms of consciousness falls apart, and when the phantasms and false-states of intoxication begin to colonise the 'true' self. This is addiction: the phase explored in the 'Pains of Opium' section. It is, tellingly given the analogy between text and drug, at this stage that de Quincey seems subject to, rather than subject of, language, since he is reduced to editor of a disjointed and temporally confused series of notes. It is also the section where dreams become important: that is, the moment when the unconscious begins to exercise its haunting effect on the conscious; where trauma, paranoia and guilt begin to bite into the will; and where phantasmic experiences blur with and against reality. Control has been lost.

I want to gesture at one further thing in conclusion. One of his most terrifying dreams is an Orientalist (and indeed racist) nightmare, where he is overcome by the archaic rituals and practices of the East: 'the mere antiquity of Asiatic things' is an 'unimaginable horror' (p.73). There are many ways of reading this section. However, the terror of being swallowed up by the ancient, by what is perceived as primitive: is this not a terror at the origin of culture? And is not 'culture' - the construction and reproduction of artificial modes of life - the oldest and most fundamental 'drug' of all? What is culture ('institutions, histories, modes of faith', p.73) but the manipulation of the communal body of 'natural' drives and instincts, in the same way that opium or alcohol is the manipulation of the individual, biological body? That would be the most fundamental addiction of all.

Kadare/Kafka: Concreteness and Absurdity

2011-11-12T22:31:00.000Z

Having returned from a trip to Albania in September, perhaps the strangest and least-known corner of Europe, I read a novel in a handsome Vintage edition I had picked up in Tirana by Ismail Kadare, the country's most famous writer. As I read it, I became subtly but insistently conscious of what I thought might be echoes of Kafka's The Castle. I hesitated because I have no idea whether the dialogue I was perceiving was conscious or purely something that happened to scratch against my memory of studying Kafka at MA level, but when I found Kadare's Broken April slots next to Kafka on my bookshelf, I felt serendipity at work (and as I google the two names, I find that I am hardly the only one to awaken to the comparison).

Like Kafka's nightmarish village, ruled over by the inscrutable authority and impassable bureaucracy of the Castle, the world depicted in Broken April - that of the binding blood feuds of the Albanian mountains - is haunting and disorientating. Enigmatic figures, bearing the black armband of those entangled in the demands of the Kanun, or revenge code, shuffle along desolate mountain roads. Gjorg, the main character, is one such condemned man. Realising the violent and the nonviolent part of the codes are inextricable, mutually reinforcing and hence in the last instance indistinguishable, he comes to describe himself 'as if trapped in bird-lime by the bloody part of the Kanun' (p. 30). He enters a surreal and sheared-off time after committing the murder required of him: the grace or truce of thirty days before the family whose son he killed are allowed to come after him.

In this month, he must go to a castle called Orok to pay the so-called blood tax, and it is here that allusions to Kafka seem unmistakeable:

Now that Gjorg caught sight of it in the distance, not believing that it was really the castle, he could not make out its shape. In the fog its silhouette seemed neither high nor low, and sometimes he thought it must be quite spread out and sometimes he thought it a compact mass....even when he was quite close, he could make out nothing distinctly. He was sure that it must be the castle and he was certain that it was nor...Its appearance changed as he approached (p. 54)

This is very similar to a passage in The Castle. And when we discover a bureaucratic apparatchik at the heart of Orok who is responsible for overseeing the blood ledger, coldly recording the unbroken chain of killings from 1611 to the present, we are certainly in Kafkaesque territory. The horror is reinforced by a kind of dark comedy: the bureaucrat Ukacierra fears that the revenge code is waning, and as it is his financial and administrative 'department' he frets and panics: one day, only a single killing happens, skimming desperately close to no killings at all: 'it would have been the first day of its kind - a blank - in a century, perhaps during two, three, five centuries...at the very idea that such a day might come about, Mark was terror-stricken. And to imagine that it just might have happened' (p.139). His is the overwrought panic of every office middle-manager forced to run their eyes over a spreadsheet.

Yet, if Kadare's world is filled with a strange, dark claustrophobia borrowed from Kafka's, there is a marked difference. Kadare's novel has a strictly defined geographical place (although its historical one is rather more elusive). Hungarian critic Georg Lukács famously attacked Kafka as representing the worst of bourgeois modernist excess: the notion of a tortured and fragmented individual lost in a meaningless and absurd world, and the problems of freedom faced by such an individual, was a middle-class illusion. For the Marxist Lukács, the vertigo of the estranged self caught in its own 'abstract' potentiality could only be a bourgeois anxiety: in reality, the world was not full of atomised individuals, nor was it inexplicable: rather the world was a meaningful totality, that is, the totality of capitalist brutality which linked all individuals together into a single economic system. Such a system provided rather more finite pathways, so-called 'concrete potentiality' Yet the interesting thing about Kadare's Kafka-tinged world is that it is not a world of abstract potentiality, but concrete potentiality. It is a distinctly Albanian world, rooted in real custom, social forms, historical context.

A genuine Kulla (tower of refuge) in Northern Albania
which I was able to visit.

What does this mean? A simple reading would simply say that Kadare is saying that the real existential terror(ism) lies in the real world. The 20th century possesses a horror equal to any philosopher's nightmare. Yet I think there is something more at stake, an issue which I have been discussing - fascinatingly - with two of my excellent third-year seminars at NUI Maynooth. The Kanun system does possess a certain Kafkaesque irrationality, and characters note this in this novel itself: 'the concept of "the guest", like every great idea, carried with it not only its sublime aspect but its absurd aspect too' (p. 88). It is highlighted by using outsiders to look in, from the outside, on the blood code: especially in the shape of Bessian, an academic from Tirana. But the very concrete context of the Albanian mountain culture is also the context of meaning. Gjorg himself, early on, argues that whilst 'life outside the whirlpool of blood might perhaps be more peaceful, by the same token it would be even more dull and meaningless...clans that were in the blood feud lived in a different order of days and seasons, accompanied as it were by an inner tremor; the people were more handsome, and the young men were in favour with the women' (p. 34).

The lesson here, I think, is that when Kadare locates Kafkaesque madness within a society, a culture, and a law he is also willing to acknowledge these things as sites of meaning. By moving his existentialist novel inside the terms of a very specific national and historical culture - Albania - he is asserting that meaning and absurdity, freedom and determinism, inhere in the same world. The kind of existential dilemma that Lukács sees in Kafka (which might, I hasten to add, be accused of being a rather unfair misreading of The Castle) is one which sees existence as a problem which can be conceived in a purely abstract realm: beyond any actual culture or history. Broken April, by contrast, very definitely locates an existential dilemma within the thrownness of an actual, concrete individual. Gjorg has nationality. He has culture, he has a historical position. It is the locus of his freedom, but also the trajectory that propel him to his own death. It is freedom and unfreedom wrapped in one enigmatic tangle.

All spaces of freedom are orientated by laws of one sort or another, explicit or implicit, and if the centre of those laws is enquired into too deeply, then it shall reveal itself as absurd. Yet laws must be set, and a centre must be held. Any culture, and its anthropological rules, can be seen as absurd from outside: but there is no absolute outside of culture, absurdity is only relative. There is no Archimedean position. This is, I feel, why Kadare evokes a certain Kafkaesque tone in his work: to show both the grandeur and the almost pathetic savagery of the Kanun, alongside each other, because of each other. The heart of the blood code is the source for meaning and rational order in the Albanian society of that time and place: but precisely as such it is the dark site for its irrationality - for any order will confess its own irrationality, its own terror even, if pressed hard enough. The 'inner tremor' felt by Gjorg is the lived experience of this duality, this paradox.

October Notes and Thoughts

2011-11-05T16:46:00.000Z

Some random notes and thoughts:

1. The poetics of the diaphanous (embers, washes of light,evanescence, the aerial) in Shelley. How related to the poetics of the veil? Ifthe veil is a negation – a visible mark of the invisible – then what is thediaphanous? The invisibility of the visible? A gesture of pure light – not excess of light perhaps, not anaesthetics of incandescence – but a gesture at the conditions of possibility ofthe visible itself. Looking at the sky on a summer day: one can see the lightthat would frame objects, but no objectivity itself. The object withdraws, butnot in any negative theological or sublime sense.

Ruskin on water, the aerial and Turner.

2. Derrida on the suspension of reference (cf. the ‘poetic’function in Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism, the eclipse of themessage by the medium):

the hesitations of the ‘veil’, the ‘flight’, ‘the leap’, asthey condense down toward the point of an idea or of a dancer’s toe…are always,in addition, descriptions/inscriptions of the structure and movement ofthe literary textile, a ‘hesitation’ turning into writing. In folding it backupon itself, the text thus parts (with) reference, spreads it like a V,a gap that pivots on its point, a dancer, flower, or Idea (Dissemination, p. 239)

How long isreference suspended in poetic language? Is this a question of speed, ofvelocity, of duration: what are the bounds of such a continuum? On the onehand, the ideal or perfect suspension of reference for the entire act ofreading (what of after-effect?): not necessarily a text of pure signifier, buta parabolic or asymptotic skimming over meaning. Barthesian? Or, actualparalysis of reference. Looking at a painting and facing the withdrawal ofmeaning, the aesthetic reaction of silence, of not-being-able-to-say. Mystified,‘struck dumb’, bewitched. On the other, could there be a poetic text, poeticbecause it is draws the reader fasterthan reference, than meaning, than instrumentality? What would such a text looklike?

Is narrative primarily a function of reference (storytelling,fable, moral) or of poetics?

3. Sometimes, thinking about responding to a line or imageseems a work of weightlessness. Slow reading. In an academic culture whichprivileges an ever-expanding set of measurable outputs and ‘achievables’, whathappens when I feel, fundamentally, I can’tread a single line, even a single word, of Keats, when I struggle over language that resists - that resists any attempt to enframe it, which resists to the point of spiralling away.

Landscape and Counterscape

2011-10-18T17:27:00.001+01:00

Jacqueline Labbe's work on Charlotte Smith is truly excellent, and I've always found it among the most lucid and agile writing on female Romantic literature. Lecturing on her 1807 (posthumous) text Beachy Head this week, and thinking about its many voices and voiced positions, therefore, it was reassuring to read Labbe suggesting 'in this poem Smith preserves a persona reliant on a multiplied sense of self; characterized by a keen awareness of the suitability of voice, tone, self-construction, self-placement'.* As I was already thinking about Beachy Head in terms of pastoral, and then in terms of the eighteenth-century prospect poem, what began to coalesce in my head was something in terms of position, genre and landscape.

Smith's assertive opening - 'on thy stupendous summit, rock sublime!...I would recline' - claims immediately the visual authority of the prospect poem: a form, often interleaved with the sublime, which surveys a landscape in a panoramic fashion and exploits this position for meditative purposes. A familiar eighteenth-century genre, Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' had given the mode a Romantic twist. Yet, what is interesting is a repeated gesture which, I would be tempted to argue, dissolves the perceptual power of the prospect. As Smith scans the illuminated world before her, she comes up against a series of moments which mark sensation passing towards the imperceptible: the tiny creases of the sea caressed by a slight breeze, the 'dubious spot' of a trading ship passing over the horizon, the falling of the light, and 'the skiff, faintly discern'd awhile, / Then lost in shadow'. Curiously, Smith always turns her visual scene to the textural, and the aural - the bleating of sheep, the murmur of the ebb tide, the busy hum of waves among the rocks, the interrupting cry of a sea-snipe - as if relinquishing the primacy of the one sense, sight, which she dominates so utterly from her cliff-top seat Despite the claiming of the rhetorical and literal ground, then, Beachy Head seems to always trace a path from the sublime to the barely-there: the Romantic infinite to the Romantic infinitesimal.

It is after darkness has rhetorically closed in that Smith turns to another register of interpreting landscape, not unrelated to the prospect poem: the historical meditation. Once more figured from a position of elevation and authority - 'contemplation here, / High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit, / And bid recording Memory unfold' - the poem now articulates a confident fifty line passage tracing the landscape's historical significance from the 8th Century to the present day. However, this mode finds itself undercut later in the text when Smith turns to two elements of the landscape that resist history in different ways. Anonymous tombs in the landscape promise a certain 'nothingness' and absence of memory: the nihilism implicit in the 'lapse of Time', but also, in a sense, lapsed time. Even more archaic, and more unhistorical, are the 'strange and foreign forms' of fossils. These are truly primordial - 'did this range of chalky mountains, once / Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves / Swell'd fathomless?' - and open a nonhuman history far vaster than the political meta-narrative Smith earlier employed.

Whether in the mode of prospect poem or historical meditation, then, I would argue Smith both advances readings of landscape based on genre-positions, but also circumscribes them, evoking horizons both literal and metaphorical that delimit their possibility and range. Arguably, a third mode insistently plays amongst the spaces of prospect and meditation, and that is pastoral. Evoking her writerly persona from the wildly successful Elegiac Sonnets, a landscape of rustic artlessness and rural nooks is never very far away, the quite literal 'reverse angle' to the prospect genre:

Haunts of my youth!
Scenes of fond day dreams, I behold ye yet!
Where 'twas so pleasant by thy northernslopes
To climb the winding sheep-path, aided oft
By scatter'd thorns: whose spiny branchesbore
Small woolly tufts, spoils of the vagrantlamb
There seeking shelter from the noon-day sun;
And pleasant, seated on the short soft turf

This mode often makes itself felt precisely at moments when the other registers are under pressure - 'How gladly the reflecting mind returns / To simple scenes of peace and industry' - but that does not mean it is unproblematic itself. In fact, surveying the scenes of work which permeate the landscape, Smith concludes almost from the very outset that this pastoral must include an element of counter-pastoral: 'scenes all unlike the poet's fabling dreams / Describing Arcady'. Hard labour, criminality and suffering - as well as the shadow of wider geographies, be that the city or continental war - show Smith cannot attempt straight pastoral. Indeed, she marks a textual distance between herself and her most 'elegiac' character, the stranger, who himself seems to dissolve, caught halfway between reality and a community's tales and memories:

In silence, gliding like a ghost
He vanish'd! Lost among the deepening gloom -
But near once ancient tree, whose wreathed roots
Form'd a rude couch, love-songs and scatter'd rhymes,
Unfinish'd sentences, or half erased,
And rhapsodies like this, were sometimes found -

Now, what does all this mean? We have, I would argue, two to three different modes of landscape poetry, each of which interrupt both themselves, and each other. Neither prospect poem, nor historical meditation, nor pastoral, can give us landscape - and each inscribes its own deconstruction (or, if I could be permitted, counter-scape). In the vanishing point or the aural panorama, in the anonymity of the tomb or the archaic space of the fossils, in the labour of anti-pastoral or the ghostly disappearance of the melancholic youth, we see figures which trace the limit of each mode. They all mimic the explicit claim, made halfway through the poem, that the varied and variable world of sea and air and land around Beachy Head itself mock 'the Poet and the Painter's utmost art'. In a poem of shifting modes, the last and starkest counterscape comes, perhaps, with the extensive annotations: a rich second voice, of geological, botanical and historical knowledge, observation upon observation, commentary upon commentary. Not only a performance of female intellectual attainment (which it is), the intervention of this counterpoint text, this second 'I', is the most fundamental interruption of all. It dislocates poetry from itself, and forecloses the possibility of a landscape unified under poetic mimesis. Every view has a reverse angle, and there is something beyond, under or invisible to every glance. In a context where the poet's eye so often assumed a prospect of metaphysical vantage (Wordsworth, Coleridge, even P.B. Shelley at times) let alone the assurance of the eighteenth-century prospect poem, this continually self-interrupting, mobile poem is perhaps Smith's finest.

* Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), p. 144.

The Location of Pleasure in Sidney's Defence

2011-10-11T17:35:00.000+01:00

Recently been reading Sidney's Defence of Poesy as part of a foundation course on poetry and history. It all seemed so simple at the time: a grand tour through some of the great historical manifestos which defined poetry's place in their cultures (Sidney, Pope, Shelley, Pound), starting with the Renaissance 'sugar-coated pill' theory of literature. To teach and delight! What could be easier?

Sadly, as is frequently the case, these theoretical texts are noticeably more complex when you root around outside their quotability. I've done my best to wrench the Defence into a self-consistent and relatively easy shape for the first-year undergraduate lecture, but - for myself - the terms wouldn't settle into a straightforward pattern. Perhaps because I did spend a bit of the early summer thinking of pleasure and utility in Shakespeare's sonnets (this is probably the best, or at least most coherent, of my four stabs at reading), I was particularly interested in the mobile location of pleasure in Sidney's argument.

Now, pleasure and the ability to move plays a crucial role in letting poetry force a claim above both history and philosophy. With a radical reversal, the discipline of literature - which at one point Sidney worries has no 'object' at all - suddenly encompasses the very highest object: human self-knowledge. The weakness of philosophy is that it trades in the abstract and general: it is possessed of what the Defence terms a 'sullen gravity'. The historian, by contrast, can offer particulars that engage and move the reader: tremendous events and charismatic figures who 'put the learner's hand to the lute'. Poetry, however, does both: its images have the intellectual grandeur of philosophical concepts (Achilles' courage is the very essence of the ethical notion) but which 'strike, pierce...[and] possess' us as if they were real. One might be tempted to think Sidney is advocating a dualistic notion of poetry, then, where literature combines the knowledge of the universal with the pleasure of the particular.

However, this is clearly not so. As Sidney turns to show how the poet rivals the historian, once again it is a question of motion and inertia. Whilst philosophy was maimed by its own 'gravity', history is shackled to the inanity and chaos of what actually exists: 'the historian, bound to tell things as things were, cannot be liberal'. History is 'captive to the truth of a foolish world'. Xenephon surpasses the historians (who write about the same topic) since he can provide us with exaggerated and fantastical accounts: he can move. Suddenly, then, the location of pleasure has shifted. Against the abstractions of philosophy, it was the concreteness of the particular thing that moved us. Juxtaposed with the account of particular things given by history, it is the idealism and perfection of the concept that moves us. Sidney's apology for poetry is mobile and circular: pleasure alternately does and does not reside in the particular and the general.

Fair enough, one might respond. This is precisely the reconciliation that is supposedly unique to the poetic image (it has the force of a real thing, but the depth of a philosophical concept), and which Sidney pursues. The specific pleasure of poetry lies in the combination. As such, we have the renowned sugar-coated pill effect. Poetry teaches us, but it moves or delights us as it does so. Early on, Sidney asserts that both philosophers and historiographers have always had recourse to the 'passport of poetry' in gilding their texts. Poetry makes this permanent and essential: 'a speaking Picture, with this end to teach and delight'.

However, I'm still not happy. Where is the location of the pleasure? On the one hand, it looks as if pleasure is just what Derrida would call a supplement. As such, poetry is a disguised proposition (the pill) which has been articulated in images (the sugar-coating). Poetry would cleave to an inside/outside distinction which Sidney explicitly describes in talking of Plato: 'though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin...and beauty depended most of poetry'. However, if poetry's ability to move us is simply the skin which illuminates a proposition, and the pleasure is located 'outside', we must interrogate the nature of this proposition, and its relationship to pleasure. Is pleasure just a happy coincidence, or is it intrinsic to the nature of the 'speaking Picture'? (One way of considering this is to consider whether we could ever conceive of a proposition which was particular and general, but was purely ratiocinative and did not move us).

This comes to the surface when Sidney closes his Defence by engaging with Plato's famous exiling of the poets from his ideal commonwealth, the Republic. Sidney's response is interesting. He claims that whilst Plato nominally condemns poets because they create images, shadows, dissimulations - in short, they lie - this is a misplaced criticism, because no poet ever claims to be telling the truth: 'for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth'. This, to me, is deeply troubling for Sidney's thesis and goes right back to that anxiety that poetry has no real object (in the way that astronomy has the stars as its object, medicine the human body, and so forth). Of course, this is all part of the strangeness of literary language, and the epistemological status of fictions. But what interests me here is by voiding 'affirmation' from poetry, Sidney does disruptive things to the inside/outside and knowledge/pleasure binaries and hierarchies. How can knowledge have priority over pleasure, if Sidney denies a poet ever affirms any truth?

Poetic propositions are not affirmations; they are not - strictly speaking - truths. Why? The answer is because they are images or fictions: they refer neither to concepts, nor to things, but to a constructed fiction which combines the two (as above). They do not - and cannot - exist in reality, only in the languages of artworks. This, for me, is okay: I am happy with this strange entity, the speaking picture or poetic image. But, what is the act of creating the poetic image, the particular/general hybrid? Well, it is the crafting of fictions, the work of the imagination, experiments in reality - it is a kind of play. As such, I would argue, it is a kind of pleasure. Therefore, we cannot simply imagine an artwork as a cold proposition sitting hidden 'inside' a pleasurable shell: these weird propositions, these fictions or images, are forms of play and thus of pleasure. Pleasure is 'inside' as well as 'outside'. Pleasure goes all the way down into the heart of the poetic.

Arguably, this is the way to untangle the affirmationless affirmation that Sidney evokes in his dispute with Plato: it is to understand that the artwork makes gestures that look like propositions, that mirror the form and look of assertions, but actually have no content. However, that would take us way beyond Sidney and the Renaissance, and to Kant's profound theory of the beautiful, and his account of play and pleasure, in the Critique of Judgement. And that is, definitely, for another day.

Hiatus

2011-10-11T16:03:00.000+01:00

It has been several months since I've posted anything. There's a few good reasons for that: I've been enjoying my first full summer in Dublin, working on a chapter about Keats and have just finished a 10,000 word article on John Donne and the body. I've also been to Albania!

However, I hope to be up-and-running again. I also see that Google have overhauled the whole blogspot.com interface, so I've given Maddalo a shiny new look.

Note on Shakespeare's Sonnet 4: Life

2011-07-07T22:30:00.008+01:00

Naturally, I don't think I'm ever going to complete this little series, but when I have time...

Vnthrifty louelinesse why dost thou spend,
Vpon thy selfe thy beauties legacy?
Natures bequest giues nothing but doth lend,
And being franck she lends to those are free:
Then beautious nigard why doost thou abuse,
The bountious largesse giuen thee to giue?
Profitles vserer why doost thou vse
So great a summe of summes yet can'st not liue?
For hauing traffike with thy selfe alone,
Thou of thy selfe thy sweet selfe dost deceaue,
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable Audit can'st thou leaue?
Thy vnus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee,
Which vsed liues th'executor to be.

Now, this sonnet sort of does what I implicitly critiqued when thinking about registers in sonnet 2. It makes an appeal, under the sign of the symbolic order (propriety, law, family), for desire and beauty to be absorbed into an economic register. Yet, partly because I think I've been a little harsh on childbirth (and a little generous to narcissism!) and partly because I think this sonnet does something subtly different, I'd like to advance a different kind of reading.

Obviously, the appeal is elaborated routed through a series of economic motifs: legacy, profit, usury, trade, audit and inheritance. And, once more, the argument is enforced through an exquisite structural touch: the A rhymes in both quatrains set up crucial oppositions (lend vs. spend and abuse vs. use), whereas the B rhymes push the reader towards intensified and deepened definitions (a 'legacy' must be 'free', or generous; to 'give' is to 'live').

Yet, whilst Shakespeare foregrounds purely economic terms, I can't help see this as having a strong anti-economic drift under the surface, condemning the calculations of narcissism in the name of the gift-character of love. We could perhaps read 'Natures bequest giues nothing but doth lend' as a disciplinary line, warning the addressee that life and vivacity and beauty come with responsibility. Yet, such economic austerity seems at odds with a recurrent gesture towards a nature that does not calculate. Line 4 suggests that nature gives to those that give away in turn. A vocabulary of excess runs through the centre of the sonnet: 'bountious largesse' and 'a summe of summes'. We might then read that third line as saying nature lends - generously, it lends us life itself - but of course that gift is a loan, since we must return it: we must die. And death - this 'loan' - overturns all economics.

Despite the rhetoric of wills and executors at the very sonnet, does not the line 'unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee' suggest the destruction of any calculability? If life is a quantity, it is a quantity that must be spent, and spent exorbitantly, since 'traffic' with oneself is vanity itself in the face of a life that must end: an usury that will turn no profit, as line 7 insists. To my mind, despite the hint at recompense in the very final line, this sonnet does not play so heavily on the child as a figure for maintaining value and existence: rather the child is a figure for an offering.

Nature gives life, and life must be spent with the same gorgeous generosity as it is given (or lent...) As such, I would read say that although this sonnet uses an economic vocabulary, it privileges - at a different level, perhaps slightly against the grain even - life as a profoundly uneconomic activity: movement outwards, love, friendship, service, creativity, desire. On the one hand, the audit that the young man might give would be weak if he did not have a child, since he could have done more (purely economic logic here). On the other hand, death makes nonsense of all audits, and the very possibility of such - for any life that has not been spent well (in both senses), can never be recovered.

Note on Shakespeare's Sonnet 3: Images

2011-07-04T14:45:00.009+01:00

Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest,
Now is the time that face should forme an other,
Whose fresh repaire if now thou not renewest,
Thou doo'st beguile the world, vnblesse some mother.
For where is she so faire whose vn-eard wombe
Disdaines the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tombe,
Of his selfe loue to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mothers glasse and she in thee
Calls backe the louely Aprill of her prime,
So thou through windowes of thine age shalt see,
Dispight of wrinkles this thy goulden time.
But if thou liue remembred not to be,
Die single and thine Image dies with thee.

This sonnet brings out all my deep-rooted Derridean tendencies, and this is a fairly basic reading along those lines. As both the first and last lines evoke the relationship between self and image, the différance between the two seems most obviously at stake.

The opening quatrain establishes that although the young man's beauty, confirmed by the reflection in the mirror, currently grounds a secure self-identity, that repetition ("I am that beautiful image", as it were) is fragile - as confirmed by the vewest/renewest A rhymes. Over time, what one views (the beautiful face, the image) will not renew an identity: in fact, the image currently seen in the mirror will slide towards a kind of counterfeit, once which has tricked or beguiled the world. Because of the permanent logic of the procreation sonnets (the duty of beauty is to continue beauty through reproduction), it is 'time that face should forme an other'.

In fact, throughout the octave, the self is recurrently threatened with vacancy and emptiness unless it should inscribe itself in reproduction. The male face in the mirror, as I mentioned, becomes a beguiling counterfeit; the young woman evoked in lines 4-7 is blank and fallow until her womb (echoing interestingly with 'tombe') is marked with sexual 'tillage'; and the movement of 'self loue', far from substantiating the self, concludes in the very opposite of life if it does not move outwards. The self thus requires its own double to make it concrete. A self without a child is a self condemned to the negative.

However, I think things are more interesting than this. It is, somewhat weirdly, the face in the mirror (i.e. the image) that is addressed ('tell the face thou vewest...that face should forme'). Why demand the mirror-image procreate, rather than the young man himself? Similarly, posterity, the key term at the very moment of the volta, seems to have a double sense: both fatherhood and lineage, but also remembrance and reputation. The clear distinction between selves and images of selves seems to be not entirely secure. Does one reproduce in order to double one's own (concrete, physical, biological) self, or the image of one's own self (social position, name, memory?)

This becomes even more curious when we turn to the sestet. Let us recall the imperative of procreation: the self that does not double itself is insubstantial (a fleeting mirror-image, an unploughed field). Faced with time's passing, the demand is to secure one's own stable identity in 'an other', a child. Yet, in evoking children in the sestet, Shakespeare seems to reverse the logic. The young man is 'thy mothers glasse' - i.e. just a reflection, or image - which recalls a plenitude ('the louely Aprill of her prime'). Equally, the young man's envisaged heir is also a kind of window (a framed image?) through which the young man can see a recollection of 'this thy goulden time'. The very time - youth - that in the octave seemed so fragile is now a seam of rich identity.

But that is surely just the logic of reproduction, and the mutual grounding in a relationship between self and other. The young man guarantees his own image in the being of a child, but in turn the child becomes an image that recalls the being of the young man. Each side of the binary is alternately image and original. It is a classical deconstructive double-bind. What Shakespeare's sonnet exposes, I think, is the pattern of deferrals that operate around self-identity and images. Without images and doublings, the self would indeed be unexpressed and empty, but each image is in turn a kind of vacancy, 'merely' an image which must always gesture elsewhere. For instance, the young man is his mother's glass, and his own child shall be his (is this hypothetical heir then an image of an image, a glass within a glass?) What we end up with is a play of mirroring far more complex and proliferating than that simple circuit evoked in lines 1 and 14. The solid self, always desired, always grounded only provisionally, seems to slip away, as beguiling as any briefly caught reflection.

Note on Shakespeare's Sonnet 2: Beauty

2011-06-30T23:33:00.007+01:00

The madness continues.

When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow,
And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field,
Thy youthes proud liuery so gaz'd on now,
Wil be a totter'd weed of smal worth held:
Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies;
To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise.
How much more praise deseru'd thy beauties vse,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Proouing his beautie by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art ould,
And see thy blood warme when thou feel'st it could.

I'm not sure I have anything singularly original to say about this sonnet, but I'm still interested in the exorbitant register of beauty, the aesthetic and the erotic. The question, I think, is what kind of experience is 'beauty'? What kind of value does it have? What kind of temporality does it have? (I've written on the latter, the intertwining of time and desire before, in relation to Sappho). Can we understand beauty in terms of other sets of values? Or is it an experience to be indulged within a lawless intimacy, perhaps with a certain recklessness related to the snatched or seized moment? As D.H. Lawrence puts it, with particular aptness to this sonnet, in one of his 'rose' poems from Look! We Have Come Through!:

How will you have it? - the rose is all in all
Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?
The sharp begetting, or the child begot?

Is the 'time' of beauty ultimately a kind of staccato un-time, in the last analysis, the orgasm? Is the 'sense' of beauty, despite the repeated attempts of philosophical aesthetics to legislate it (for Kant, beauty is the very lawfulness or harmony of the faculties in concentrated form), an excess or senselessness?

This is the problem traced in the octave. The very superficiality of beauty - traumatised or vitiated by depth, be it the lines of aged flesh or the 'deepe sunken eyes' - is a difficulty within the sonnet's own logic, which I think very much resists and strives to overturn beauty's untranslatability into other terms. It wants to make that pure surface mean something more. It is interesting that the volta (line 8) qualifies two aesthetic experiences (eating and praise) with practices of reason (shame and thrift). In the sestet, the register of beauty is continually absorbed into something else. The aesthetic-erotic is to be brought under the sway of the pragmatic ('beauties vse'), the calculable ('sum my count') and even the epistemological or juridical ('proouing his beauty').

However, does not the fairness of the child implies a different kind of 'love' to the fairness of the young man. The couplet, concluding on the basis of the economic practicality that will preserve the beauty of the 'sharp begetting', claims to resolve a paradox, making one feel new when one is old, and warming the blood of the young man when age may make it cold. Yet, to come over all Lawrentian for an instant, is not beauty and the sharing of beauty that constitutes the erotic nothing else but the irrational rush of blood in all its warmth? Such warmth would mean nothing without juxtaposition. Such delicious irrationality would mean nothing without opposition. In the face of beauty and its demand, perhaps cool rationality and care for time must admit their incomensurability:

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
(John Donne, 'The Sun Rising', ll.9-10)

Note on Shakespeare's Sonnet 1: Desire

2011-06-29T23:59:00.015+01:00

I have a rather absurd idea, which is to use this blog to write a short commentary on every one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Unfortunately, there are 154 of them - and I can't help but believe this is an ambition which is really a displacement activity as I am singularly failing to make headway on a chapter I am writing about Keats and secular prayer.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I had a careful read of the first sonnet:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heire might beare his memory:
But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes,
Feed'st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell,
Making a famine where aboundance lies,
Thy selfe thy foe, to thy sweet selfe too cruell:
Thou that art now the worlds fresh ornament,
And only herauld to the gaudy spring,
Within thine owne bud buriest thy content,
And tender chorle makst wast in niggarding:
Pitty the world, or else this glutton be,
To eate the worlds due, by the graue and thee

On a basic level, it's a fairly straightforward procreation sonnet, addressed to the young man. The addressee owes it both to his own beauty (which will fade) and to the world (which is subject to cycles of life and death) to have a 'tender heire' and continue a 'memory' of himself in a child. It fits a solid Jakobsonite analysis, in terms of its exquisite structural balance - as indeed a sonnet about continuity might be expected to do. The three four-line units each progress a step of the argument, end with a colon (lines 4, 8, and 12) before the rhetorically pleading final couplet. The sonnet is bisected by two lines of paradox which sum up Shakespeare's argument: the young man makes famine where abundance should be (line 7) and is thus his own worst and cruellest enemy (line 8). The rhymes, as nearly always, function with semantic grace: death is to be countered with living on (die/memory), the young man's rich potential for outward life has been foreclosed by a refusal of movement (spring/niggarding), and of course the couplet throws in the common be/thee rhyme to posit, as so often, an existential choice (i.e. of narcissism or self-consuming gluttony, ultimately an option to be tested in the mouth of the grave).

Yet I am interested in a certain shadow or remainder cast across this sonnet, which I think can be unfolded via the very 'desire' introduced in first line. There is actually a disjunction, I think, contained in that first quatrain: the young man is said to owe procreation, as I suggested above, to both the world and his own beauty. The first logic is broadly moral or perhaps 'natural' in a sense of natural law ('as the riper should by time decrease'); the second logic is more aesthetic or erotic: a rose that shall, fantastically, not die, a desire enacted, in particular, at only the 'fairest creatures'. Are they really the same part of the same compass of reasons?

What is at stake in the sonnet is obviously the young man's self-absorption - the narcissism or self-contraction emblematised in his 'owne bright eyes', and which Shakespeare argues against. The poem contends that procreation is a duty which must break this narcissism. Yet, particularly when we have a male poet addressing a young man, is the imperative evoked by his beauty really the same as the supposed debt or 'due' owed to nature and the world?

The concentrated point, the entire topos of the second quatrain, are the young man's eyes. They are sites of eroticism and cruelty, and Shakespeare dislikes that their gaze remains inward. The motif is interesting. Quite apart from being a standard trope of courtly love poetry, it evokes Narcissus gazing into his own reflection, and thus positions Shakespeare has his forlorn lover, Echo. Like Echo, Shakespeare is frustrated in his desires. The self-contained subjectivity, which the poem attempts to figure as paradoxical, self-harming and hence pathological ('thy selfe thy foe') is an involution of self which prevents the young man being unfolded as an 'ornament' or poetic object (surely not functional in a strictly biological sense?) for the poet's gaze. The affectionate, almost playful address to the 'tender chorle' and the image of closed bud seems, to me, to imply a register of seduction as if, in the manner of all courtly love poetry, Shakespeare was attempting to 'unclose' the reluctant and chaste bud of his beloved. All this is rather different to simply saying: bring yourself out of yourself, you owe it to nature and the world (to have a child). It is more intimate by far.

At this point, I suppose I have a choice: one can go to the aesthetic (the young man as poetic object) or the homoerotic (the young man as sexual object) ends of a continuum. But in either case, I think the self-absorption of the young man is not only an affront to the natural (social?) law that demands procreation in the face of time's realities, as through the sonnet's most explicit themes. It is, more subtly, an affront to Shakespeare's desire: his desire for the young man's beauty to be properly unfolded before his gaze. This desire, intensely personal, perhaps bound up in a different and more fantastic temporality to that of the pragmatics of the passing seasons ('beauties Rose might never die'), is, I think, a very different appeal. Shakespeare wants the young man to open up, not only because he believes he should consider becoming a father, but because he wants to see those eyes turned towards him - as a man, or a poet, or both. Not unrelated here, surely, is the fact that, as the sequence will later explore, Shakespeare can offer a different kind of posterity to that provided by biology and childbirth: the immortality of language and of art. In this posterity, of course, the erotics - unlike that of procreation - may slide away from the strict heteronormativity of spring's law. There is a desire here which seems on the edge of the reasons of what is due to the world alone.

Heidegger, Technology, Nature

2011-06-09T11:49:00.012+01:00

I had a somewhat strange and disturbing idea to offer a third-year undergraduate seminar on Heidegger's 'The Question Concerning Technology'. Having re-read it, I'm not so sure: it's probably too tricky, and my desire to go through it virtually line by line wouldn't work in Maynooth's frugal one hour seminar format. However, it propelled me into thinking about, well, technology...obviously.

I like the essay for two reasons, which enfold each other. Firstly, I would argue, it doesn't imply the 'crisis hypothesis' of technology: that is, that the modern - whether in the shape of industrial production or Facebook - represents a radical and potentially traumatic break from the past. Heidegger does not reiterate, at least at the deep and structural level of his argument, the well-worn trope that technology is the alienation of the human, and that we have passed from the authentic to the inauthentic due to steam-power/factories/global capital flow or the printing-press/mass culture/the internet. To chalk 'The Question Concerning Technology' up to such a jejune Romanticism would be, I think, a misreading; as Heidegger himself says, we are in no way confined:

to a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil. Quite to the contrary, when we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim.

However, neither is the essay blind to the fact that something has shifted in a technological age, and that there is a danger present - hanging over our ecological attitudes to nature and our ethical attitudes to ourselves.

The path Heidegger tracks between these two alternatives works, I think, because he does not become entangled in the surface of technology, but rather sees industrial (and post-industrial?) technology as part of a longer phenomenological history of techne, which he defines as 'reveal[ing] whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another...what is decisive in techne does not at all lie in making and manipulating...it is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth'. Technology is a certain, very specific mode of relating to beings, of evoking objects in our perceptual and conceptual universe, of bring presences to presence. It is a certain hold on the world. 'Presencing' of the world is, in itself, value-neutral: objects must have some way of appearing to us as presences, and a technological presence is simply one way of presencing among others. It is not intrinsically bad, or vicious, or inauthentic when compared to other domains of presencing. Hence, if Heidegger talks of the 'danger' of technology, it is not merely because technological presences are technological, despite the closeness of the essay's rhetoric at times to ecological or Marxist concepts, as when it thinks about the way that nature is 'challenged' violently by our scientific and technological powers, (the instrumentalization of things, the reduction of nature to a 'standing reserve', the quantification of human existence etc.).

What Heidegger identifies as existential risk is not that nature can be enframed, measured and extracted per se, but that this calculable set of presences may harden to the point where we don't realise we created them, and where we fail to see there are other modes of bringing objects and worlds to presence:

enframing [through the technological attitude] does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing...They no longer even let their own fundamental characteristic appear, namely, this revealing as such.

Fundamentally, technology is a way of relating to objects: and for Heidegger, the danger is not so much in the exact nature of the relating, as in the fact that we may not see it as a relation at all, but just as the way things are: a fixed and immutable strife between the human and the nonhuman. It is then a question of contingency rather than alienation.

Perhaps I can make myself clearer by concluding with a remark on nature and technology. Technology is, of course, usually opposed to nature as its binary opposite (along with language, society, culture, politics). This is where alienation comes in: too much technology, and we become estranged as human beings from the natural. However, I think what the Heideggerian notion of 'presencing' can do is to overturn that understanding: technology is, in fact, a way of relating to nature; indeed, in a tenable sense, natural objects are produced (revealed, presenced) by technology. The river is 'presenced' differently depending on whether it is bridged by a ford, interrupted by a waterwheel or harnessed by a hydroelectric dam. Nature, as a totality, shifts signification as the historical 'object' of technology. That is not to say that nature is purely a cultural or social category, but rather that technology is the mode of experiencing and expression the tension between the human and nature (cf. some of my comments on tension and humanism just recently). And this is why we should never be taken in by some recherché Romanticism about inauthenticity and technology. Despite the distinctive historical shifts in the last few centuries, nature has always been 'presenced' at a certain distance from us, certainly as long as there has been human activity, and it is always presenced through a certain technics (which is, I'd contend, why we can never 'lose' nature through technology, since we always, in fact, 'find' nature through 'technology' in its most open sense).

So much discussion of technology, of a Romantic vein, operates with a kind of manu-centric or hand-centred worldview. To simplify, industrial production is bad and dehumanised and craft production is good and natural. Yet, arguably, there are no authentic or inauthentic modes of production in themselves. The earliest of technics, the initial use of the hand as a tool, from the very first scraping of flint, presences nature at a distance from the human - in essence, just as much as and no differently from the steam engine or the silicon chip. (Indeed, nature is surely pointless and semantically void as a category unless there is this distance: for, without tension against something else, nature simply signifies 'the complete set of entities in the world'.) In this way, technology creates a relationship to nature, and thus the history of technology produces the history of nature. We have never experienced or presenced 'raw' nature: certainly not under the sign of any form of production and reproduction. And, as Marx reminds us, that is the very sign of the human; that is, contingency and history.

Humanism as Alibi

2011-05-26T00:03:00.007+01:00

I remember when I was an Oxford undergraduate, I did an 6000 word essay on Adorno and this fellow described it as not dialectical enough, whilst a series of essays on Derrida were described by the tutor who pretty much saved me for English Literature as too dialectical

Excitingly, I got to use exactly the latter criticism on one of my own students this week: it is quite hard to take apart first-class essays, after all - since I only give a First if an undergraduate has surprised me, made me think again about something. Anyway, the issue was the relationship between scientific naturalism and humanism: that is, between the framework of a purely empirical, material universe and a framework of value based on the human. At first, they seem sweetly suited: arch-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins describe themselves regularly as humanists, and indeed the rejection of theism, the embrace of human reason/potential and the privileging of science seem to form a natural constellation.

I'm not sure things are so simple. In the same way that theology can be blunt foreclosure of the question of God, and empiricism can be the most weakly reductionist path back to the reassuring conclusions of 'common sense', humanism frequently tries to crush the recalcitrant difficulty of the human into submission (Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' beautiful on this). Humanism began, in the Italian Renaissance, as an attempt to square a circle: to understand the divine spark that Christianity postulated at the heart of the fury and mire of mortal clay. It is probably not coincidental that of the greatest humanists, one was a cynic (Machiavelli) and one was an ironist (Erasmus).

In fact, I think Christianity is fundamentally an anti-humanism: not for any of the childish reasons a Dawkins or a Hitchens might suggest, but because it makes an ethical demand which is impossible, through an impossible metaphysics. It fundamentally says: you are not who you should be; in a sense, you are not who you are, you fall short of your essence. It took Reformed theology, Calvin and Luther, to reaffirm this tragic anti-humanism.

Perhaps, in the last analysis, this is a response to the question of evil.

If Renaissance Humanism tried to reconcile Christianity's emphatic anti-humanism with a flourishing series of human social and aesthetic achievements, then Enlightenment humanism may well have done the same thing with the self-destructive epistemology of the eighteenth-century and Romanticism. The more we tried to secure who we were, and what we knew, the more it seemed that those elements were chaotic and stranger than we had at first thought. Locke advances human thought under a straightforwardly liberal banner, Hume shows where it leads, Kant makes the only (and best) response possible, German philosophy convulses, Hegel tries to reinforce Kant, but we end up with Nietzsche.

This kind of tradition of difficulty, to me, is why the invocation of humanism now - as part of a keen secularism - is highly problematic. The more I think about it, the more I think there has only been on truly serious atheist thinker (Nieztsche). The media portrays naturalism and humanism as two sides of a single secular coin, but they cannot be easily defined as such. Humanism is a response, as it has nearly always been, which closes down the difficulty of the human: that is, the fraught relationship of our species to other species, to God, to thought, to matter, to our own bodies, to freedom, to society, to history, to fate... If there is a definition of the 'human', it lies more profoundly in the relationships with these other elements than any genetic 'essence'. Yet, of course, relationships are dynamic.

Naturalism, of the strict kind, is actually an austere proposition. What if all polvalent registers of experience (ethical, aesthetic, political, erotic) can be reduced to a single plane? A 'humanist' may proclaim that they can appreciate beauty, but what if that response can be deconstructed to a bare physiological one ? What if evolutionary biology were to decide that something - rape, say, or periodic genocide - were an evolutionarily profitable strategy? What language would naturalism have to contextualise those things, to resist their consequences? The language would, without doubt, be humanism. And yet, it seems here that humanism is merely an alibi to retain certain aspects of experience that we unwilling to give up. In the last instance, it is maybe a case of whether we see that humanist meta-question - the question of the Good - as being something deducible from natural existence, or something that lies precisely in our tense ability to transcend natural existence.

I would not want to push this too far. Otherwise I too would be taking up an alibi - one of the recurrent modern criticisms of humanism is its inability to incorporate, say, animals, into its ethical calculus. But that is my point. For us, the animal is a question. It a question because we are irresolvably neither animal nor not-animal; neither 'nature' but clearly not transcendent over nature. There are fantastically hard - but interesting - dialogues that need to be pursued - our relationship to a web of deterministic natural causes, our relationship to the drives of our own bodies, and our relationship to the ecosystem around us, to name but three. Yet, these dialogues occur, or can only be driven forward through tension. Humanism, I would argue, whether it turns us into little gods or capacious animals, erases this tension. It pretends the questions have been answered. Who we are is simple, and thus the observer of the world can be taken for granted.

Long live anti-humanism.

Irony and Capitalism

2011-05-13T19:50:00.014+01:00

This is something I wanted to write about after attending a very interesting lecture from a month ago on Douglas Coupland and cultures of work. As is the case with most of everything this month, it's rather disconnected.

One of the things that came up in the lecture was so-called 'cappuccino resistance' (at least I think that's what he called it; maybe it was decaffeinated resistance; coffee was definitely involved somewhere) - that is, workers who find certain corporate cultures absurd, but carry them out anyway. One major example, and the topic of the speaker's paper, was the kind of buzzword-suffused, 'transformational' management training cultures, so effectively skewered in a first series episode of The Office. Yet, I think we could expand the scope considerably outwards: not only to other aspects of corporate life (where the disjunct between the ideal and the real is often fairly radical, particularly when there is something to be branded and sold), but to life under a late capitalist society generally. Thinking this through chimed with something I'd pondered before, which was the kind of language used in advertising (for example, given my first monograph was on the sublime, I'm particularly sensitive to the odd places the word turns up in modern culture...) The satirical Tesco mobile ad here (sadly I can't find which agency conceived the campaign) works so well because vocabularies that would have once been found in aesthetics, politics and religion are most frequently found in, somewhat bathetically, commodity culture. Hints of transcendence and ecstasy are inscribed in everything from an iPad to a beer: cue sweeping guitar soundtrack, cue arty cinematography.

So far, so postmodern. Of course, no-one takes this entirely seriously, barring perhaps the most self-unaware Apple aficionado. Yet we continue to consume, often taking relatively limited detours - if we are going to be cynical - into other 'brands' such as green, local or fair-trade: unaware, or perhaps unwilling to be aware, of how deep our implication and imbrication in global/corporate economic processes is. (I don't mean to slight ethical consumption, or the real effects and benefits it can have, merely to note that positioning ethics as a matter of individual consumer choice naturally leaves systematic or structural damage wreaked by the market relatively untouched, ideologically and materially.)

And I suppose that is what I was thinking about. Let us suppose we (or 'some'?) relate to capitalism with a certain degree of irony: whether it is working in organisations where we are fully aware we are carrying out ambiguous or void processes and yet we continue to enact those processes, or acknowledging commodities through our consumption even though we understand their cultural 'presentation' is depressingly hollow. Irony can be, however, either stable or unstable. Classically, the notion is that one ironizes something by referring to some unspoken, but shared assumption: in short, let us laugh at this state-of-affairs, by mocking it from an assumed position 'over here'. We don't have to explicitly state where we are coming from, because it's implicit. On the other hand, 'unstable' irony takes away this stable, assumed ground. We undercut 'x', but all 'x's across the system are equally vulnerable. We don't offer any stable values in the place of the subverted ones: it's more anarchic than that.

I can't help but think stable irony slips relentlessly into unstable as we stand in relation to capital. If we note consciously we are being sold a simulacrum of transcendence through some high-end advert for Adidas or Samsung, then we should perhaps also note that - as an overall culture - we barely believe more convincingly in any other kind of transcendence. The stability of our initial ironies ('of course I'm anti-corporate, I just love Apple stuff because it's so shiny') would hence be defensive, veiling an unstable irony in which we may as well be consuming sincerely, since we don't - again as an overall culture - possess any values significantly richer than the bare parodies delivered to us in the shape of commodity.

What this comes down to is the imaginative penury of late capitalism. Again, I don't want to slight real efforts at social justice which can and do have an effect. Nor do I actually mind that I am economically determined in the last analysis, or that my subject position is laid out as if in advance: that, as I have written before, is just implicit in the very definition of subjectivity. What appears to be tragic is that the space in which we think 'otherwise' to capitalism - envisage an alternative mode of social and economic organisation - seems to be vanishing, at least in the mainstream cultural imaginary. That threatening foreclosure of alterity is one, I think, which very definitely calls for a deep philosophy of irony - in the vein of Diogenes, Erasmus or Byron. Perhaps even Marx.

Keats, Mnemosyne, Time

2011-05-10T01:14:00.012+01:00

Just been re-reading Keats's two Hyperion poems.

I'm not going to question that the Odes are Keats's most perfect poems (although I can never decide whether 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or 'To Autumn' is my favourite), but I think the Hyperion fragments are possibly his most profound texts. In particular, for reasons connected with my research, I've been thinking about Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. In both texts, Keats positions an encounter with Mnemosyne as central. I've also been thinking about time, and the past, a lot recently, so here's a few loosely connected observations, based around a reading of 'Hyperion', rather than 'The Fall of Hyperion'.

Firstly, the young Apollo thinks of Mnemosyne as elusive and fugitive. He does not recognise her, and yet he recognises her:

How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?
Or hath that antique mien and robed form
Mov'd in these vales invisible till now?
Sure I have heard those vestments sweeping o'er
The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone
In cool mid-forest.
(ll.49-54)

She appears as if in a half-remembered dream, or as the wind through the trees. I think this is absolutely appropriate, insofar as time is a strange, uncanny thing. It is not coincidence that time is at once the most obvious and the most undefinable parameter in the philosophical canon, from Heraclitus to Heidegger. If Mnemosyne can stand as a figure for time, then she is veiled (as she will be more literally in 'The Fall of Hyperion') because time is ironically un-experienceable as it is passing. The present is infinitesimally small. Time is what creates us, but we do not notice its work, since the self which is subtly shaped and reshaped by its agency is almost imperceptible. We alter almost every moment, and yet we do not perceive alteration. Hence, time possesses a kind of secrecy. Yet it also possess necessity.

The second thing that struck me was the melancholy of time. Mnemosyne is a tragic figure first and foremost. Again, this comes through with redoubled force in 'Fall', but even in 'Hyperion', no sooner is the goddesses' name breathed in prayer, than Apollo laments: 'dark, dark / And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes' (ll.85-6). What is interesting about the encounter with memory, in both poems, is the sadness of time: not because of transience per se (which is arguably the leitmotif of the Odes, as I have argued before) but rather because of time's irreversibility. Every moment that passes is a moment forlorn. In Apollo's 'aching ignorance' (l.107) on the shores of desire, I think we feel Keats's sense of the weight of time. When we are young, perhaps, we possess an illusion counterpart to that youthful illusion of immortality: the faith in the absolute ability to fashion ourselves. Time offers a different lesson: it is not just that the past passes, but that it remains; that we carry around ghosts with us, that new strata are laid inexorably upon us, that - ethically speaking - things that can never be taken back or revoked are nonetheless suffered. Time itself has a lived density.

The first two points would, quite correctly, begin to position human life - Da-sein - as a radical passivity. Time, almost unconsciously, inscribes a being that we always-already fall into, inherit, absorb or receive. If we are our own histories (as we are), the fact is that we are delivered to ourself in moments we barely perceived or understood. Once inscribed, those moments are not easily erased. However, particularly in 'Hyperion', Keats also offers the possibility of rupture and new beginnings, perfectly expressed through Apollo's apotheosis. If time offers a tragic passivity, it also offers a revolutionary spontaneity, where the unexpected seizes us, overturns us, reinvents us:

wild commotions shook him, and made flush
All the immortal fairness of his limbs...
with fierce convulse,
Die into life
(ll.124-5, 129-30)

There is the possibility, immanent within the very definition of time, to begin: futurity demands it. If the past is inexorable, the present is inchoate.

Yet, what Keats realises, I think, is the same thing that Heidegger would formulate philosophically a century later: that this possibility of the new must involve an involved encounter with time and the past up until now: indeed, a kind of impossible encounter. By understanding that you are an existential function of time, you may, just possibly, create an opening within and from all those pasts, all those histories, all those memories, that have gone to create the 'you': that now turns and faces the sublime figure of time, the goddess, and stares her in the face. The alternative is to believe in a freedom that no-one (barring maybe the eighteen year old!) possesses. In short, it is only by coming to terms with the ways you have been created as a self, by your own subtle and uncontainable pasts, that you may - out of those materials - transcend or move on from them. You can only 'begin' from a point that has already been given to you.

This, for me, is the profundity in the fact that Keats positions an encounter with Mnemosyne - with memory - as the purest condition for existentiality. Time is sorrow, but is also freedom, and hence beauty: 'How beautiful, if sorrow had not made / Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self' (ll.35-6). We cannot take anything back. But it is in that acknowledgement that we are not bound by our past selves, and that the most beautiful and narrow stroke can be made between them and the present.

A Note on Language

2011-05-06T00:42:00.002+01:00

Arbitrary jotting:

There seems to be a rough assumption that language is opposed to the world. The relay of sign and referent implicated in representation severs the re- from the presence. Critics and theorists who absorb themselves in analyses of language flirt with irrelevance; writers whose work obsesses with words are less concrete, less real somehow, then those who obsess about things like politics.

This doesn't seem right to me. If there is such a thing as a pre-linguistic 'thing', it would petrify us with its uncanniness. We exist in language. As Heidegger says in his 'Letter on Humanism', language is the house of Being. We dwell among words, breathe them as easily as air. It is the space of our every thought; it is perhaps the space of our most fundamental and most profound creativity, and thus freedom, insofar as language is an instrument of play, of figure and invention. It is also the medium of intersubjectivity, and thus of our most human existence, as we carry ourselves towards and with others across language.

Nor is it an empty, abstract phenomenon: this seems to me a profound metaphysical error. Language is always material: it is the timbre of a voice, the feel of breath, the weight of a book or the weightlessness of a screen. Language is also a material style: the way things are said - their velocity, their rhythm, their tone - is always inscribed and the dream of language as some kind of calculus of pure reference, of pure symbolicity, is fantastically false. As Kristeva points out, the semiotic - 'the various material supports susceptible to semiotiziation: voice, gesture, colors. Phonic (later phonemic), kinetic or chromatic units and differences' (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 28) - always underwrites the symbolic.

As such, reflection on language is as concrete (as immediate, as vital, as political) as reflection on place, class, nature or anything else. A poet like Stephane Mallarmé, for instance, is not ethereal or distanced because he is drawn in by language, but - in his exquisite, delicate meditations on it, on the word, on silence, on the white space - deeply engaged with the vivid materiality of how we think, love, hate, mourn, whisper, laugh, confide, proclaim and, well, live:

(Where invisible ash pursued
In every tiny grain
Is going to fall again;
Hence my disquietude.
('A Fan', ll.9-12)

Decrying language as non-presence only makes sense in a binary metaphysics that has faith in presence (a version of a point made here) outside language in the first place. Language as close to us as our own flesh; as close to us as the breath that it, after all, is: as textured, as affective, as erotic.

Difficulty and Pedagogy

2011-05-04T19:43:00.008+01:00

I've been thinking a little bit about pedagogy recently, partially because this is the time of year that the feedback questionnaires come flooding in, and partially because of this article in The Guardian.

One thing that strikes me is that there is an increasing demand for university teaching to include a certain element, embodied by the 'good' lecturer, of being 'engaging' and 'accessible': indeed, to some extent, for the classes to be 'fun' or even 'easy'. Delivery is privileged over content, and there is the underlying assumption that the lecturer must work to gain his or her students' attention.

Of course, I don't think good modules simply teach themselves, and I try to think insistently about style, and about form, and about bringing my own horizon of understanding into contact with an undergraduate one - which involves bridging historical difficulty (why is this text important and interesting?) or formal difficulty (what does this text even mean and why should I care?) On the other hand, there must come a point in education where the onus passes to the student.

For a start, at degree level, I do believe that we should be selecting students who have an authentic and deep interest in the subject. They should be able to find something from any period of literature that interests them, and they should be willing to give texts patience, time and careful reading: if we have students who, for instance, say they do not like poetry, I'm a little worried. A university should not have to earn its students' attention: students should bring interest and commitment and passion to their subject.

Secondly, there is a pedagogical question here. For me, the best seminar is unpredictable, and its unpredictability comes from being driven by observations and questions and interpretations from the students. All authentic learning - as opposed to mere memorisation and schematisation - must come from the unpredictability of singular encounters. However, if lecturers are driven to make topics more and more accessible and digestible, then one not only ends up simplifying them to the point of distortion, but creating easily followed, purely passive lines of understanding. One ends up with a pedagogy which is suitable more for a school than a university: that is, a lecturer spoon-feeding an undergraduate audience which expects and even demands spoon-feeding, telling them what Marlowe or Tennyson or Woolf or Foucault means.

And this leads on to my third, and most important (I think) point, which is an intellectual one. If literature and those things that lie on its borders (philosophy, theory, history, media, politics) are to have any point, then they cannot be easily, swiftly and unproblematically digested. Thought is difficult. Critique is difficult. Ideas are difficult. But therein lies their value: if an English Literature degree does not end up re-orientating a certain understanding of the world - of overturning the commonplaces that present themselves inexorably as 'common-sense' - then it is nothing. The more universities are driven to 'engage', to 'appeal', and to render 'accessible', then the more they are nullifying thought itself. Texts should involve an interpretative excess which draws you back to their ambiguities; theories should cut the ground out from under your feet. We would be teaching only banalities if students could simply absorb them exhaustively in a single hour.

Of course, many students will not immediately have the patience for this: they will want things to be given to them, as easily as possible: as if knowledge was a commodity or a consumable. Yet this is where pedagogy comes in: not to simplify and hence bend to this impatience (which will eventually destroy any gap of critique between the university and the world and histories it attempts to understand), but rather to create a space for some patience to emerge - and in its wake, for thought, for understanding, even for difficulty and ambiguity.

Sadly, the fact is that the current direction in education policy seems to work in precisely the opposite way. We cannot really complain that students demand that thought should be consumed as easily as anything else they buy (a burger, a haircut, a GAP year experience) when we make them buy it, and foreground not intellectual relationships within the university, but economic ones. Installing 'value-for-money' and other quantified measures as central leads inevitably yet tragically to a scenario where university is not considered a privilege, nor a site of intellectual challenge or dialogue, but a transaction and an entitlement.

A Note on Constructs

2011-04-26T14:32:00.012+01:00

I've been rather snowed in over the last few weeks, finishing off teaching and writing the first chapter of my new book. There's something I want to write - provoked by a lecture I attended on 'Knowledge Work, Self and Belabourment' - on irony and capitalism, but in the meantime, there's a couple of random musings which don't really justify a full entry, but which have intrigued me over the last few weeks.

It's a commonplace in literary studies and associated disciplines that phenomena are socially and ideologically mediated. This means that experiences are historically conditioned: not just the obvious ones (notions of legitimacy and authority differing between a 13th century monarchy and a contemporary democracy, for instance), but most interestingly also things that we may be tempted to say are universal (love, privacy, the body, truth, even the self).

However, the endpoint of this is that perpetual historicising treads a fine line between profundity and banality. Saying triumphantly that something is socially constructed means very little when everything is socially constructed: we must resist the temptation to say that such constructions are fictions or inauthentic or alienating (and so forth), at least insofar as those terms may be said to imply their opposites. Such judgements would only make sense outside the horizon of constriction - of language or history - and, as Louis Althusser admits, we can no more conceive of a world without ideology than we can imagine breathing without oxygen.

For instance, in an analysis of subjectivity constructed under capitalism, the only point of interest should not be that it is constructed, but rather that it occurs under capitalism. The political and ethical dimension should be inscribed through the latter fact, not the former.

From Hunger to Mysticism: Crace's Quarantine

2011-04-09T22:21:00.027+01:00

I just want to return to a question that got raised at the Paris conference I attended last week, which was to do with the 'eye' of the heart (inner eye, third eye etc.) in religious mysticism. The question is, I think, too large to answer, but roughly concerned the privileged cultural place of the heart - cardiocentrism, we might say. It is an organ which seemingly exceeds its restricted place: not only is it metonymically promiscuous (being able to stand in for an array of different sensations and effects), but it can be exchanged with a beloved, perceive things that the external sense organs cannot, and it even has a language and a voice. Potentially this is historical accident - Aristotle, apparently, believed the heart rather than the brain to be the 'seat' of the self, and that error echoed down the ages - but I suppose probing that would require an anthropology of the heart to match the various, excellent historical studies (e.g. Kirstie Blair's book on Victorian hearts).

However, the question got me thinking about how it is natural that we try to find an emblematic site, a convergent point, for that mysterious inside life of the body. Our brain is filled with a world of thought; the five senses concern and face outwards to the external world, but there is also a plane of feeling - of yearning, of aches, of kicks, of surges, of inertia - which is purely inside, concealed beneath veils of skin. How do we interpret this concave life? It is one of the aspects of the self most enigmatic, most resistant to interpretation, and it is this which arguably produces explicative narratives such as those surrounding the heart, and indeed other organs. Firstly, it was not until the Renaissance that science (not least because of advances in anatomy and dissection) finally began to decipher the biology of the human body: it was, for instance, only in 1649 that something as fundamental as the circulation of the blood was understood. It was hence fertile territory for speculative ideas to take hold. Secondly, there is an aporia which certainly stood until the invention of the x-ray: the array of inner feeling is nothing short of 'life' itself, and it occurs across sites (the heart, the stomach, the liver, the lungs, the muscles) which were fully known even to the ancients, but those organs could not be observed without destroying life itself. Once you open up the 'inside' of the body, you kill it, and the very thing you wish to study disappears. Thirdly, as we exist, the pulse of existence remains secret: the interiority represented by the concave existence of the flesh is uncanny even to us who are 'it', deeper than our depths, untouchable and invisible. There is a profound inaccessibility to that part of our life which is, in some ways, the closest to us. Sensation runs across and through it, but it is 'outside', though through being on the 'inner' edge of, any of our sense organs. This gives it a fascinating role in human subjectivity. The heart, as Jean-Luc Nancy observes in a neat paradox, can be touched by another, even though we cannot touch it ourselves. Islam notes, in a piece of beautiful phenomenology, that God lies closer to you than your own jugular vein (50:16).

It was whilst thinking about this that a reading of Jim Crace's Quarantine - a novel I am teaching at NUI Maynooth - sprang to mind (I have written about Crace before, here and here). Quarantine is about a group of people who retreat into the desert to fast for forty days and nights, including a 'realist' depiction of Jesus Christ. Throughout, Crace is lovingly attentive to the details of their flesh: both in the effects of fasting (hunger, exhaustion, thirst) but also in the situations that relate them to Quarantine in the first place. Two of the pilgrims fast and pray because of bodily conditions (Aphas has cancer, Marta is supposed barren although it is heavily implied that her husband is infertile), whilst Musa the merchant has a fever and his wife, Miri, is heavily pregnant. So much of the prose is dedicated to explicating their embodied experience: the hard, alien presence of the cancer; the agony of the empty womb, the weight of the full one; the hot, oven-like fever scorching the chest.

One thing that Crace does (and I have mentioned his ability to do this before, in a blog on The Gift of Stones) is to invent utterly convincing folk narratives. In Quarantine, many of them are about, precisely, bodies. Musa's fever is a demon, who must be lured out with prayer. The absence in Marta's womb becomes concrete through Crace's images - loom, dovecote, tomb - whilst she subjects it to folk-medicine. The whole community of spiritual practice - from fasting to healing - is permeated by a concern for negotiating and engaging the inside of the flesh. Where the novel goes with this is clear. As the narrative advances, we begin to understand religion itself as increasingly entwined with a certain 'god of the gaps' hypothesis, where the inner biological life is the gap: Marta imposes a pattern on the sufferings of the body where 'ill-health could be taken as a portent' (p.114), and then Jesus, more extensively, shadows the corporeal with spiritual meanings - interpreting cloudy urine as impurity, muscular pain as a mortification, nakedness as exposure and sacrifice, sleep as the dark embrace of temptation. The culmination of such a theme would indict mysticism as the reflex of a biology that has been deliberately strained to breaking point, where religion actively and deliberately colonises the inner life of the body in order to twist it towards a supposed spiritual insight. Jesus, in Quarantine, is (on one reading at least) simply ill; his final visions merely the misunderstood product of a deranged physiology.

As such, I think we can suggest Quarantine wants to expose religion, sceptically, as a phenomena that prospers from the unknowability of the body - both explaining, responding to, and appropriating bodily states which lack full natural explanations. (In the background, I think, is the question that Crace explores in Being Dead, that is the absolute unknowability of physical death). In lieu of the 'correct' scientific understanding of its processes, we have narratives and myths and significations projected into the flesh's recesses and interiors. Having said that, without wishing to spoil the very end of Quarantine, Crace does leave us with something miraculous, something which throws a purely transparent understanding of the body as biological process into some ambiguous relief. And I think this is appropriate too: for to return to my points above about the 'concave' life, they are not entirely clarified, I would argue, by science alone (particularly the last one). For to do so would be to eschew phenomenology and qualia, and reduce the body to an object of scientific observation and classification alone. As I have argued before, I don't think that's entirely adequate.

Nostalgia and the Other

2011-04-06T21:53:00.013+01:00

'How could the desire for presence let itself be destroyed? It is desire itself’ (Jacques Derrida)

Beginning with a student question from a few weeks ago about the boundaries between social necessity and personal choice (you're asking the wrong question, I helpfully answered...), I've been thinking about issues of identity and alienation, and the way that individual subjectivity and its freedoms are enclosed within trajectories which pre-exist it - what Adrienne Rich describes as a kind of music which we start in media res:

we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born
('Transcendental Étude')

In particular, I'm thinking about how the site which traversed by those movements (i.e. the self, the 'I') is experienced differently, according to, for instance, ethnicity or gender.

The issue came home to me listening to papers (and giving my own) at a recent conference on religion in Paris. Many of the papers, particularly those on the 19th and 20th centuries, were concerned with the loss of faith, and the relationship of 'modern' poets to a spiritual tradition that still claimed them, that still held them, but which was falling apart or even gone. This is a question of nostalgia as a cultural imperative. What does one do with the past? Can one reorientate the languages of the past? Can one dispense with them? Can one invent new languages? If one does invent new languages, does one find them consciously or unconsciously mirroring their voided forerunners? When one tries to live without the old languages, does one feel oneself haunted by their very absence? The value of signifiers like 'prayer' or 'faith' or even 'God' is disorientating in an era when 'doubt', as Gary Kuchar noted, has a fundamentally different semantics to the same concept from, say, the 13th century.

In short, even for those of us writing and speaking about sceptical or atheist poets, Christianity was this overarching presence: the difficulty of a lost transcendence and spectrality of a two thousand year old tradition of concepts and images that is both a ground and a non-ground for the present. Yet, amongst all these elegiac notes, there was one paper which struck, to me, a different perspective. A reading of blasphemy in Caribbean poetry by Monica Manolachi seemed, to some extent, to sidestep the ghostly hold of tradition. This made sense, for the poetry was infused not only with Christianity, but also with Hinduism, and with the native obeah. No one tradition could have an elegiac hold on these poems, for they existed within a hybrid space, a confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe, in which all those traditions - or, arguably, none - 'belonged' to them in the sense that a Keats, Tennyson, Hardy or Beckett might be said to be haunted by a belonging appropriate to Christianity.

In short, nostalgia is not necessarily an appropriate mode for the Other. This takes me back to Rich. A position which comes through particularly fiercely in her work is that history and tradition has continually effaced women: 'a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear' ('Diving into the Wreck'). The more profound point, sometimes perhaps missed by undergraduates, is that evoked by the 'Transcendental Étude' above, and elsewhere: whilst history may be patriarchal, every woman is nonetheless thrown by, and into, that history, spoken by that tradition, among those myths: 'I never chose this place / yet I am of it now' ('The Fact of a Doorframe'). Yet that non-chosen place, once it is realised and exposed that it is non-chosen, is like the hybridity of the Caribbean poets. It forecloses any straightforward nostalgia for origin, for tradition, for myth. This is your history, saith patriarchy - but we have written it on your behalf. As someone like de Beauvoir painstakingly analyses in The Second Sex, the 'place' of woman in such a mythos or narrative is an unenviable array of supplementarity, lack, monstrosity, irrelevance and invisibility. How can you be nostalgic for one's place, when one's place is dis-placement?

As such the interpretative position of the Other's subjectivity to itself is distinct and different. There can be no longing for the presence of myth, when myth always refused them presence. Rich understands this instinctively. The necessary response for her, is a creative resistance and opposition (indeed, a kind of blasphemy) which seizes hold of a different historical line. A creative re-visioning of the past - based on the imaginative excavation of lost and wounded female experience - must always be maintained: a superb point crystallised, once again I'm afraid, by a student rather than me! Equally, new languages for the present and future must be invented, even though, as it is put in 'Twenty One Love Poems', this means a certain abyss or desert as one leaps from the identities that have always been dictated and prescribed: 'we're out in a country that has no language...wondering if the water will hold out'.

Of course, poetry of 'the centre' also may try to form new languages. High Modernism, for instance, yearns so often to be Romanticism, to reclaim that lost shred of transcendence and seeks ways and words for doing so. But those new languages are always haunted - by what they have left behind, and from which they are forever parted. (Yeats, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, j'accuse...) At best, as in Beckett, there can be a kind of elevated blasphemy or parody, but one that always feels still 'held' by tradition. Conversely, I would suggest, for poetry so shot through with the subject position - and the material histories - of the Other, anti-myths are so much more potent: for they have never been haunted by myth in any more than a agonistic way, for they have always been offered not identity but alienation. The Other must invent. Writing beyond, outside, under and against myth is not just an attempt to become post-mythic at a given historical juncture, but to appropriate any kind of identity at all, in the midst of a history which was never their own. Such invention, such creativity, such blasphemy need not fear any falling short before 'myth', for the all-consuming, elegiac origin was never there in the first place.

Rich reminds us of this in a quite brilliant, staccato passage from 'Transcendental Étude', which shows us the vertigo of leaving old languages is terrifying, but nevertheless nothing compared to the terror of the way that the old languages wrote 'woman' and inscribed women into lives under patriarchy which were both their own and profoundly not their own:

We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new languages, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter lonelines
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.

But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves.

To borrow a motif from Rich's poem on Marie Curie, this terror is both wound and power. Above all it is a site, traversed and implicated by myth, but which demands creativity, blasphemy and invention, and which need not bear nostalgia in doing so: for it is not the loss of myth but the losses caused by and in myth which agonise Rich's poetry.

The Conservative Artwork

2011-03-18T22:18:00.017Z

Recently, I entered into one of those unwinnable and interminable Facebook debates with a friend of a friend on the other side of the world who I have never met. She was arguing that all great art was iconoclastic and innovative. Now I felt both positions were myth. The first, I am almost certain, is false (apart from anything else, if all great art is iconoclastic, then that begs the question of what exactly the eikon is?) The second is more plausible and defensible. In a weak sense, I think it actally is true, but in a quite uninformative and uninteresting sense based on the philosophical axiom that there is no absolute repetition. For time passes, modes fade, and at the very least we should expect art to respond to the present of its creation. Even those most apparently unoriginal of modes - say, translation or imitation - 'innovate' by interpreting a 'past' in light of a contemporary context which wasn't there before. Equally, we would never - by definition - admire an artist who managed nothing outside of what had already been achieved (although, having said that, art galleries are full of paintings by the 'school' or 'studio' of X, sometimes misattributed...and yet the image is the same, and surely just as great, whether it is by Rembrandt or an imitator of Rembrandt).

Nevertheless, in the stronger sense, the proposition that all art innovates is, I would hold, unhelpful. Firstly, it is unhistorical: it fails to take account of the fact that 'originality' in the sense we understand it only emerged fully as an aesthetic value in the mid-18th Century, and that different criteria have been held throughout history (e.g. the older ideal that art must imitate nature as perfectly as possible, and thus there is only one 'original' - nature herself; or the postmodern interrogation of the possibility of innovation and originality per se). Secondly, it is reductive: there is a diversity of responses to tradition, from the revolutionary attitudes of the Futurists and Dadaists, to the assiduous respect for established forms found in neo-classicist dramatists or, say, Pope. Moreover, sometimes by innovating one actually betrays intense traditionalism (T.S. Eliot?), and sometimes by reaching into tradition, one innovates (the Pre-Raphaelites?) All this subtlety and texture threatens to be lost if we think innovation is an a priori. Finally, it is almost self-evidently insufficient as a condition of 'greatness': few people would hold that Christopher Smart is a greater poet than Thomas Gray, or Meredith's The Egoist is a greater novel than Eliot's Middlemarch, even though the former are almost certainly more innovative than the latter.

On the other hand, the discussion got me thinking sort of laterally about the difficulty of a conservative artwork. When we try to trace some functional distinction between 'art' and other forms of text and culture, we often implicitly rely on a demand that art challenges or interrogates what exists. It makes us see things like we haven't before (from the Romantic idea of a world as if it still as the dew on it, to the Russian Formalist notion of ostranenie, or estrangement). The world, objects, thoughts are broken from their carapaces by art. Marxist literary criticism often suggests that artworks expose the rigidity of conventional ideology; deconstructive literary criticism often insists that artworks rip the rigidity of conventional language. The things to which art is conceptually opposed are usually exemplifications of a standardised or received consciousness: mass culture is consumed unreflectively, propaganda attempts to reproduce regimented patterns of thought etc.

Hence, assuming art does not have some kind of Platonic essence, it seemingly must have a certain functional effect which differentiates it: and an effect of resisting an actual or desired inertia in consciousness seems frequently cited. Does this not, then, readmit the canard that art must be innovative, radical and iconoclastic? My objections still hold. The problem is that art - even apparently great art - does repeatedly reinforce the centre: even crystallising received or mainstream worldviews. A good half (at a pinch?) of literary criticism is dedicated to rooting out the inscription of ideological commonplaces - usually negative - regarding class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity in canonical works. One can make an excellent case for Shakespeare as a Tudor propagandist or Wordsworth as an apologist for conservatism (even in the early works): in short, a lot of 'great' works appear to spend time reinforcing what is, or has always, been thought.

There are a couple of options here: reducing art to mere technical expertise, for instance, or trying to collapse politics into aesthetics (i.e. reform the canon alongside 'radical' lines) or aesthetics into politics (claim art is simply a flashy wing of propaganda and incorporate literary criticism into a wider study of culture). Alternatively, one can try to come to analytic terms with the conservative artwork. I have a few final thoughts on that last possibility, inspired to some extent by the theorist I have most faith with, in these matters, Theodor Adorno.

My feeling is that the artworks are an organisation of the world according to an 'other' logic: the logic of the artwork. It is not a logic independent of ideological organisation - indeed, it reflects it and is drawn from it at all points - but the novel, poem, painting, sculpture, building, even symphony, does have a special structure. Firstly, it is a unique structure - found only within that artwork, closing an entire world unto itself - and secondly it is a dense structure - far denser, more elaborate, or inviting more elaboration, than virtually any other structure of thought or perception. We can pour over the logic and structure and architecture of an artwork in a way we would not do for comparable or equivalent events in the real world: deriving meanings, holding off meanings, comparing meanings. (A bored, sexually-frustrated French wife is merely anonymous, Madame Bovary profoundly haunts an entire epoch.) From this, four points:

1. As Adorno would note, the very fact that an 'other' logic exists, separates the artwork from the world. It also separates the artwork from the weak or merely reproductive structures of propaganda or the 'culture' industry, which try to repeat or counter-sign the world in the simplest and barest way. As such, art affirms the possibility of the 'otherwise', the utopia. Nevertheless, there are conservative utopias, and this is important to remember.

2. Of course, art can be fiercely radical and iconoclastic. The 'other' logic opens up a space of critique like no other. There is an articulate gap between the way the world is and the way the artwork is: how the one represents the other may be revolutionary, showing forgotten margins, concealed barbarity and undetected beauty. Nevertheless, as Adorno would also say, the greatest artworks are rarely the most bluntly polemic and 'radical'.

3. The reverse of (2). Art can be fiercely conservative. The 'other' logic can crystallise a way of thinking and viewing the world in a form more coherent, more elegant and more profound than everyday life. This may be an entirely received perspective - it may be institutional, sentimental, even reactionary. But it possesses the density of the aesthetic logic and structure: after encountering an artwork, there appears a surfeit of meaning, one wishes life, indeed, to cleave to the coherence of art. (Propaganda (nor the culture industry) would conceivably be unable to achieve this effect and affect.)

4. However, even conservative artworks cannot be unambiguously conservative. The thing about the density of aesthetic logic, and the intensity of the interpretative response it demands, is that there cannot be a simple, monodimensional perspective on the world. This is why radical artworks are rarely works of radical polemic alone, and why conservative artworks can often be re-read in radical ways. The signs in artworks pursue a richness of meaning: this is why they are 'deep', but also how they evoke ambiguity. An artwork - even a conservative one - will often try to include and resolve contradictions that propaganda or the culture industry would simply sidestep; artworks exist at the junctures of most ideological stress: their resolutions of the deepest problems and anxieties of their societies and cultures are often breathtaking, but they may also expose more about their worlds than they might intend.

Density (and therefore ambiguity) of the sign and structure, then, might be why conservative artworks are so powerful, but also why they still separate themselves from mere imitations or naive defences of the status quo. Such would go some way to explaining why they still are worth our attention, and may still affect us, even if we are far from the ideological positions they nominally articulate.

Feminism below the line

2011-03-06T20:38:00.028Z

Just been reading an article by Lucy Mangan in the Guardian, on International Women's Day. Although a 'weekender' article in the life/style section (for a more seriously toned piece, see this), the comments section caught my eye because it embodies so many of the standard anti-feminist arguments: founded, I would argue, on a fairly tight and repetitious circuit of errors and fallacies. Yet precisely because of their pervasiveness, I think it is worth pouring over them, for they represent the 'common sense' reactions and positions which may seem intellectually convincing but are actually logically suspect.

So, given I've been discussing feminism on the Maynooth Moodle boards recently, here's a few comments:

1. Hit a Straw (Wo)man. There's plenty of examples in the comments thread, but perhaps the most prolific caricature is the contention that feminism is some kind of man-hatred. Claims like feminism desires outright female supremacy, that it wants to maintain the benefits of patriarchy with none of the disadvantages (for some reason working in oil rigs comes up a lot in this context, as if every man - obviously! - has done that), that it is dedicated to forestalling harmonious relationships between the sexes, that it cares nothing for the problems of men, or even that Lucy Mangan is not allowed to look pretty in her photograph all fall under this category.

Strangely, being against practices and representations that discriminate against women does not necessarily commit you to any of these man-hating, man-refusing or man-fighting positions.* Some are just silly (e.g. that feminists necessarily believe that women should rule the world, or that the world would be better if they did) and some are just false (e.g. it is possible to be critical of how heterosexual desire and relationships are represented in the world, without opting out of them - just as being critical of one government, even lots of governments, does not mean you have to be an anarchist). And some are paradoxical. Whilst feminism would usually condemn militarism in any case, male deaths in wars are something often brandished by anti-feminists as 'masculine suffering' but also, somewhat bizarrely, trumpeted as something that women hypocritically refuse thus showing they don't really want equality at all... (as if politics should be dedicated to equalising suffering rather than overcoming it!)

It is also worth noting that oxymoronic beast, the 'male feminist': living proof, surely, that feminism is not man-hating. The trick here is to remember that ceasing injustice actually benefits everyone. Odd that.

* I think the deeper root of this fallacy is simply the mistaken belief that feminism is an attack on men first, rather than on the system of patriarchy; indeed, ignoring structure/system and focusing entirely on individuals as if they were somehow free of determination by social contexts is a recurrent problem in antifeminist ripostes.

2. Deny Asymmetry. Perhaps the most common response is the one that is superficially the most irrefutable. Feminism declares that it desires gender equality. Yet feminism, as its name suggests, is a woman's liberation movement. As such, it is internally contradictory. QED. This is behind all the 'what about men?" comments that say there should be an international men's day, or that feminism marginalises masculine problems like suicide or criminality and deliberately occludes others like male victims of domestic violence.

My response to this is twofold. As mentioned above, I think a 'feminist' approach can and should raise interesting analyses of masculinity under patriarchy. Those depressed young male suicides have some causes which lie firmly with gender and its intersection with economics, emotions etc. However, whilst men have problems which are gendered, this does not mean feminism should simply become 'equalism' or 'genderism'. Patriarchy is patriarchy, and it creates a condition of asymmetric privilege: the empowered and the powerless (at the extremes). One cannot pretend that men and women 'suffer' or experience their gender equally: being female remains ideologically/representationally passive or negative, and materially/economically weaker and more constricted. Any representation, statement or act exists within this context, and therefore must have its meanings and effects understood through this context.

Asymmetry may change - arguably, it is changing - but until the asymmetry and its legacies have been overturned, the anti-feminist argument that men suffer too only sees 'masculinity' and 'femininity', or 'men' and 'women', as if they were on the same level - it fails to see the structures that skew those binaries into a hierarchy.

Incidentally the old appeal that 'men and women are just different' is a weak attempt to explain away, neutralise and/or justify this asymmetry. Yes, we probably are different, but that doesn't mean the gains of the last 200 years (women's political, civil and educational rights etc.) have to stop right here: remarkably convenient if biology sanctions the ideological status quo at precisely this moment in history...

3. Divert attention. One strategy, once the asymmetric nature of gender relations becomes so apparent it cannot be denied, is to simply say 'we're doing well enough' or are 'nearly there', at least in a country like the UK or Ireland. The assumption is that we are modern liberal societies: Mangan's piece, which covered issues like street harassment and sexist humour in the media, was instantly lambasted as middle-class whinging which ignored genital mutilation and the burqa. Of course, no-one is seriously saying a wolf-whistle is as serious as a pay gap or a rape. But this diversionary move is flawed, although appearing well-meaning.

Firstly, it is logically nonsensical. The fact that greater suffering exists does not ameliorate lesser suffering, otherwise no-one would ever have any ethical complaint unless they were a torture victim in the midst of a horrendous, inhuman genocide. Secondly, it absolves all responsibility; it says - not here, there. It means one has no dirty hands. And, if we look closely, we see it is often tied up in interestingly racial and geographical assumptions. In the reaction to Mangan's piece, it was always the 'Muslims' (as if there is no difference between Lebanon and Saudia Arabia, Indonesia and Turkey, Assam State and Brick Lane) who get it again and again. As scholars have shown, there is a long historical precedent of colonial cultures asserting their own civilisation - even in the very midst of a colonising project! - by comparing their own treatment of women to that of the colonised culture. Put fundamentally, it's too easy to construct a liberal self-image which whitewashes one's own flaws by creating an ideological contrast with a demonised 'Other'. Islam currently sits prettily in this position for the West (cf. how the burqa ban has recently been used to reinforce a tottering French secular identity.)

So, there we are: feminism is man-hating, feminism actually refuses gender equality, and feminism has no more work to do in the West. These three shibboleths are arguably the most common objections to feminism - certainly the seem to recur incessantly on any kind of comments thread - but equally I think they become misconceptions that circulate and even suggest to women that they should refuse the label 'feminist'. As such, they are damaging and worth challenging.

Women and Truth

2011-03-03T22:59:00.018Z

Just been reading Adrienne Rich's essay 'Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying', and she has some very interesting and perceptive remarks on the gendering of truth:

Male honor also having something to do with killing: I could not love thee, Dear, so much/Lov’d I not Honour more (“To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars”). Women’s honor, something altogether else: virginity, chastity, fidelity to a husband. Honesty in women has not been considered important. We have been depicted as generally whimsical, deceitful, subtle, vacillating.

A man's truth is inscribed in the value of 'his word'; a woman's truth in the socio-economic value of her body and its inviolability. As such, a man's truth is positive and involved in self-realisation, it is expansive and linguistic, whilst a woman's truth is involved in denial and holding in check. In the public sphere, a man is supposed to coincide with himself (his probity, his integrity); by contrast, a woman's social role is dangerously de-stabilised by the non-coincidence of beauty (through dress, ornament and seduction). The latter can, perhaps, be explained through the 'staking' of the former truth, the staking of the body and in its honour in games of courtship.

This notion of woman's truth lying differently, in 'virginity, chastity, fidelity', is a fascinating one. For a start, it contextualises the iron narrative convention - found from Richardson to Austen to Dickens, and resisted by those like Eliot and Woolf - that a woman's virtue is the negative, based on saying 'no' - so different to the male narrative conventions of the Bildungsroman and the like which ultimately derive from the quest-narrative, the achievement, the conquest, the 'yes'.

More interestingly still for me is that it is based on an epistemology of negation. If a woman's truth-value lies in negation - the inviolablity within virginity, the renunciation within chastity, the self-control of fidelity - then this suggests a shadow-truth lying underneath the negation. The proposition ¬P (not-P) inevitably evokes P, even if only under the modality of alternative worlds (you cannot say 'there are no unicorns' unless you have the concept of a unicorn).

I think the P inscribed in ¬P in the case of women's honour is, as de Beauvoir would predict, the female body and female sexuality. That is, after all, what virginity, chastity and fidelity are deeply concerned with. There is of course the cultural option, frequently exercised during history, to deny the very possibility of P: to suggest that women have no sexuality, no erotic life. Yet even with this, female sexuality becomes a mythic P, instantiated in monstrous alternative worlds: the siren, the Medusa, the amazon. More straightforwardly, ¬P can be seen as the cultural regulation and negation of the female body on the part of a culture who both fears and needs it (for those of you who are interested, this is where Kristeva's more psychoanalytic perspective on 'negation' as the recovery of a denied semiotic in the realm of the symbolic might come in, the translation of the female body into phallologocentric Law...)

Hence, ¬P implies P. But, if so, we begin to understand the ¬P of female honour in terms of the deeper, more fundamental truth of P. So whilst a woman's virginity before marriage or fidelity during marriage is figured as her truth (in language, law and society), it is merely the derivative negation of a deeper truth (the female body, its sexuality, its desire). Indeed, one might wants to argue that just as St. Paul declares that it is the law that creates sin, it is patriarchy which creates female sexuality in its 'dangerous' and 'subersive' forms through its very proscription and prohibition.

In short, it may be impossible to culturally construct the figure of the angel without simultaneously constructing its opposite - the whore, the temptress - and raising the spectre of female sexuality as something polyvalent, mysterious and volcanic: a deeper 'truth' of woman than her honour. Of course, the husband 'claiming' the virgin in the first act of sexual intercourse can purport to have appropriated this 'truth', yet he has also unlocked the possibility of autonomous female sexuality and thus of adultery: as de Beauvoir also observes, perhaps the key anxiety of patriarchy lies with the fact that a father can never be utterly assured of paternity.

This P/¬P complex takes us, I believe, in the direction of Derrida's Spurs, where we understand how patriarchy's figure of the woman is inevitably self-deconstructing. Woman is always posited as 'outside' - not least this means she is private/inward, where man is public; and she is body, where man is soul/mind. Yet the very act of 'Othering' means that a woman's 'truth' is produced which is both powerful and yet dangerously on the outside of patriarchy. Every effort to regulate this outside - for instance, by controlling the embodied 'truth' of female sexuality with the socio-legal 'truth' of woman's honour - merely deepens the paradox, since the P always has logical priority over ¬P. As soon as she is posited within patriarchy, then, woman is twofold: she is false, she is true, and indeed her most profound 'falsehood' (her autonomous sexuality, her breach of the honour of virginity, chastity and fidelity) may also be her most profound truth.

Transcendence, Life and Gender in Tennyson's Ulysses

2011-02-11T22:42:00.010Z

It's fairly obvious that Tennyson's 'Ulysses' is a poem that hinges on irony. Is the zeal of its aging speaker - 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield' in the face of mortality - epic or misguided? Do we admire Ulysses's raging against the dying of the light or do we realise a pathos in his flaws? There are a range of possible ironies tensely underwriting and unsettling the poem's single-minded rhetoric. Firstly, it is a dramatic monologue, and that genre - particularly in its Victorian form - is fundamentally built on the particularity, and potentially the misguidedness, of the imagined voice. Secondly, it was published as a diptych with the brilliant 'Tithonus', a lyric about the futility of immortality and thus one which invites a critical dialogue to open between the two texts. And, finally, it is worth remembering that the most famous literary depiction of Ulysses's last voyage was in Dante's Commedia, where the Greek hero is condemned for the sin of overreaching ambition.

On re-reading the piece, however, one thing that leapt up at me as I considered the question of irony was, interestingly, gender. Perhaps this is because I had just been reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, where male quests and projects of the kind exemplified by Ulysses's desire not 'to rust unburnished, not to shine in use' are crucial. Early on, she mounts an analysis of the gender dichotomy in existentialist terms of life and transcendence. In early societies, she claims, women are bound somewhat passively to biology and reproduction, the bare repetition and continuance of life, whereas men articulate projects like the hunt or tool-making which open up new spheres of existence. It is no accident, she suggests, that these 'transcendences' of mere life soon accrue a sacramental character and help solidify the elevation of the male over the female: 'it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal' (p.95)*

Of course, the repetition of life ('life piled on life') and transcendences both physical ('to sail beyond the sunset') and spiritual ('to follow knowledge like a sinking star') are central to 'Ulysses'. And, for me, looking at gender can create an interesting twist on an ironic reading, revealing that the masculine spirit that attempts to define itself positively and heroically in the face of death is in fact a masculinity which is existentially sterile.

Throughout the text, the constellation of experiences surrounding the domestic, the familial and the communal are all gendered feminine - and forcefully excluded. Ulysses is ageing, and yet it is not him but images of the home ('this still hearth'), the land ('these barren crags') and the woman ('match'd with an aged wife') which are imbued with the qualities of decay or stultification. By contrast, he is merely 'an idle king' (a positive stillness, crackling with potential energy) waiting for another voyage: he hence strives to separate himself from the continuation of life which is embodied in and represented by the everyday existence of the settlement or community. This is surely because the cyclical pattern of 'hoard...sleep...feed' ultimately marks those things - the passing of the generations, reproduction and inheritance - which demand the necessity of his own death. As he sits back and surveys his world as a king, he sees the onrushing mortality he did not feel when he was the Homeric adventurer.

It is thus no surprise that Telemachus, who will carry his name and legacy forward is given short shrift, because he too is a sign that Ulysses will die. Far from seeing a kind of transcendence in the filial descent, Ulysses is offhand about his heir. The carrying on of social and political duties that he will inherit ('by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people') and Telemachus himself ('decent not to fail / In offices of tenderness') are both conspicuously feminised. The hero wants nothing to do with such soft labour: 'he works his work, I mine'.

In short, then, everything to do with settled existence and its reproduction - land, everyday consumption, basic government, the family, inheritance - is bundled as feminine and seen as a burden, a passivity, and a danger to the masculine spirit. Ulysses desires not just reproduction but novelty - not just the continuity of life, but the transcendence of adventure. Perhaps predictably, with the femininity of mere 'life piled on life' repudiated, the poem turns to male-male relationships instead. As de Beauvoir shows, it has always been institutional structures composed of men (patriarchy, homosocality) which have organised, regulated and controlled the continuity of biological life: be this the father passing his daughter to another family in the exchange of marriage, or the ownership of land (gendered feminine) by men. This is, arguably, the very origin of society as an anti-physis: culture (masculine) stands over nature (feminine). In 'Ulysses', this tendency reaches an extreme as homosociality doesn't just attempt to order and orchestrate the feminine aspects of community and continuity, but escape them. Male-male sociality breaks entirely free and seeks a space of its own: on the waves, in adventure, voyage and virile solidarity, 'one equal temper of heroic hearts'.

If, as de Beauvoir hypothesises, masculine projects like wars, raids and hunts are, existentially, an attempt to transcend mere life and biology, then Ulysses's last voyage is the absolute gambit of transcendence. Yet nature - life, in its rise and fall - will of course have its revenge. Ulysses knows he will die, and biology is already sapping the strength that underpins the project: he admits as much. There is a certain inherent absurdity about all these men setting off on a quest which has no actual object and certainly no homecoming (apart from, perhaps a little homoerotically, to Achilles).

Seeking refuge in a life of absolute masculinity without women, 'Ulysses' is a poem trapped by its own binary thinking: the feminine (nature, continuity of life, reproduction of community) versus the masculine (culture, transcendence, adventure). That, to me, is Ulysses's great error. His unwavering belief in masculinity as transcendence, as the opposite of 'life piled on life', means that the hypermasculine Ulysses ultimately has no answer to mortality, which comes at him and upon him precisely from 'life piled on life'. The masculinity of the hero, which has always successfully conquered nature, his own body and the bodies of others, is useless in the face of nature's 'return' in the form of physical weakness and death: and yet Ulysses has no other modes of behaviour.

As such, I would personally read 'Ulysses' ironically. A band of old men, desperately setting sail into the sunset, abandoning the womenfolk whose bodies remind them of their own mortality? This does not seem to be facing death, but rather remaining deliberately or obtusely ignorant of it: living out an increasingly hollow and worn image of the masculine hero and acting out familiar homosocial roles which are now, rather pathetically, attached to no actual society.

* Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997 [1949]).

18th Century Regimen and the History of Secrecy

2011-01-31T20:18:00.020Z

Two things I have been working on recently have both reminded me what an important category 'habit' was in the eighteenth century. Because of the empiricist core of the leading British psychology (more accurately and less anachronistically, a mix of philosophy, physiology and the 'science' of human nature), human consciousness was frequently considered as a construction of sense impressions, akin to an elaborate wax tablet scored with a certain calligraphy of experience. Since the order and quality of these impressions and their various modulations and modifications as they traversed the mind determined character and identity, the 'habitual' was crucial. The repetition of experiences and acts ensured weaker connections between impressions became stronger ones, with phenomena as diverse as moral dispositions or a sense of causality being secured by the so-called association of ideas.

This created a tendency in eighteenth-century 'practices' of the self for a vocabulary of regimen, exercise and discipline. If you wanted to instill a certain association of ideas, the ethic of choice was repetition; character was formed by the conscious organisation of scattered impressions into more unified ones. (This latter exercise is particularly apparent, I think, in a peculiarly eighteenth-century understanding of memory, where recollection is very much the re-collection of the parts of the self which have been disturbed by the stream of sensations: I have found this in treatises on religious devotion, and it is almost certainly present behind Wordsworth's famous 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'.)

Anyway, as I have said, two recent parts of my research have found themselves traversing the category of habit. One is the various eighteenth-century treatises, sermons, manuals (etc.) on prayer, where it is clear that a certain Anglican (non-evangelical) understanding of prayer sees it as a repetitive discipline for the soul, forming, re-forming and preserving certain relationships of the self: with itself, with God, and with the world. The other was something on Wordsworth. Rewriting the end of an article on the urban body in The Prelude, I have ended up suggesting that the city, with its incessant novelty, undoes the phenomenology of habit. It disperses the embodied mind's unity, which had been tied together through habit, exposing streams of raw sensation and movement as the base unit of perception. Wordsworth's struggle in the city is one of re-habitualization, recreating a sense of totality and a stable embodied platform for observation and reflection.

The inspiration for that last argument was David Hume's famous deconstruction of personal identity, just given an embodied twist. This really is the ghost in the machine of British empiricism. If the mind is indeed just a passive screen - a smooth wax tablet, or tabula rasa - which is then inscribed with various impressions, then what becomes of 'us'? Of the 'I'? Hume's argument is that we are, indeed, nothing: there is no permanence to the 'I', merely a constant, somewhat random and chaotic, procession of sensations and impressions. Once the habitual is challenged as a category, and without the alibis of repetition and association, then the self dissolves. We become, in Hume's words,

nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement...The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity.

It is this self-deconstructing logic of empiricism, dispersing the self when it is revealed as pure passivity, which Kant famously reacts against. However, I would like to conclude by turning to a different model of subjectivity, even reading Kant in such a tradition (rather than through his own famous philosophical categories). That tradition is the history of secrecy.

A lot of what I am doing here is indebted loosely to Foucault, whose analyses in The History of Sexuality (the second volume, 'The Use of Pleasure', in particular) themselves trace a history from a practice of regimen (the Greek disciplines of dietetics) to a practice of secrecy (the Christian confession). In a practice of secrecy, an authentic self is produced, not through a given self disciplining its own structure and form, but by a given self discovering, as it were, a new, deeper self concealed within it. Regimen - with its emphasis on repetition and form - is replaced by technologies of secrecy such as the confession, the inquisition, the meditation and the autobiography. These things interpret and thus bring to light a deep, intimate interiority which is the 'truth' of the self. This sharp turn inward is very different to practices of regimen which may always lapse into formalism (i.e. purely external performances).

My work on prayer, which is still inchoate and indeed partially secret (!), definitely wants to argue for a shift of this kind happening at a certain period in history, across certain definable religious lines. And I think it is definitely there in Romanticism too, as an alternative mode of the self, often reacting against the passivity and dissolution of subjectivity which is the risk of eighteenth-century empiricism. Even though habit remains central to a Wordsworthian poetic (both on an individual and a political level; James Chandler's 1984 study is excellent on the latter), it co-exists with the category of secrecy: think, for instance, of the Intimation Ode's 'thoughts all too deep for tears'. Coleridge, too, begins with empiricism and associationism, but ends up with a poetic 'I' riddled with hauntings and a philosophical 'I' which is encrypted as the 'echo in the finite of the infinite I AM' (Biographia Literaria). And Kant? Well, he saves subjectivity from Humean streaminess, but only by inscribing a 'transcendental I' on the far side of the visible. This silent, brooding presence, Kant argues, is the one thing that ties all our perceptions together, but, of course, as that which perceives it cannot itself be perceived.

And this, I think, is the interesting problem about practices of secrecy, and of evocations of deep interiority. Where does it stop? Depths can call to further depths, and unlike the disciplined clarity of a regimen, the practices of secrecy - as Foucault emphasises in his late work - are hermeneutic or interpretative. And hermeneutics is potentially boundless (as, indeed, one might argue one sees as confession of sin is redoubled and deepened into the confession of psychoanalysis?) Just as Kant's 'transcendental I' is phenomenologically inaccessible, or Wordsworth finds his authentic self merely an intimation, lost, like an ember, always across the edge of a horizon, all rhetorics of secrecy threatens infinite withdrawal.

It seems that to foreclose a self which finds its own absolute dispersal under the structures of regimen, that a self must bear the wound of an absolute dividedness, a relationship to itself which is indeed unbridgeable. Paradoxically, the most authentic self may be inexpressible. And what if were such a self to possess a voice? The answer must surely lie somewhere between Romans 8:26, and silence.

Community and Narrative: Jim Crace's The Gift of Stones

2011-01-21T17:26:00.008Z

Just finished another Jim Crace novel called The Gift of Stones. It's an interesting little book about a young boy in a village of stoneworkers, or knappers, who loses his arm in a raid of horsemen. Unable to join the craft economy he becomes, instead a storyteller.

By counterposing labour in a symbolically pure form - the working of obsidian and flint - to imagination, the novel quite transparently reflects on the relationship between work and storytelling. A recurrent motif, evoked by the storyteller from the spaces outside the village, is that 'the sea viewed from the clifftop is a world that's upside down. Its gulls have backs. You're looking down on wind' (p.43)* I like this: I think it captures the social truth of the aesthetic: that art is a kind of camera obscura, an image that is both free and conditioned. It reminded me of Adorno, when he says of artworks in Aesthetic Theory that 'each and every one of their elements binds them to that [empirical reality] over which, for their happiness, they must soar and back into which at every moment they threaten once again to tumble' (p.6). I also like the reflections on the way that storytelling is a kind of labour - that one can shape and chip and sculpt the lineaments of a narrative in the same way that one might an arrowhead - and on the ways and the times that the figure of the storyteller interacts with the 'normal' community.

But if storytelling is a kind of labour, then I am also interested in the subtler, reverse proposition: that labour and its communities are founded on a kind of storytelling. Or, if not storytelling, then certainly a use of language which is creative, which trembles somewhere between the poetic and the phatic functions. What I really like about Crace's work is the way that he rarely sets his novels in determinate places, but his sense of place is so intense, so concrete. His novels often create fictitious communities and locales (Baritone Bay in Being Dead, the Soap Market in Arcadia), but populate them with believable names, quirks, histories, myths, narratives, slang, sayings, and phrasings. For me, these are the surface expression of something: a language that binds, even creates, a community together and articulates its lived relation to place and history. Perhaps I mean something close to what Michel de Certeau describes in The Practice of Everyday Life as 'ordinary language': unformalisable and demotic relays, a kind of savoir-faire or practical know-how archetypally embodied in things like 'red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning'.

Crace seems to love inventing whole fictional argots of this kind. The title of the novel itself is a mytheme which expresses the uniqueness of the village, a story of origins which posits their community's special place in a wider geography:

we could not be touched because we possessed the gift of stones. If all that the outside world needed was to pound and crush and hammer like savages then any rock would do. But once they wanted more, to pierce and slice, to cut and scrape....then, they, those farmers, horseman, fishers, wrights, could not be free of us and we were safe (p.3).

The most skilled stoneworker is called Leaf, because he can work a stone to a delicate thinness. Alcohol, raw and violent, is called headspin. There seems to be reserves of folk-wisdom in the background: without release and a woman, a man's body dries inside; when a soul leaves the corpse, a hawk hovers above their hut. Sayings are woven into the texture of the novel: one is safe and thus 'as snug as poppy seeds' (p.119), a lie is 'as hollow as a wormed-out nut' (p.129). Reflections on life and work are shot through with a sharp sense that stone-knapping is the prism through which life is interpreted: it is the invariable fact, and their language bends across stone.

As I say, Crace thus gives the community a particularly vivid sense of rootedness. Yet, of course, as all the argot of the everyday is, this phatic/poetic discourse is relatively unfluid. It is the silent reserve, the stock of images and commonplaces, that allows its users to negotiate their own culture, and thus it is relatively flat, full of petrified metaphors and well-worn semantic tracks. Its creativity is only the deep-lying creativity of creating the very conditions of belonging to a place, time or people. In extreme cases, it is precisely petrifaction (of, for instance, an old wives' tale or sailors' wisdom) that is the functional aspect of stories, to ensure that knowledge - de Certeau's 'know-how' - may be passed from generation to generation. Yet, this is the issue that Crace confronts right at the end of the novel. What happens when the stories that a community unconsciously tells about itself - the names, the sayings, the argot - cease to ring true?

In the final chapters, we discover that iron-working has come, and suddenly the exquisite skills of the stone-age village have become obsolete. The acts of labour and exchange begin to become pointless, and thus so do the words that underpin them. Even Leaf becomes parodic, bound to the old ways, as he continues to work stone into now useless artefacts - but with iron tools. The one-armed storyteller, here, must come into his own. When the community's instinctive languages and narratives fail, it is up to marginal figure of the storyteller to invent a new future, new stories. They leave on an emigration with no clear horizon, led only by him. The skill which was previously a luxury, a supplement, an entertainment, now becomes central and profound.

And maybe there is something broader in that: that art must continually engage - must offer to reinvent - that deep-lying firmament of narratives, commonplaces and truths which unconsciously structure our belonging. Otherwise our communities will indeed become as cold as stone.

* Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones (London: Vintage, 1997)

A Slightly Marxist Reading of Forster's 'Maurice'

2010-12-28T14:13:00.010Z

A somewhat bizarre conjunction of reading recently: Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (a book I was supposed to read, possibily in full, for my MA, but never actually appear to have finished) and E.M. Forster's unpublished 'gay' novel, Maurice.

One thing about Adorno's aesthetics that I like is the focus on the unresolvable, the non-identical and the rift as the critical privilege of an artwork: hence, the motif of tension. For Adorno, whilst formal flawlessness is one of the great dreams of (bourgeois) art, were it to be actually achieved one would end up with a text or work that conservatively counter-signed the world 'as it is'. It is precisely because artworks cannot construct seamless worlds that we realise our world is itself not seamless.

Maurice, being a novel with a triad of lovers, involves a very obvious internal tension between two loves. The affair that Maurice begins with Clive Durham at Cambridge ends when the latter decides he is actually heterosexual, but is succeeded - after a savage interval of beautifully drawn loneliness - by a more fulfilling relationship with Clive's gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. Emotionally and ideologically, it is the tension between the representation of Clive and of Alec (in a dualistic sense that reminded me of Hardy) which seems to drive the novel. Whether the novel 'succeeds' (in a conventional sense now, rather than Adorno's) is in large part down to whether the happy ending that Forster insisted upon works - i.e. whether the first half of the narrative (the failed affair with Clive) is 'overcome' by the second (the love of Scudder).

The relationship with Clive, to me, seems to signal a homosexuality enacted, tenatively and problematically, within a certain 'tradition': that is, the tradition of university homoeroticism (found in, for instance, the intense friendship of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam portrayed in In Memoriam) and underwritten by the classical warrant of Plato. It is a love which ekes its place out subtly in the spaces allowed it, operating under alibis such as decadence and camp (cf. Risley). But it is also a homosexual practice overshadowed by familial and social expectation - in the end, Clive Durham decides to marry - and one which Forster depicts as leading to a kind of stultification. Justified by Plato, and riding on an intellectual defence drawn from an idealised Hellenic past and literature, their affair is physically weak: it turns out that they do not 'share' their bodies.

By contrast, the relationship between Maurice and Alec is more physical, more passionate. Rooted in the fields, the night, and rural England, their love appears to mimic Maurice's fantasy of the greenwood: a classless, sexually liberal Arcadia from a forgotten or alternative English past. Indeed, the transgression of class (and more generally, work and economy) is crucial: quite apart from the bourgeoisie/labourer taboo (also breached in Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, of course), Maurice quits his financial career, Alec abandons plans to emigrate to Argentina, and the non-economic logic of sacrifice is fundamental to their bond. In short, their relationship is far more utopian than that found in Cambridge, which - although obviously sexually transgressive - is still far more entangled in social norms, institutions and practices, particularly those of class. With Alec, at night in the boathouse, all such entanglements are dissolved and a freer homosexuality envisaged: Maurice disappears to Alec almost phantasmally at the end of the novel, leaving only a pile of primrose petals. (That particular moment reminded me of the sudden upsurge of Hindu mysticism, another trope of dissolution, in Passage to India.)

Dissolving away into the night: the dissipation of tension, and the opening up of a different kind of gay love, thus completes a movement begun when Alec and Maurice realise their true feelings in the British Museum (emblematically, of course, among the relics of Greece). But, without wishing to needlessly darken Forster's happy ending, I think it is worth re-opening that tension. The affair with Clive had represented a homosexuality practised in the margins of 'what is', within existing social structures and without breaching the everyday. The affair with Alec, as I have suggested, is naturally far more transgressive and utopian. But is the tension between the two types not symptomatic of the tension internally constitutive of any desire for change? Or for change itself? To be new, there must be a breaking of the old, yet, equally, no social progress is ex nihilo, somehow occurring on the outside of the social conditions that already exist. (This is perhaps why Maurice has to invent a 'greenwood' past which can serve as some kind of foundation for their transgression.) Although Forster can invoke a utopian sexual experience which soars fiercly clear of society, there is a dialectic here: life remains and remained bound to the demands of the everyday, of class, of social structure i.e. precisely the demands that the Cambridge homosexuality carefully negotiated, and Forster's happy ending must partially occlude.*

This is why, I think, it is obvious that Forster's novel does not just implictly plead for a more humane attitude towards homosexuality on the individual level, but wishes to re-imagine what - as with any revolutionary change - was then unimaginable i.e. a shift in the social structures which would allow a homosexuality to be practised without alibi, without fear, and thus with freedom. Whilst his answer - inviting a gamekeeper to one's bed in the dead of night - is hardly applicable in all cases, the tension between Clive and Alec, between Cambridge and the greenwood, between intellectualised Platonic affection and liberated, trangressive passion is, I think, precisely the kind of tension Adorno counsels us to watch for. For such tensions confront society with its own untruth, and open up, in opposition to 'what is', the horizon of the unthought, and thus of social and political change.

* It is fascinating that were Forster to have written a tragic ending - say, a suicide - his novel could have been published without difficulty. The portrait of a gay love that dares to live was what would have caused the censors to act.

We Prove Mysterious By This Love

2010-12-17T21:32:00.019Z

Had a very interesting discussion with an ex-student on John Donne which sent me back to perhaps my favourite collection of poetry (Songs and Sonnets), and I can't help but feel I've stolen some of her ideas: so consider this little piece to have a ghostly co-author, which is kind of appropriate, given its conclusions. What I argue here is not dissimilar to what I have thought before on Donne (e.g. here), but maybe is more systematic.

The Elizabethan love sonnet tradition thrived on rhetoricising the physical: on translating the body, and its sensations, into heightened images. The Renaissance blazon - with its eyes like suns and lips like coral - created a stylised vocabulary of amatory passion which, driven by hyperbole, inevitably ended up hardened into formulae. Even by Shakespeare's time ('her eyes are nothing like sun') poets were turning against these images, representing a counter-beauty that claimed to be beautiful precisely because of its realism.

As my student pointed out, Donne makes this deflationary gesture himself in, for instance, 'The Canonization': 'What merchant ships have my sighs drown'd?' (l.11). And yet, as the most fleeting acquaintance with Donne will prove, the Songs and Sonnets are hardly poetry that relentlessly pursues 'everyday' representation; in fact, they are full of extended and logically complex conceits of the most baroque proportions. In 'A Valediction of Weeping' tears become successively coins, emblems, mirrors and worlds. In 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning', the souls are both beaten gold and a pair of compasses. What is going on here? Is it just that Donne's symbols possess a greater sense of originality and creativity than his forebears?

I would say there is a more focused reason for why Donne's conceits are unique. The 'stock' love sonnet works by taking a single physical body and simply imbuing it with an exaggerated quality. In such sonnets' expressive aspect, the poet's own passions (sighs, tears, protestations) are transcendentalised; in their objectifying aspect, the beauty of the beloved is re-imagined as quasi-divine. What Donne does differently I think, at least in his most interesting texts, is to portray physicality-in-contact i.e. two bodies in their conjunction. As Levinas' work on the face has shown, the encounter or intimacy of two subjects in the world is strange and distinctive: it de-stabilises the intentionality of the ego (an intentionality which is, incidentally, central to visual array of the blazon).

In Donne's texts, the very field of sensation is altered - overthrown even - by conjunction, intimacy and doubleness. The sigh of the individual lover is translated into the intertwining of the kiss. A tear becomes more than just a biological act but a whole language of intimacy interposed within the crossing of two gazes. Two bodies that long for each, that touch, and feel themselves touching and being-touched, have a memory of that touch which transcends physical distance. In short, the physical is no longer an inviolable thing, a locus of self-identity, but something affected by the Other, an affection explored in all its paradoxical beauty in poems like 'The Ecstasy' or 'The Broken Heart':

If 'twere not so, what did become
Of my heart when I first saw thee?
I brought a heart into the room,
But from the room I carried none with me.
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thine heart to show
More pity unto me ; but Love, alas !
At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be empty quite ;
Therefore I think my breast hath all
Those pieces still, though they be not unite ;
And now, as broken glasses show
A hundred lesser faces, so
My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love, can love no more.

('The Broken Heart', ll.19-32)

Donne's poetry hence recurrently takes the experience of shared physicality, and weaves it into many fantastical shapes. Bodies are always under transformation: into other things, into pure flesh, into spectrality, into each other... This is powerfully appropriate because in erotic intimacy, the individual body and its sensations (both internal and external) have lost their nominal self-identity and self-enclosedness. In a very real sense, the physical is no longer 'there' in the simple fashion it was 'there' before, but is now set in, and predicated on, a relationship with Otherness. It is this tension or transformation - between the 'intentional' body and the 'affected' body-with-another - which Donne's conceits express. It is the strangeness of such intimacy that underwrites the strangeness of Donne's verse.

As 'The Canonization' makes clear, the lover and beloved are proven 'mysterious', re-made in a new pattern in which the self-evidence of the physical is cut across with something from outside. As 'The Broken Heart' shows, with that supreme metonym of deep feeling, presence and absence, self and other, can exist side-by-side at the heart of the subject. What we find in the Songs and Sonnets are not metaphors that exist to evoke purely idealistic transformations (a neck like a swan's, teeth like ivory), but metaphors which act as virtual spaces in which this very real transformation of a sensation into a sensation-with-another can be enacted and explored. Metaphor (meta-phora; to carry across) is not false in Donne, because the physical is in a constant process of being carried across, carried between, two selves who are no longer just what they were before:

Call's what you will, we are made such by love ;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us ; we two being one, are it ;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
('The Canonization', ll.19-27)

De Quincey, Labyrinth, Modernity

2010-11-30T23:24:00.010Z

I just want to briefly touch on one section of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater which affected me quite powerfully the first time I read it, and continues to intrigue me. It concerns Ann, a young prostitute who had aided De Quincey in a time of sickness and for whom he had returned to the city some months after:

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann? For her I have reserved my concluding words. According to our agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street. I inquired for her of every one who was likely to know her, and during the last hours of my stay in London I put into activity every means of tracing her that my knowledge of London suggested and the limited extent of my power made possible. The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the house; and I remembered at last some account which she had given me of ill-treatment from her landlord, which made it probable that she had quitted those lodgings before we parted. She had few acquaintances...Finally as my despairing resource, on the day I left London I put into the hands of the only person who (I was sure) must know Ann by sight, from having been in company with us once or twice, an address to — , in — shire, at that time the residence of my family. But to this hour I have never heard a syllable about her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been some time in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other — a barrier no wider than a London street often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!

There is a sweetness in the narrative beforehand which means that desperate image of the two searching impossibly for each other, probably being within a glance or a few footsteps and yet never knowing, is terribly sad. Yet there is more than pathos here. For me at least, De Quincey's passage has a taste of the mythic about it - a dimension which echoes with riven lovers and ancient mazes.

The evocation of the labyrinth (particularly in a text that also cites Piranesi's Carceri etchings) is particularly interesting, given that the culminating image is that agonisingly close yet futile crossing of their pathways. I feel there is probably a Greek or Latin word for this geometry or trajectory: the nearest I can think of is asymptote. To my mind, the classical mythos of the labyrinth nearly always implies a heroic exit yet De Quincey's image is bleaker, and perhaps thus quintessentially modern. The logic of the labyrinthine, living city promises and even implies intimacy and meeting - and yet also withdraws it in the same anonymous movement. It is closer, if anything, to myths of torture and repetition (Prometheus, Sisyphus) although even that doesn't quite capture what's going on, since it is precisely the one, irreplaceable (unrepeatable) moment that is central. The best I can say is that this is a mythic image about dislocation and the experience of dislocation in modernity - that people are never quite synchronous with other people.

The trajectories also interest me in another way. Hungarian critic Georg Lukács identifies (and is savagely critical of) the discontinuities which make up the plots of bourgeois modernist fiction: a recurrent sense that the individual protagonist is lost and falling among an open field of possibilities. Now, De Quincey is no modernist, no Kafka, but he is certainly interested in discontinuity. The image of him and Ann passing each other in the labyrinth seems, to me, to be potentially expressive of how different kinds of lives are but seconds or footsteps away from us: incremental changes, decisions, pauses can alter everything. (Lukács would accuse me of being irredeemably bourgeois here).

The Confessions is of course a text which is massively interested in vertiginous experiences of time and space in the extreme sense of phantasmal dreams, majestic visions and terrifying opium experiences. But is there not a more secret, yet equally profound, vertigo running through our everyday experience of time and space? What is more disorientating than to think of something or someone passing, invisibly and irretrievably, past us that - given a tiny shift of trajectory, mere seconds, mere feet - could change an entire life. Yet, according to De Quincey one might want to argue, such shadowy presences are passing by us all the time.

Keats and Belatedness

2010-11-21T15:58:00.018Z

I have a difficult history with John Keats, perhaps ever since my undergraduate essay on him at Oxford was met with the beautifully faint praise that 'this would have been a first-class essay...in the 1960s'. The first chapter of my doctorate was on Keats, and it was then abandoned as I decided to focus on Coleridge alone. Undeterred, at the moment I am trying to work on something about Keats and Robert Southey which will analyse prayer, emotion and 'Greek religion'.

I'm also lecturing on his Odes at NUI Maynooth this week, and it's in this context that I've become increasingly intrigued by the motif of belatedness. From 'Ode on Melancholy', with its transitory sensations that carry sorrow and loss as their obverse sides ('Beauty that must die'), to the 'Ode to Psyche' with its 'latest-born' goddess, 'too late for antique vows / Too, too late for the fond believing lyre', there is a sense that Keats's Odes are always inscribed in the 'just-after'. The haunting nightingale song trembles and dissolves even before Keats has assured himself of its concrete existence ('Was it a vision, or a waking dream?'), whilst 'To Autumn' celebrates the music of the 'soft-dying day'. Only 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' - a lyric dedicated to permanence, stasis and a kind of futurity - seems to set itself differently, and even here the enigma and secrecy of ancient sculpture could be said to position the modern ekphrasis as perpetually belated to the eeriely timeless or out-of-time artwork it seeks to decipher.

Why? Why belatedness? I wonder if it's not something to do with Keats's medical training, and his understanding of the body, explored by critics such as James Robert Allard among others. There is a superb quotation somewhere in Keats's letters (which I cannot, unfortunately, track down because I don't have my Keats notes in Ireland) where he muses that the ceaseless decay and regeneration of physical flesh means that no body sustains a constant identity, but is rather a flux of atoms, a million material transits . It is a physiological re-statement of Hume's famous deconstruction of consciousness, where the self is nothing more than a streaming mass of different sensations, shifting from one moment to the next. Contextualised within the radically materialist medical theories of the day, which were challenging the separate existence of the soul (e.g. the lectures of William Lawrence), we begin to find a very different idea of the body to that typically associated with Romanticism. Whereas a Coleridge or a Wordsworth would normally gesture to the organic body as a privileged trope - as an index for sensation, presence and 'Life' - Keats model throws the stability of 'feeling', as an expression and/or guarantor of self-consciousness, into doubt.

With affect and sensation thus exposed to a temporality which is fluid - making each experience ephemeral and part of an embodiment always haunted by flux, decay and, perhaps, ultimately the realisation that to live is a mortal process, life-as-dying - is it any wonder that Keats's Odes seem equivocal? They fail to hold their central sensations in a secure grip, always overlaying sensation with the experience of after-the-sensation. This should not be seen - as a certain poststructuralist reading might frame it - as a case of writing or representation or poetry being deferred from the presence of a sensation, but rather as sensation being deferred from itself: the experience of a body which can possess no permanence, and which cannot appeal to a Christian soul to counterbalance the understanding that 'all flesh is as grass...the grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away' (1 Peter 1:24).

Thus, we have belatedness. Sensation intertwined with the incessant movement of sensation. Psyche - a goddess and yet also a figure for the human mind, herself a human woman apotheosised in the twilight of Greek mythology - possesses a strangely double relationship to immortality. With no lodging place in temple or ritual - she is too late for that - Keats must offer poetry and his own mind as the dubious surrogate ground for the existence of Psyche (we are back, perhaps, to Wordsworth's lament that the human spirit has only the frailest of shelters to keep itself - cf. here, line 49). What stability is this? Is it enough? Turning to 'Ode to a Nightingale', listening to the songbird is an experience which appears to offer a plenitude of sensation, but one which is also shot through with echoes of the past:

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

I wonder if there is a way of seeing Keats as belated in relationship to these earlier figures. More straightforwardly, it is an obvious irony of the Ode that in the very act of making his meditation on past nightingales - even in trying to secure continuity and relationship with the past and with history - he suddenly finds his own sensation is now past; it has slipped away from him as the bird has slipped away through the trees. Reflection has overlaid affect, and affect has thus fled. And perhaps simplest of all is 'Ode to Melancholy', which understands the transit of sensation to be tragic and inevitable. In fact, pleasure is posited to exist precisely because it is short, momentary, predicated on a certain consuming or destruction of what is desired. One crushes the grape, and then it is gone. The grass withereth, the flesh too.

In some ways, I would conclude, this makes the enigmatic 'To Autumn' the most important of all Keats's Odes. For it alone, deliberately rejecting the songs of spring (the traditional loci for poetry since Greek pastoral), tries instead to explore an aesthetic of belatedness, transitoriness and the 'after-effects' of sensation. Everything in the poem is moving, passing, fading, oozing, ripening, decaying; it is a poem which opens up with a gorgeous passivity to time and refuses nostalgia for either spring or summer. It glorifies instead the slow movements of autumn and twilight, with the only the barest hint of mourning:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Blake/Barbauld: Apocalypse and History

2010-11-17T15:00:00.012Z

As an humanities academic living in the time of the Browne Report, and living in Ireland at a time of economic cataclysm (a recent newspaper leader here felt the need to argue that the Republic is not 'the worst country in the world'), I think I am becoming almost immune to apocalyptic rhetoric. The sense that things are senseless, that things are collapsing with untold velocity, demands a trope and the rich discourse of apocalypse steps forward, as it has done on frequent occasions before in history.

The strange thing - and the thing I want to explore here - is that apocalypse is generally invoked not to express historical chaos, but to explain historical chaos - to, in fact, restore the linearity and intelligibility of history at junctures of instability and violence. It is a meta-historical concept, not an anti-historical one: things fall apart for a reason. After all, the fury and disaster of the Christian apocalypse (from which the Western tradition takes its cue) is the seal and sign of a completed historical trajectory: for all its fiery images of disorder, it is in fact, of course, the absolute logic of order. Genesis to Revelation, the separation of humanity into saved and unsaved, creation to consummation.

For all people's fears and uncertainties 'on the ground', secular apocalyptic rhetoric also has a meta-historical dimension. Apocalyptic logic is invoked to give order and coherence to history. Thus, for capitalism's proponents (insofar as they admit a theory of crisis), it is important to see exact repetition: history and markets work in cycles and the present is simply another turn of the screw: there has been suffering before (1980s, the 1930s) and there will be prosperity again: so there is no need to change things. The appearance of things collapsing is merely necessity working itself out in a particular form: the oscillation and self-correction of society's levels of supply and demand. Much as Thomas Malthus predicted famine, war and epidemic as demographic checks when populations outstripped resources, the same applies here: chaotic, violent and disorientating on the personal level, but clean, rational and logical on the grand scale.

Not that the left are necessarily any different: Marx's theories of capitalist crisis are a reiteration of an old radical belief that moments of historical disorder and rupture are also potential crucibles for the ushering in of new epochs, pivots of meta-historical change. The modern left suggest the same: the finanical implosion is the death-rattle of capitalism and the harbinger for a greater or lesser revolution (literally, a 'turning' of world history) or, more pessimistically, the time when an even greater and more damaging faith in markets will be entrenched. Crisis, tellingly, derives etymologically from the Greek for a decision or a separation (of ways).

Apocalypse gained its greatest literary popularity, one might argue, in the Romantic period, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, here, is an excellent example of the same meta-historical impulse. She opens her poem at a time of war, with tyranny stalking Europe and images of blasted landscapes, ruined domesticity and nations on the brink. Her first impulse is to invoke the 'krisis' - the decision - suggesting that providence has brought Britain to a moment where its fate hangs in the balance: 'thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe' (l.46). However, a deterministic understanding of meta-history soon takes over - 'if prayers may not avert, if 'tis thy fate' (l.70) - and Barbauld turns to envisage the disaster falling, the post-apocalyptic moment. The poem daringly portrays an abandoned, future Britain standing in ruins, its monuments and remnants visited by travellers and tourists much as her own age visited the faded glories of ancient empires: Greece, Egypt, Persia etc.

However, this radical imagining of a British Empire destroyed is not mere chaos, but a cylical understanding informed by Volney's Ruins of Empire among others. The fall of empires is seen as part of a coherent progress, controlled by a mysterious historical spirit (ll.215-22) which stalks time and space, organising empires into a series of overlapping peaks and troughs. Not only does this allow Barbauld to understand her own nation in a meta-historical frame, it allows her to re-imagine a new kind of 'imperial' legacy for a British supposedly at the edge of its own destruction. Broken by its commercial greed and militaristic adventures, the poem articulates an alternative, cultural patrimony (arts, science, philosophy) which will be handed on to the rising empires of the Americas. Historical order and intelligibility is, in short, restored and the critical and violent moment which Barbauld perceives (the poem is, after all, called 1811) is placed in a frame which understands Britain's place in chain of world civilisations. There are few better poems for showing how chaos is recuperated into linearity through the rhetoric of apocalypse.

Just finally, I want to turn to Blake's 'Europe: A Prophecy'. He too has a grand historical panorama in mind: when we read 'eighteen hundred years: Man was a dream' alongside the reference to the 'secret child' in the 'deep of winter', we understand a narrative running from the birth of Christ to the present. Yet, in contrast to Barbauld, I see Blake articulating a more fluid and chaotic kind of history. For Barbauld - as for so many meta-histories - revolution and the apocalyptic mark the joins between the cycles. Apocalypse only occurs at certain, specific historical moments and intensities. In 'Europe', whilst Blake also attempts to explain revolutionary events, what is interesting to me is that he does so by positing revolutionary change as always present just under the surface of history.

Society in Blake is the perpetual struggle between various intertwined principles, personified in his mythopoetic deities like Orc and Enitharmon. The vocabulary is one of certain forces lying dormant, or bound, or repressed; order is only order because it keeps its opposites (creativity and chaos) in check. Yet, such volcanic depths always find the surface:

One hour they lay buried beneath the ruins of that hall;
But as the stars rise from the salt lake they arise in pain
In troubled mists o'erclouded by the terrors of struggling times.

It is as if Barbauld constructs a history which is stable apart from brief and exceptional moments of upheaval; whereas Blake sees instability running through the very seam of history - the apocalyptic and the revolutionary always chafing against the structures and institutions of order and inevitably reaching melting point in certain eras, like the 1790s. This seems to make Blake, as one might expect, far more radical than Barbauld: her poem is ultimately dedicated to order and progress, 'Europe' to repression and potentiality; '1811' folds apocalypse into an anonymous and necessary line of historical progress, in Blake it seems as if apocalypse is, in a sense, always available. A history always on the cusp of radical rupture.

Notes on Jacobi: Reason and its Exits

2010-10-10T21:23:00.005+01:00

Just been reading the German Romantic philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi - perhaps most famous, if at all, in a distorted and misinterpreted form as a fideist and irrationalist; a purely religious counterpuncher, hurling himself in the name of Christianity against the heart of Enlightenment reason. Either that, or he blurs into the chain of minor philosophers between Kant and Hegel, notably only because his name does not begin with Sch- (Schelling, Schlegel, Schleiermacher...)

On the other hand, I've found him interesting: not only because he is on the same page as Coleridge in many ways, but because I think he actually mounts a fairly radical and intelligent critique of rationality and its limits. Two things I wanted to reflect on:

1. Jacobi, in a way you don't see very often in the philosophical tradition, understands that acts of reason are set within lived experience. In 'Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza', he claims that 'philosophy cannot create its matter; the latter is always there' and even more tellingly that 'one ought not to derive the actions from their philosophy, but rather their philosophy from their actions' (p.239).*

Jacobi's argument largely concerns history and tradition, but I wonder if there isn't a more intimate modality to his assertion. Thought accretes a kind of lived sensuosity, with each reflection, judgement and value rooted in others, and the roots of those in turn enmeshed with our identities constituted across time. Do we not act 'rationally' insofar as we are almost like microcosmic versions of Thomas Kuhn's 'scientific paradigms'? I'm willing to admit that I attempt to maintain a fragile and uneven consistency to my intellectual beliefs, with the deepest and more 'structural' axioms and intuitions privileged and hence shaping the rest of my judgements. I have already enacted a series of intellectual identities, and they help constitute me as 'rational'. It's not quite as extreme as deliberately searching out the arguments that will confirm already held opinions, but neither is it rationality articulated on a 'clean state'.

Moreover, when 'reason' shifts its ground, I find this to be a lived experience too. Reason in the fullest sense cannot be constituted on the abstract model of an observer and object: I have found my own 'rationality' has been shaped by lived experience - be that dialogue with certain teachers, friends, students, even books and movements (yes, one can have a dialogue with the dead...) as well as other more intangible changes in my life. Coleridge said somewhere (in his periodical The Friend, I think) that truth had to bear the stamp of a shared, social communication. It is indeed usually ideas embodied in and through people and relationships, rather than ideas in the arid isolation of themselves, that sway us.

2. One of Jacobi's core beliefs is that realism must be based on faith. On the one hand, this is a version of a simple argument: idealism, in the strictest sense, is close to irrefutable. How do we know the external world actually exists? The realist, who does believe in the existence of the external world, can do little but simply gesture to the 'force' of sense-impressions: 'he has nothing to support his judgment except the fact itself - nothing but that the things actually stand in front of him' (p.272).

Now, this isn't actually great as a logically rigorous argument and comes close to devolving into the 'let's throw a stone at Bishop's Berkeley's head' variety of refutation. But in texts like 'Idealism and Realism' (1799), Jacobi goes on to explore the immediacy of 'the world' from a slightly different angle. As part of a critique of Kant, he holds it ridiculous to envisage the 'I' (and rational categories) without a world (and 'stuff' to fill those aforementioned rational categories).

What is interesting is that Jacobi begins to privilege the 'sense' or 'life' or 'impression' that 'reason' goes to work upon: 'our finite being must begin with the body and be constantly supported by it. Hence our reason but begin with sense-impression, and be constantly supported by it' (p.324). The recognition that our selves - including our rationality - arise from a ground of affect or being-affected is one that has been beautifully explored, in far more detail, by the phenomenologist Michel Henry (see my earlier post here). What Jacobi's work does, I think, is to show that reason has limited purchase against the simple 'givenness' of the world, of life itself - that we have arisen at a certain place and time and that we are filled with experience. Reason goes to work in ordering that constant flow of affect and experience, but it cannot 'explain' it.

And, this in turn, struck a chord with me when I came across this in Friedrich Schleiermacher, also talking about 'life' (the very existence of self and world, in a unity) in a passage that I think must have been influenced on some level by Jacobi:

Did I venture to compare it, seeing I cannot describe it, I would say it is fleeting and transparent as the vapour which the drew breathes on blossom and fruit, it is bashful and tender as a maiden's kiss, it is holy and fruitful as a bridal embrace. Nor is it merely like, it is all this. (Selected Writings, ed. Clements, p.88)

I love that last line. Maybe this is indeed nothing more than saying philosophy can do nothing with its own degree zero, which is the 'is'. There is. I am. Other people exist. Time happens. Death is. Love is. Without wishing to sound like that much-maligned breed, the history GCSE teacher, what do these things feel like?

The fact is that rationality must presume them, but cannot turn upon itself, puts its tail in its own mouth, and capture them. At root, I think, they are aesthetic phenomena, and thus we have at least one thing that only poetry, or art, or music, can do better than any other discourse. One thing Jacobi does for me is to trace out the limits of science and philosophy; their borders against this ground of affectivity, this hidden recess of ontology.

What does it feel like to feel? Or, pace Keats, the 'feel of not to feel'? I cannot go to reason for this.

*F.H. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2009)

The Red Stuff

2010-09-30T21:37:00.011+01:00

I tend to use my summers to hit seriously long texts that I would probably never get through otherwise. 2008 was Being and Time. Last year, it was The Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty (see my posts here, here, and, oh!, here). This summer, I finished Marx's Capital, or at least volume one: still a thousand pages, and the only bit that was actually published. As someone who has more or less consistently considered himself left-wing, it's obviously taken me quite a while to work out how to even begin to respond to the text.

One thing that I did think about long and hard was the way that the critique of political economy had an impassioned substrate: an unwavering and highly-evidenced attack - sometimes satirical, sometimes moralistic, always fierce - on the conditions of factory workers. The epic sweep of chapter 10 on the 'working day' is the brutal empirical proof, for Marx, of the theories of commodity and surplus-value he has worked out in the measured abstraction of political economy. The note recurs at every stage, whether it is condemning the market in child labour (15.3) or the plight of the unemployed in industrial slumps (25.3). In the case studies that crown the analysis of the antagonistic character of capitalism (25.5), the motif that accompanies all the reports, statistics and observations is that 'free' wage-labourers under capitalism are actually worse off - morally and physically - than serfs or prisoners.

Now, one might argue that this kind of grinding suffering has been abolished. Would Marx really be able to summon such radical anger in the present day? However tedious it may be working the checkouts at Lidls, or even doing night shift-work on an industrial estate, it hardly compares to Victorian factory work (e.g. children working 36 consecutive hours in dangerous conditions, 40,000 starving workers on the streets of London, women making 2000 clay bricks by hand per day - to pick random examples from the pages of Capital).

There are two ways to respond to this. First, one can argue that the most inhuman strata of necessary economic activity have been pushed to the shadowy margins of the developed world and, more fundamentally, to the global South. Given the interconnection of markets to which Marx himself attested, the poverty of the developing world might be said to be structurally necessary to the wealth of the developed world. There is no doubt that socialist ire could be very well be directed here.

Alternately, one can turn to the more general levels of Marx's analysis. In the midst of a highly empirical and historical discussion of mechanization, there is a philosophy of labour which I think is fundamental:

it is not the worker who employs the condition of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. (p.548)

In short, the worker is not the 'subject' of an economic process, he is an 'object' in it. Symbolically exemplified in the factory - but equally applicable to the economic sphere as a whole - the workers are 'merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton' (p.544). Now, whilst one might object that of course an individual is going to look a little powerless when juxtaposed with any economic system he or she exists within (as the individual will always look insignificant next to social forces), there are three important riders in Marx.

1. As the system becomes more large-scale and complex, it becomes ever more difficult to even conceive an existence outside it. Although for Marx this meant the triumph of division-of-labour over hand crafts - factory workers only possessing skills which made sense in a factory environment - I'm sure it's easy enough to imagine modern parallels.

2. As the system it advances, it reproduces itself to the workers' detriment. As the worker does not own any means of production, it is unlikely they are going to be able to do much for themselves or their family other than throw themselves back on the labour market at broadly the same price.

3. Although Marx sees capitalism as a process which reproduces pretty much the same objective social relationships again and again (and indeed, he contentiously claims, makes them more antagonistic), capitalism can also say: 'but the worker sold his labour freely'. It is that difference between the individual's apparent freedom on the labour market, and the fatalistic movement and reproduction of the system on the macro-level, which is crucial.

Now, there's plenty of things I have problems with in Marx. Obviously, the particular meta-history he charted has not come to pass. On a more fundamental level, I have severe doubts about the validity of the theory of surplus-value as it is articulated in Capital (basically, the fact that the employer gets more out of the worker than they pay the worker, i.e. that they end up earning profits without actually working themselves) largely because it depends too heavily on the discredited labour theory of value. But those three propositions above still seem tenable to me.

If we look at the statistics, social mobility remains a problem. Generally, if you are born into a certain socio-economic strata, there is a good chance you will die there too. The system does reproduce itself in a fuzzy sense. In general and on the macro-level, we see that working-class families earn enough to reproduce the conditions of working-class existence; middle-class families earn enough to reproduce middle-class existence, and the very richest have the investments to reproduce and even extend their existence. This is not just a case of money and inheritance, but education and other social factors involved in the kinds of places inhabited and the lives led. The possibility for some to 'make good' disguises the fact that their 'freedom' to rise up the ladder belies a much wider and more deterministic pattern of 'unfreedom'.

How do we solve this? It's not hard to make a social democratic case for solid, fair taxation and a state that protects the weakest and provides the best possible material conditions for equality of opportunity. Given that 90% of citizens earn less than £46,000, we can see plenty of scope for the social democratic lever to be applied. It would be a nice if a profession earning something like £40,000 was in reach of any child, and I have faith that proper public services are the best chance of ever coming close to achieving that. Moreover, we know this is not fair and just, but efficient: there is much evidence to back up Disraeli's (conservative but strangely radical) two nations thesis that a wealth gap between rich and poor creates a worse society for everybody.

On the other hand, particularly when dealing with the astounding asymmetry that seems engrained at the apex of our society (the top 10% possess over half the wealth, even the top 1% possess an astouding fifth of it), there seems to be another angle. One could engage and confront Marx's central contention: that the means of production (or, modified, the sites in a society which really create and expand wealth) are and continue to be concentrated in the hands of a few. This is potentially the most scandalous social immobility of all. Surely there is a case to be made not just for moving wealth around within the economic arrangement, but for altering the arrangement itself.

Romola and the 'Feminist Bildungsroman'

2010-09-15T18:15:00.009+01:00

To me George Eliot is the supreme English novelist, with only Woolf rivalling her in my affections. Whilst on the one hand mastering realism with the perfectly constructed Middlemarch, her other late novels are also wonderfully ambitious, experimental in content if not form, taking her Victorian readers into strange territories such as Jewish Zionism (Daniel Deronda) and the intellectual world of Renaissance Florence (Romola).

Romola, having sat on various shelves for literally nine years, was my latest read. It is the story of a Greek man, Tito Melema, who becomes embroiled in and corrupted by both Florentine politics and his own narcissistic ambition. It is also the story of his wife, Romola, the daughter of a humanist scholar and acolyte of the revolutionary monk Savonarola. Like Middlemarch, a loveless and corrosive marriage comes to take centre-stage, with the meticulously researched world of fifteenth-century Italy as the backdrop. Although not a feminist novel in any unqualified sense of the word (the tropes of duty, maternity and piety are all very much in tangled and equivocal evidence), I was taken by the way that Romola's narrative struggled out from underneath Tito's. At the beginning, she is merely a beautiful and quiet figure in the wings of the narrative; by the novel's end, she is self-possessed, self-commanding and the emotional and ethical pulse of the text itself.

As Mary Gosselink de Jong has argued, the feminist credentials of Romola must be measured against historical context and against the conventions within which Eliot was operating. Something I find myself pointing out time and time again to students is a motif found in Pamela, Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre among other texts: the heroine's virtue is a negation. A narrative economy emerges whereby the heroine is rewarded not for an action, but for a renunciation: indeed, in its purest but most paradoxical form, she gets the man she wants at the novel's end as a reward for having earlier turned him down (in a morally compromised situation). I feel Romola very much plays with the tradition of 'negative virtue'.

Indeed, the motif is put into play in an exaggerated and dramatic form. The patriarchal negation - 'do not!' - is personified in Savonarola, the monk and mystic who waylays Romola as she is attempting to escape Florence and leave Tito for a new life. He convinces and commands her that the bind of marriage - the duty of morality, in his framing of it - is irreducible. She cannot opt out; her place is beside her husband. Awed by this religious and paternalistic commandment (her own father, who hated the gloom of religiosity, having earlier died), she returns to Florence and a hollow marriage, renouncing her own happiness and taking to a life of piety. This cardinal moment - this virtue of the negative - is placed right at the centre of the book.

Yet, whilst inscribing a cultural expectation in the most chiaroscuro terms, Romola's Bildungsroman does not end there. She comes to realise that the voice of patriarchal authority is incarnated in a fallible human being: she comes to doubt Savonarola. Some of the sceptical impulses of Renaissance humanism - the legacy of her dead father's scholarship and ethos - return. Meanwhile, Tito's interior life, haunted by the consequences of political intrigue and ambition, comes to seem pale, vicious and monodimensional in comparison to Romola's richer experiences of self-exploration and self-realisation. And then, finally, comes the crucial moment of reversal, an anagnorisis whereby the 'virtue of negation' is cut away and Romola challenges Savonarola face-to-face. She rails at his hypocrisy and stands against him fiercely as an intellectual and moral equal. The most important sentence in the whole novel is arguably 'the law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too...There had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant' (p.557).

Romola leaves Florence again, sailing away in a rather mystical, symbolical passage. This time, however, there will be no renunciation: she has passed through the negation that might have defined her, as it defined so many literary heroines in the past, and come to a higher understanding of what the 'moral' must be that encompasses both freedom and duty. Yet, even here, Eliot's keen intelligence works further levels of complexity. As Romola awakens, she is free. Florence has given way to an almost pastoral realm. In a village stricken by plague, she comes to play the part of a mysterious figure of charity and mercy, explicitly described and recognised as a kind of Madonna. Yet this kind of female sovereignty - articulated as it is within stereotypically feminine spheres of activity - is not enough. What is really telling for me is that Romola, having staked out her autonomy, returns to Florence again: to the urban centre, the public space, the site of politics, the realm of social struggle.

Once there, she sets about finding and looking after Tessa: a peasant girl who Tito (now dead) had seduced and made pregnant. Maybe Romola looking after these children - a kind of surrogate maternity and a correction of her husband's fault - is once again problematically close to the motif of renunciation. In the closing scenes, we begin to see the image of the Virgin Mary encroaching again, no doubt. Yet, I still feel that Eliot has achieved what she set out to do, which was to articulate a tension between individuality and duty. Romola lives within the morality of her time, just as (by returning to Florence, rather than staying in a symbolic 'outside') she participates in the socio-politics of her 'place'. However, through a kind of dialectic which evokes the commonplaces of feminine virtue (obedience, renunciation, passive suffering) only in order to show their contradictions, Romola has achieved a positive and autonomous relationship to moral questions.

If she still lives a life with moments of sacrifice, these derive from her soul's own 'warrant' and no longer from external force and demand. This, in context, remains a fairly radical shift within literary convention (just as Romola's narrative does not end with one of those two inevitable novelistic destinies - death or marriage - and remains open-ended). Eliot has fashioned that rare object: a female Bildungsroman where the sense of realised and educated selfhood is only minimally compromised by the gender of the protagonist.

The murderer should not triumph... (Note)

2010-08-24T16:34:00.002+01:00

This was meant to be a double tangent in the previous post, but it was taking up too much room. So I'll place it here.

1. If injustice appears to be irreducible within our horizons, it counsels us to consider asymmetry when we are judging situations. I generally wince at the occasional instances of special pleading that can lead well-meaning people to minimise offences and outrages committed by oppressed groups, and exaggerate those carried out by the powerful, but it is true that all acts have contexts, and the way that acts occur within asymmetric contexts are important.

2. If injustice appears to be irreducible within our horizons, we must attend to material relations of power and oppression, and possession and dispossession. Sometimes, 'identity politics' can adopt an idealistic humanism and make it seem as if all this is a matter of representation: as if when people let their prejudices drop away and saw women, ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals 'correctly' and without bias, then equality would ensue. On the other hand, an irreducible structure of injustice would mean that this is not a question of individuals changing their perceptions, but something about the world itself, a world constantly stratified and re-stratified by power.

The murderer should not triumph over his innocent victim

2010-08-24T15:23:00.014+01:00

I'm going to start with a deliberately contentious statement: all politics should be religious, or, at least, all radical or emancipatory politics should be religious.

This doesn't come, I'm happy to say, from any sudden road-to-Damascus (Tennessee) conversion to the Fox News inspired worldview of right-wing US fundamentalism, but rather from Jürgen Moltmann's dialogue with Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wonderful The Crucified God.* (Incidentally, follow the Frankfurt School link - what a wonderful picture!)

Now, the core assumption here is twofold. Firstly, that suffering is intolerable (hence the quotation, from Horkheimer, which entitles this post). Secondly, that suffering is impossible to abolish: as Horkheimer suggests, secular history cannot erase injustice. Recently, I've been coming to think more and more that there is an irreducible asymmetry between the powerful and the powerless which must stand at the centre of ethics: exploitation seems intrinsic to all our current and past historical horizons. Support for this unfortunately pessimistic position could be adduced from various places. One might turn to philosophy's recent return to the question of evil, or to analyses of power given by people like Foucault or Derrida (the latter in 'The Force of Law'). One can attend to Horkheimer's own assertion that a 'longing for perfect righteousness can never be realized in secular history; for even if a better society were to resolve the present social disorder, it could not make good past misery nor take up past distress into all-embracing nature' (p.232, cited by Moltmann). This point becomes particularly forceful if we think about the way that the present is constituted by a material history leading from the past: how does Europe set about a work of reconciliation, for instance, when the place from where it would do so is constructed from the spoils of colonialism? Perhaps most fundamentally, we can simply appeal to the brute non-negotiability of historical experience: maybe those like Horkheimer and Moltmann, living in the shadow of Stalin and Hitler, had a better sense of scepticism towards narratives of progress, something we should bear in mind as we gloss over the millions (billions?) of oppressed and impoverished in our own moment.

Back to the provocation: must politics be religious? For Horkheimer, given the horizons of the present cannot imagine an end to suffering, there must be - if one is not simply to accept a pragmatic rapprochement with the distribution of power that creates suffering - an eschatological element to any ethics and politics:

In view of the suffering in this world, in view of the injustice...it is...impossible not to hope for truth and righteousness and that which provides them. That must be said on the other side. For radical criticism of the here and now is impossible without a desire for the wholly other. Without the idea of truth and that which provides it, there is no knowledge of its opposite, the forsakenness of men (p.232, cited by Moltmann)

This is the 'religious' content of Horkheimer's politics. However, it is not that easy. The desire for the 'wholly other' is dubious. In religion, it can be criticised - and Moltmann does criticise it - as a disengaged, otherworldly theism which turns its face from the sufferings of the world. A contradiction emerges, articulated in the 'protest atheism' of those like Dostoevsky, which arraigns this distant otherworldly God for permitting the agonies of this world: Ivan Karamazov would refuse heaven on precisely this ethical basis.

However, if one rails against the transcendent in theism, one can do so equally in atheism (or any secular politics). Is this not the very basis of utopianism, which tries to impose what Moltmann calls an 'immanent substitute' (p.231) for the divine eschaton? The historical outlook does not seem good for such attempts to breach historical horizons, and it is telling that many contemporary thinkers approach the teleologies and utopias of prior radical politics with wariness. On the other hand, to abandon eschatology altogether is to acquiesce to suffering: to permit the present to exist as it does and the past to remain as it was, to let the murderer triumph, to countersign the unjust structure which consigns millions to powerlessness. One can do this, certainly, under the realist banners of avowing small triumphs, increments of progress and 'it's the best we can hope for, under the circumstances'.

Yet what for those of us who might want to continue to demand the wholly Other? If we are to dismiss the transcendent panaceas of heaven and utopia respectively, can we address the problem?

Interestingly, Moltmann has an answer - for the Christian at least. For him, Christ - executed as a rebel, a blasphemer and as godforsaken - shows that God has shared in the groanings of his creation. He thus stands as a this-worldly redemption in the very midst of injustice: God has precisely abandoned his transcendent position. Unlike the distant God of classical theism, he needs no defence against the problem of evil: he is theodicy incarnate. In a stroke, Moltmann's radicalised theology of the cross offers an account of hope that also engages pain and injustice concretely and immanently: it does not simply evoke the transcendent - an afterworld where everything is fine - as an exit from the problem of suffering. God is with us, he suffers with us.

The question for any radical politics that does not want to clip its wings with pragmatic realism is whether it can offer a parallel account of hope and futurity: one that both refuses to countenance the suffering of history and its crushingly limited horizons, whilst also remaining immanently engaged and effective with the here-and-now.

* Trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 2001)

Free-will

2010-08-21T13:06:00.008+01:00

I've been reading a lot of eighteenth-century sermons. Too much theology from a period which is not exactly a rich seam of theological innovation does tend to do odd things, and thus I found when I was reading an account of providence in relationship to prayer by William Leechman. Somewhat strangely, a domino effect ensued, and created a genuine panic about what I actually believed about free-will. This actually suspended my reading in the British Library for a good 45 minutes. In general, I've been content to follow Donald Davidson's anomalous monism - itself derived from a certain Kantianism - that contends that mental events, including volition, intention and 'freedom', are inassimilable to the lawlike explanations of physical science.

Yet, I think something deeper is going on, which I want to explore here - Davidson's (and Kant's) accounts work for me so well partially because they present freedom as an experience of paradox (or a paradox within experience?). The very concept of free-will is, no doubt, internally difficult.

Classically, it has been held that we are free if we are the origin of our actions. If we imagine events as chains of causes and effects, a volitional event is one where we set into a motion an entirely new causal chain. If person 1 pushes me into person 2, and person 2 falls over because of it, then person 1 is the 'cause' of person 2's fall. However, if I just walk up and push person 2 over, then I am the 'cause'. The first case might be seen as involuntary; the second as volitional and 'free'. However, if free-will is simply spontaneous, uncaused causation, then all our free actions seem to have no grounds. Why do I do anything I do? Without a set of reasons 'causing' or motivating my free actions, I am essentially acting randomly. Yes, a random action may not be constrained or impelled by other forces, but it is irrational. Not a good picture for human freedom!

So, we might turn to an account of reasons and motives. I push over person 2 because I dislike him, or because I can see he is about to get hit by a car. This seems to solve the problem of randomness, because it attributes action to a series of reasons - my reasons. However, as soon as we say a free action has one cause (my first-order motive), then we can equally ask 'what causes the cause?' Why do I dislike person 2? Whatever answer X we give to that question, we can keep going and say 'why X?' We quickly seem to end up with determinism because even if we try to explain our immediate motives from, say, the kind of person we are (and thus keeping each rationale as belonging to me), we soon realise the kind of person we are must also have a set of causes. The end result is that the causes of every 'free' action stretch back far beyond the circumstances of our birth. The reason I am writing this blog might be because my great great grandfather bucked the family trend of dock work and became a clerk for the East India Rubber Company in Limehouse in the late nineteenth century. Quite apart from asking in turn 'why did Thomas Charles Stokes apply to be a clerk', this seems deeply counter-intuitive. How can something be my volition if it was essentially caused by events before I even existed?

So, the more we try to escape the spectre of randomness by appealing to causes for our actions (motive), we seem to become deterministic; the more we try to escape the spectre of determinism by appealing to spontaneity (agency), we seem to create randomness. Compatibilism is philosophy's endless attempt to square this circle, and it is analytic philosophy's (the Anglo-American tradition) mainstream position because analytic philosophy abhors contradiction and strives to abolish it. On the other hand, continental philosophy seems to accept that (as I noted below) some 'human' questions are unanswerable precisely because human experience is contradictory - what Kant termed antinomy. I think continental philosophy - despite analytic philosophy's persistent attempts to refine and re-refine its accounts- has an edge here precisely because of this.

Why is the above conceptual confusion generated in the first place? What is distinctive about subjectivity is that it is self-conscious, or differential: I can perceive myself, I can think about myself, there is an 'I' and a 'me'. I can say things like: 'I can't believe I'm about to do this' or 'I don't trust myself' or 'I knew I would do that'. Could this be a clue into the problem of free-will? The 'me' side is an object. It is a collection of a more-or-less constant dispositions and qualities. I know what kind of person I am, and I can observe that person. Yet, hovering above 'me', is the 'I'. This is an occult entity indeed: as the mobile interiority of consciousness, it is that which sees, and thus cannot be seen. As a thought experiment: shut your eyes, observe your thought processes and make a few statements about who you are. Who is speaking those statements? What qualities does that 'I' have? It's hard to answer. Yet this is the very mark of consciousness: the ability of a being to fold on itself, to make its own being a question for itself (to put it in Heideggerian terms and get away from overtones of a slightly dubious homunculus model of consciousness).

I would argue that the objectivity of the 'me' pertains to the experience of reason and motive, and the subjectivity of the 'I' expresses the experience of spontaneity and revisability. Just as subjectivity is split and differential in this way, so is the experience of freedom. I would hypothesise that the phenomenological 'contradiction' within the 'I' itself generates the logical contradictions which seem to problematise accounts of free-will. Perhaps, then, it is not a case of trying to contort the concept of volition until it is formalisable and self-consistent (indeed, one might ask whether some philosophers' concepts of freedom in any way map on to the way the word is actually used in language). Rather one might accept the paradox as structurally necessary, given the way is experience is given to us (again, this is a broadly Kantian approach).

Two final thoughts.

Jean-Luc Nancy's excellent, if complex, book The Experience of Freedom has gone even further than I have, arguing that the 'fold' in being (the I-me thing, roughly speaking) does not merely structure accounts of freedom, but is itself the proper site for freedom. He argues that we should stop trying to make freedom a property which belongs to an agent, but see freedom as an opening: this existentialist motif suggests that 'who' we are is indeterminate and open (the human being has no essential definition, see my previous post here) and thus freedom is a matter not of individual actions per se, but responding to our own being. Problems of 'assigning' freedom to a self (either saying the self is the originary cause, or the site of motives) are modified by suggesting freedom simply comes, phenomenologically, with being-a-self. My being is a (open) question for me (thus I am a free); the being of a telephone is not a question for it (thus it is not free).

Finally, I think the phenomenological approach may be more concrete (which is not to say it is truer, of course). Analytic philosophical accounts of freedom tend, in general, to the abstract: an impression not helped, perhaps, by recurrent appeals to bizarre thought experiments (e.g. imagine that a scientist has chemically manipulated your second-order motivations) and counter-factual worlds. On the other hand, phenomenological rooting in differentiality (the 'I' and the 'me') translates much more easily to experiences of alienation, representation, memory and self-realisation. These accounts slide more naturally, to give two important examples, to matters like gendered/embodied freedom and political freedom: i.e. the actual scope of freedom in the world.

Dawkins, Knowledge, Gadamer

2010-08-19T11:57:00.008+01:00

I saw Richard Dawkins' More4 documentary Faith Schools Menance last night. Two things straight off. I'm not really in favour of faith schools, although I doubt that they do a lot of the things Dawkins says that they do. Secondly, there was plenty to critique directly about the documentary's logic: from the ironically emotive use of music (sinister whenever religion was discussed, uplifting whenever science was discussed) to the ropy use of an extreme and overdetermined example in Belfast sectarianism to supposedly characterise the nature of religion as a whole (a basic error of induction, I'd say). However, I'm more interested here in thinking about what constitutes knowledge.

We can start from the letter he writes to his daughter, mentioned prominently in the programme. (Incidentally, if you give this a read, I find it impossible to believe that Dawkins genuinely holds that this letter is an exemplar of letting his daughter keep an open mind, given it has very distinctive, humanist accounts of religion as 'bad or silly traditional information'. He might be right, but he's certainly leading his daughter down a secular path. But anyway...) The letter considers how we might know something to be true, and reduces it fundamentally to one plane: visible evidence. There are some complexities: doctors cannot 'see' measles, but they can see the symptoms; Dawkins cannot 'see' the speed of light, but physicists have 'seen' the evidence for that too. Cutting slack is a good idea here, he is trying to reach out to a child after all, but this rhetoric of the visible and sensory does suggest a classical epistemology at work nonetheless: positivism, or the idea that empirical - in the last instance, scientific - observation is the only criterion for truth.

Now this falls prey to an old paradox of the form directed against the Vienna Circle in the 1930s: is the principle 'empirical observation is the only valid knowledge' itself something derived from empirical observation? (How would Dawkins go about establishing the axiom? Observing the evolutionary progress of cultures which are scientific perhaps? But does evolutionary progress equate to truth? Or does he turn out to be a epistemological pragmatist?) In a broader sense, the notion that positivist or scientific knowledge is the only knowledge - or even that all knowledge should aspire towards the state of scientific knowledge - is a problematic one I think. Establishing a single criterion for valid truth always creates a kind of epistemological scorched-earth policy. Whilst no-one is contending that knowledge should be evidence-less, there have been many fields of study - history, anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, psychology, sociology etc. - which have proceeded with different methods, such as analogy, narrative, heuristics (use of models or provisional axioms) or dialectics (the exchange and resolution of argument and counter-argument). These tend to be much better at answering questions of what might be termed 'value' and 'significance' than the physical sciences have been. How does one go about tracing the history of tragedy, creating a theory of revolutions or asking 'how should we live' in a purely positivistic sense?

In general, the positivist has only two recourses. They can either admit some advances in knowledge have been made with these inelegant tools, and try to draw the recalcitrant human sciences towards the physical sciences: when this has been attempted, the reductionist pictures which have emerged (sociobiology, behaviourism, scientific ethics and so on) have certainly not been obviously superior. Or they can deny the objects of study actually have meaning at all, because they cannot be brought firmly under a model of scientific observation: potentially, then, say au revoir to classical ethics, any humanist conception of history, emotion, beauty and so forth.

The second thing I want to say is that Dawkins, perhaps because he has a very straightforward epistemology of science (scientists observe, they find truths), doesn't seem to recognise any embedding of science in history and society. This came home to me when he, at one point in the documentary, suggested that faith schools divide by teaching the knowledges of only a single culture. Whilst that may or may not be true, I think it was undergirded by the common assumption that Enlightenment culture is cultureless: it has transcended history. The Cartesian subject has no body; the scientific observation is neutral. Yet, of course, this is not strictly true: the Enlightenment is entangled in history at every point and science does not occur in abstract space but in political space. That's not to dip into moribund relativism, or even question the truth-claims of science, but to re-admit what Husserl would call the lebenswelt (concrete, lived world) back into the framework of knowledge. For a start, it would be worth remembering that the secularisation of science is a very recent phenomena, despite the endless citation of the Galileo controversy: Newton considered his Biblical criticism to be as important as his scientific studies, most Enlightenment rationalists saw their work as an unfolding of the Book of God, and even Victorian era cutting-edge science was often intertwined with the occult.

Yet, even if it does not vitiate scientific truth-claims, bringing historicity to the fore should not be seen as a flaw. Particularly when we consider some of those disciplines discussed above, which seem to resist positivist methodology, we see that the accreted knowledges of the past are fundamental to the knowledge of the now. This is, I think, more than simply saying historians or literary critics build on the theories and findings of those who have gone before: of course, the hardest of science does that too. Even Dawkins doesn't suggest every scientist reverts the clock back to ancient Athens and begins from scratch with 'critical thinking'.

However, there's two rather more interesting things going on. Firstly, that we ourselves are constituted by these intellectual histories: as political beings, we cannot dispense with Marx, because Marx has helped create what politics is; as ethical beings, we cannot dispense with Aristotle, because Aristotle has echoed through the ages and helped provide the very questions now known as ethical. The very phenomena under consideration (human beings and human life, in short) are historical, and thus there is no question of dispensing with history. As German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer says in his magisterial Truth and Method, 'research in the human sciences cannot regard itself as in an absolute antithesis to the way in which we, as historical beings, relate to the past...we are always situated within traditions' (p.282).*

However, as Gadamar also emphasises, traditions are not merely authorities but dialogues. This is the second interesting thing about knowledge, in the human sciences in particular. Marx and Aristotle cannot be abolished because they ask the questions that help constitute the present. And it is a question of...questions. The knowledges I have been discussing here are open-ended, even though positivism wants the clarity of closure. No science student needs read Newton any more, because his knowledge has been processed. By contrast, every philosophy student should read Plato, because Plato never gets fully refuted. Of course, no philosophy (or English literature or history) tutor would want their undergraduates relying on textbooks from the 1910s or the 1740s, but the possibility of the unageing 'classic work' in those fields is symptomatic that these questions, in a very real sense, are never going to get answered. Their history is a history of unceasing dialogue. Knowledge in a positivistic mode, with its demand for precise verification, is antithetical to this dialogue.

Of course, if this is true, then we are rehabilitating in a limited sense one of Dawkins' (and the Enlightenment's) core adversaries: the authority of tradition. Yet, I think that the present is itself a juncture thrown in the midst of all the streams and conflicts and problems of tradition, so I am positing that tradition has an inescapable claim on us anyway. We should not accept dogma, of course, but neither should we necessarily take the scientific model of looking at evidence without concern for what has previously been said about the object of study as either appropriate or ideal for every facet of existence. In this, I think I share the sentiments of Gadamer who conceives of 'tradition' as a source of knowledge which need not be authoritarian but may be critical and productive, a position which Dawkinsite positivism could never countenance:

In tradition there is always an element of freedom and of history itself. Even the most genuine and pure tradition does not persist because of the inertia of what once existed, It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, and it is active in all historical change....preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one (p.281).

* Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 1989)

From the Millennium Bridge / The Sublime

2010-07-28T20:25:00.015+01:00

The defining account of the sublime is that given in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement. Archetypally, it is a critical encounter with the immensity of nature, either in its epic scale (the mathematical sublime) or its incalculable power (the dynamic sublime). As Burke and others had already posited, terror experienced at a mediate distance (near enough to affect, far enough to elude one's actual annihilation) created a certain kind of aesthetic affect.

However, Kant's account created an added twist and ambiguity: as he emphasises, it is not actually the scope or violence of nature which is itself sublime, but rather the consciousness of man [sic] in the face of such liminal experiences. Sublimity passes from stone to flesh: although we may not be able to quite encompass a cloud-strewn Alpine precipice, we can encompass our failing-to-encompass and indeed come up with conceptions important to Kant's Enlightened project. Conceptions such as (to sketch a paraphrase): 'I cannot perceptually take in the scope of this mountain, but I do have an idea of infinity' and 'I could be obliterated instantly by this volcanic eruption, but I also can reflect on my own humanity in the face of it'.

Now, this is interesting in a number of ways, but what recently struck me was the insertion of an ambiguity where the natural is transcended by the cultural (by thought, by reason, by freedom, by the 'human'). As we look at something like the Kantianism inscribed within Caspar David Friedrich's famous paintings (e.g. 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' or even 'The Monk by Sea'), it is arguably the enigmatic figures (and the intensity of their alluded-to interior experience) which is sublime: not nature.

Anyway, if classically the sublime had thus been marked by the violent intersection of human freedom with natural force, one must surely say now that nature's days are numbered. Reason, in its technocratic form, has gradually mastered nature: circumscribed it, represented it, eroded it, made it an object of knowledge and exploitation. Whilst nature can, of course, still kill us (in our thousands if necessary), as a totality it is interwoven with human activity to the point where wilderness areas are, in general, preserved paradoxically by cultural effort: we intervene to ensure non-intervention. Infrastructure, settlement, farming and resource-gathering permeate deep into nature, to the extent where we may actually be in the process of destroying it.

(Indeed, the sublime as a category may be partially implicated in this domination: the moment when Romantic tourists began to follow the artists and philosophers in having pre-described 'sublime' experiences helped co-opt magnificent nature into discourses such as tourism. As any study of eighteenth-century taste will show, there were socially and politically freighted modes of looking at landscape which were highly rule-bound: see something like the fascinating Claude glass.)

Is there, one might ask, a contemporary sublime? The intensity around this question has died down slightly since a furor of activity debating the existence or non-existence of a postmodern sublime, generally posited on the basis of technology. Yet, as I walked across London - taking in the deliberately coded vista from the Millennium Bridge as it leads to St. Paul's Cathedral - I was taken by a more concrete, place-based sublimity i.e. the not-altogether-original thought of the urban sublime. (A sublime which surely finds initial articulation in Romanticism itself: for instance in De Quincey or Book 7 of The Prelude).

Three notes:

1. The modern city represents a complete cultural articulation of time and space. Metropolises overlay culturally produced rhythms over a substrate of 'natural' patterns of wake, sleep and labour reduced to the barest minimum and, in the cliche, cities never sleep. More spectacularly still, they create a horizon-to-horizon experience of the built environment. If phenomenologically the lived world is girt by the primordial experience of 'as far as the eye can see', then a city like London inscribes culture absolutely. The landscape is no longer something with constructed, human objects within it, it is itself a human object: we have created a literal 'second nature'.

2. Cities modulate the classical terms of the sublime. Orientated around mortality, sublimity counterposed human freedom and the power of a deterministic nature. In the urban sublime, things are rather different. It is culture that has created a system with a history and a spatial organisation that are complex beyond any conception or representation: we struggle to map the cityscape which wraps around us, its endless trajectories and intersections. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift describe this as an ecology of ignorance. In the phenomena of the massive city, human freedom has created a structure, anarchic yet free-standing, which transcends and stands over human freedom.

3. Despite the ecology of ignorance, or perhaps because of it, there is also the characteristic sublime 'uplift' which comes from an exhilarating encounter with forces and objects that outstrip the individual, and yet make said individual feel more alive.

Maybe this is a personal point, but there is a surge of being, never fully exhausted through repetition, in the heart of one of the great cities of the world: London, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Istanbul etc. The scope of human experience there is, indeed, at an infinite pitch, and the human subject is - as theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau point out - reborn in its intimate yet vast spaces.

There is a political point here too. Given that cities are the centres of capitalism, any left-wing project (certainly including Marx) has been tempted by a certain anti-urbanism. If technology and commodity are a dead hand crushing the life from the living, then the allure of a more 'authentic', craft-based (ultimately rural) economic ideal is self-evident. Yet over half the world's population now live in cities: the global community has passed that tipping point that industrial Britain reached in the nineteenth century. Any socialism has to reinvent the city.

Yet cities are perpetual reinventions of themselves: the motion, force, sublimity of the urban may create awe but it also evokes radical possibility.

Karl Barth

2010-07-25T12:25:00.010+01:00

I've set myself two tasks for the summer. One is to read Marx's Capital (okay, just the first volume, but that still weighs in at just over 1000 pages); the other is to improve my knowledge of theology in advance of cracking on with my second monograph.

It is with this in mind that I have been reading Karl Barth, supposedly the most important theologian of the twentieth century (indeed, it is an interesting quirk that in the face of supposedly aggressive and irreversible secularisation, modern theology has been incredibly vibrant - perhaps more so than at any time since the Reformation).

Anyway, Church Dogmatics, IV.1 (snappily retitled The Doctrine of Reconciliation and given a somewhat disturbing cover by the excellent Continuum Impacts series) is about the atonement: that central event in Christianity whereby God offers his Son (and in some sense, ontologically contentious, offers himself) to death but also to resurrection. In doing so, the falling-short of humanity (i.e. sin) before the Law is overcome, the breach between man [sic] and God is healed, and salvation comes to the world: 'justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus' (Rom 3:24).

Now, I'm not theologically trained, so I hope the capsule summary above (inevitably skirting over abyssal areas of controversy - see here for some of the various answers given throughout history of how the drama of atonement actually works) will suffice. Equally, I hope my reflections on Barth below aren't too violently off-the-mark for the same reasons: they come very much from the direction of my knowledge in continental philosophy.

Now, it seems to me that Barth clearly uses a lot of substitionary rhetoric (the substitution theory of the atonement being centred on the idea that Christ died in our place). Indeed, there are strong traces of penal substitution, a more precise formulation where God transfers the punishment we should have justly incurred on to himself: as Barth says early on, 'God...exercises the power...to suffer for us the consequence of our transgression, the wrath and penalty which necessarily fall on us, and in that way to satisfy Himself in our regard' (p.14).*

Yet what seems innovative and brilliant about Barth's thinking appears to me to be a much more fundamental and all-encompassing sense of God's intervention in the world (captured if we translate the German Stellvertretung as 'reconciliation' instead of/as well as 'atonement'). He takes into account a full range of dramatic moments centred on what happens at Golgotha: justification, yes, but also more positive moments of sanctification and calling. Substitution, especially any kind of penal substitution, is part of it: but the change in legal relationship between God and human is a turn within a much more radical experience and history.

I understand this in terms of my favourite trope of continental philosophy, being and identity being constructed and experienced through relation. Barth notes:

Faith and love and hope are relational concepts. The being of the Christian indicated by them in a being in relation. Faith lives by its object, love by its basis, hope by its surety. Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit is this object and basis and surety. (p.181)

For Barth, our proper being is a relationship (the covenant) with God. It is the acknowledgement of the Other. Human weakness, human transgression, human blindness - finitude, if you will - has sheared that covenant, but God will not simply abandon humankind to a history constituted by a wound. (Although, Barth insists, he would have been more than entitled to do so, as a kind of disinterested deist God).

What happens instead is that the terms of the relationships are radically shifted in the movement of their restoration. If the copula God-with-man has been broken, and the world cannot struggle back towards God, then God crosses to the world. In a sense, it is nothing more than this re-insertion of the divine into the world that constitutes reconciliation and atonement: the copula is re-affirmed. Of course, given that the world is finite - a place of evil and suffering and death - then God has to be tempted, to feel pain and inevitably to die if he is to fully embrace this radical new sense of the 'with'. Yet this is the distinctive stroke of Christianity. Our relationship with a God who has participated in history and the world - literally, a God-man - is by definition different to our relationship with a transcendentally distant creator, even one who conceivably or supposedly has intervened in his creation.**

In this sense, the stakes are far more profound than, say, penal substitution. This is not God merely carrying out a legal exchange with himself in order to satisfy a calculation of justice (see p.93 where calculation is torn apart and out at the root). Rather, it is to say that our being (which is relational) has been overturned because that with whom we have a defining relation has radically changed that relationship, passing beyond any restricted logic with the excesses of love, gift and sacrifice. Our proper being is now constituted by relation with a God who has voluntarily shared our world in all its finitude and all its darkness. Meanwhile, to some extent (most particularly when Barth talks about the personhood of Christ, cf. pp.149-52), a swathe of God's proper being and identity is also constituted by this exorbitant act re-affirming the relationship of the covenant. As Barth suggests, 'in the light of Jesus Christ the empty loveless gods which are incapable of condescension and self-humiliation can be understood only as false gods' (p.156).

This is what Barth allows. God, crossing the abyss, sharing in the world - sharing in finitude and death - and intervening decisively in history. Both human and divine identity are revolutionised by this reshaped relationship. From this act, altering the world by altering its relationship with God, a new concrete history would be shown to spring. This history is not just a history miraculously de-burdened of the spectre of punishment - a legal escapee as it were - but a history which can declare its being is a being-with, once again, once more, and with a future spread out before it. As Barth puts it in one of his most beautiful passages:

In Him a new human subject was introduced...beside and outside whom that other being of man, that old being which still continues to break the covenant, can only be a lie, an absurd self-deception, a shadow moving on the wall' (p.108)

* Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G. W. Bromiley (London: Continuum, 2004)

** It is perhaps important to note that Barth sees reconciliation has first and foremost occurring with the world, then the Church, and then only finally the experience of the individual. As soon as history has been entered by God, history is changed, regardless of whether individuals realise or understand it. This is an attestation of Barth's which also leads fascinatingly close to a universalist soteriology.

Notes on 'World': Cowper, Bonhoeffer, Light

2010-07-18T19:19:00.004+01:00

A few rather random, interlaced thoughts.

1. Have recently been reading the poetry of William Cowper in preparation for my next monograph, notably his most famous poem The Task. There's quite an interesting, tension between Cowper as a nature poet (indeed, the eighteenth-century writer who can be credibly claimed to have 'invented' the Wordsworthian idiom) and Cowper as a religious poet, tortured Calvinist conscience and writer of many of the Olney Hymns. Basically, in the context of my research, this manifests itself as a tension between a movement to rural withdrawal and a more radical otherworldly withdrawal. In particular, I'm interested in how prayer intervenes at crucial moments (notably at the end of the two concluding Books). There are always intimations of apocalypse in Cowper's country landscapes, and it is interesting that such a notable nature poet should beg the seasons to 'wheel away a shattered world'.

Essentially, what I'm interested here is prayer's status as a language 'at the edge' of the world, in the sense that it functions both in a classical way as a type of thanksgiving for gifts and creation (indeed, perhaps in order to petition for the world to run a certain way), but also - perhaps more radically - as an 'un-worlding' language; a language uttered across experiences of extremity and as a turn away from the world as the vanity of vanities.

2. I've also voraciously devoured the Prison Letters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the confessing theologian executed by the Nazis. I very rarely read fast, except under duress, yet I polished off all 400 pages of this in two days. Facing a demand to maintain faith in the face of fascism, one of Bonhoeffer's most insistent theses is that Christianity must be this-worldly. Too often, he maintains, religion has been constructed and lived through a logic of absence, deferral and what Nietzsche would term the afterworldly. For instance, it is as a 'solution' to the problem of death (unknowable, frightening) that Bonhoeffer claims Christianity has often introduced itself, offering knowledge and consolation where the world and its knowledges offer none. Yet, for Bonhoeffer, this is to get Christianity askew: Christianity must insert itself not around the edges of our world (as an aid when the darkness closes in, be that as a comfort or in the shape of a 'God-of-the-gaps' epistemology), but right at the centre of things, of life, of the world.

Not least, this means Christianity's relationship to suffering and erotics may alter.

3. Finally, and briefly, I've been talking and thinking a lot about light recently, in both nature and painting. It strikes me one could scarcely get bored of this, because light is not just another object in the world, but gives the world itself, in its concrete tonality and affectivity. We do not see light, we see by light, and that is why painting has never been done with it.

Strangely, I don't think we can say the same of sound (silence is not equal to darkness), and yet music, in my opinion, has an even more profound 'worlding' effect than painting.

In short, the world is a category which has been preoccupying me recently. What is crucial about the concept of 'world', which makes it something different to and greater than merely a totality of objects has probably been expressed most perfectly, I think, by Heidegger in 'What is Metaphysics?': 'Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?'

Whether that question seems nonsensical or profound arguably parts and distinguishes two very different ways of thinking.

Distance/Affect

2010-06-29T15:27:00.015+01:00

I have just read this. Tremendously frustrating writer is Michel Henry: he's steeped in Husserl (reminds me what it's like to be adrift amongst the strange landmarks of an unfamiliar philosophy) and with an awkward tendency (it appears to me at least) to repeating an argument that seems to be in essence fully formed by p.10.

On the other hand, I found Material Phenomenology's third and final essay - 'Pathos-with: Reflections on Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation' - to be really rewarding. Strikingly, he describes a 'strange acoustics' (p.115; Kierkegaard's phrase) that constitutes our relation with others. Our intimacies and communities are constructed through senses of proximity that are not literal: imagination and memory mean that what is physically close may be emotively distant, and vice-versa. Displacing 'intentionality and perception' (p.116) from their privileged place, the objective presence of others and their distribution in geometrical space ceases as the ground of intersubjectivity:

This spiritual acoustics, which defies the laws of perception, defines our concrete relation to the other. The work of Kafka, for example, rests on this, as does Rilke's observation that it is among wives of alcoholics that one stands furthest from one another...every experience of the other in the sense of a real being with the other occurs in us as affect (p.115)

Some of Henry's elaboration takes us into communities of the absent: admirers of Kandinsky who have never met is one of his examples, as is our community with and of the dead. But it is as an analysis of intimacy that I am interested in Henry's restatement of the well-worn but beautiful idea that emotion has its own laws of distance, and affection cuts across geometrical presence or absence:

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
(John Donne, 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning', ll.33-36)

Material Phenomenology always articulates the priority of affect and its strange effects over more rational ways in which the ego supposedly organised the world (thought, reason, perception): 'this pathos [feeling] within us that is concealed from our acts of thought and secretly determines them' (p.114). For Henry, we are not primarily a thinking being - a cogito - but a materiality embedded in the world, a living thing, a concrete life: 'life' or 'pathos' is his term for the very root of our being; the ability to feel and to feel ourselves feeling: 'the laws of desire and accomplishment, of suffering and enjoyment, of feeling and resentment, of love and hate' (p.114). (This might seem initially like a simple valorisation of passion over reason, but it is a phenomenological thesis first and foremost, a thesis like Merleau-Ponty's that demands the body, sensation and the world come before thought, reflection and will. Indeed, it demands that we are constituted by a certain kind of passivity.)

This becomes even more fascinating, for me, when he goes on to analyse the caress (something also analysed by Levinas and Marion):

'the caress follows the trail of the other's pleasure. It calls upon the other's pleasure but what it touches is the other's body-object...it does not touch the other's pleasure in itself, which is outside the world, indeed outside of every possible world. This is why the moment of intimate union and amorous fusion [these French philosophers...] is paradoxically the moment in which the lovers watch out for signs, scrutinize indications, and send signals' (p.131).

Now, the insistence on affect and the 'strange acoustics' of intimacy in Henry can let us reverse what might be our expected terms of reference. That one can, for instance, gaze into the eyes of the beloved and yet the inaccessible interiority of the Other retreats behind them would seem to be a classical problem of intersubjectivity, suggesting that we are always condemned to at least one kind of solipsism. The touch, the gaze, the kiss: all fall and fail in the final analysis, because of course 'oneself' is a secret. Again, Donne expresses the agony and the ecstasy of this perhaps better than anyone: 'so to engraft our hands, as yet / Was all the means to make us one' ('The Extasie', ll.9-10). Yet, whilst the Other is always separate, if this is a 'problem' it is only one under terms which would want to possess, place and posit the Other: define them, perhaps, as an entity in the world, make them an object for will or thought, or capture them exclusively within one perceptual strike. In short, it is a problem for Cartesianism.

By contrast, the way that the caress analysed by Henry 'follows' the evanescent trail of the other's pleasure, the way that intimacy is made up of traces and half-absences, is the very ground for affect, for feeling, and thus for life as a material being. It is precisely because the beloved is not an object to be captured by consciousness that emotion is felt: affect exists because reason and representation lose their footing. It exists in those slips, those gaps. Yet, this is not a fall away from some ideal human existence (i.e. pure thought, pure consciousness), but rather the revelation of our real, concrete, embodied existence: an existence which is often entangled and non-coincident. To experience the doubleness of every touch (as evoked by Donne) or to be subjected to the non-geometrical distances where the beloved may be physically far but intensely close is to be affected, to be subjected, rather than see the Other from the position of some coldly abstracted cogito, floating and disembodied, surveying an array of purely objective space and time.

It is to attest that the cogito feels before it thinks (see what I wrote earlier this month), that the world is affective and 'lived' before it is crystallinely rational, and - in Henry's terms - to share that which we share most profoundly: affect or pathos, 'life' or (self-)feeling as the phenomenological fundament.