Long Sunday

Dali-wood

This is part 2 of a series of posts inspired by my recent family vacation to Florida. One of the hidden gems of the Sunshine State is the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersberg.  The history of the Museum's location deserves its own discussion, but suffice it to say that it was the brainchild of the local business community to establish a tourist attraction unlike any other in Florida.  Before my visit I had always thought of Dali as the silly surrealist who loved publicity and making lots of money.  In  fact, Andre Breton had coined the nickname Avida Dollars (greedy for dollars) to emphasize his passion for fame and fortune.  But having seen his work in person, I have a new found respect for not only the imagery but the masterful precision of his technique.  He was truly a great talent, even if he spent a good part of his life waisting it. 

What I also found fascinating was the reactionary nature of his politics and his ultimate expulsion from Breton's inner circle.  The Enigma of William Tell (pictured above) could be described as

Carl (und Karl)

The next (formal) symposium to take place at Long Sunday will be on the topic of Carl Schmitt's "Theory of the Partisan".  (The next informal symposium event will be in celebration or commemoration of Karl Marx's birthday.  Short pieces, scattered thoughts, etc.)  It is tentatively scheduled for early June, possibly the first week. Because of the length of the essay, I've put the announcement out a bit earlier than the previous ones.   If you're interested in participating, please reply here or at theoria.  As always, new and old participants alike are welcome -- and encouraged -- to join in.

The essay, originally published in 1963, has finally been translated into English -- twice in 2004.  One version, under the title of "The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political" translated by A.C. Goodson is available online [pdf] from CR: The New Centennial Review  as a companion to their special issue on the essay in Volume 4, Issue 3.  It has also been published as "Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political" [pdf] in, of course, Telos 127 (Spring).

A bibliography of Schmitt's writings in English can be found here [pdf].  The essay, like Schmitt's work in general, has received quite a bit of attention, links and references to which will be posted shortly.

Confirmed: John S. Ransom, Adam, Nate, Angela, Craig, Luke, Jodi, Matt, Anthony Paul Smith, Old Doug Johnson, Squibb, John
Unconfirmed: Jon , Brett

Karl (und Carl)

May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday.  Happy birthday Uncle Karl! 

In the trajectories of blogweaving, and by way of an invitation sent out rather late, what would it mean to assemble a conversation not at Marx's funeral but at his birthday?   I'll leave it for Craig to post here about (the other) Carl.

Jane

Jane Jacobs, was one of the first, if not the first, chroniclers of "this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal", passionate defender of the flaneur and the multitudinous bustle of the street, "foot people" and, of course, the city itself as a form of life.

fast, cheap

I'll go ahead and (un)wrap the symposium here. Obviously, this shouldn't prevent anyone else from contributing further thoughts on "Scattered Speculations," on Spivak, or on any of the issues that have arisen during this symposium. I'll add any new contributions to the aggregated "Carnival of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". But our intensive week of reading and discussion is now over. What remains is to unwrap, unravel...

As several people have noted, the idea for this symposium on Spivak arose during a discussion at the eponymous Weblog, in response to Adam Kotsko's "Theses on the 'Higher Eclecticism'". In other words, it arose in the context of what is by now a long-running debate on "Theory" that has been represented in terms of an antagonism between the two "sides": John Holbo's Valve on the one hand; and this blog, Long Sunday, in particular, on the other.

Swadeshe pujyate raja vidyan sarvatra pujyate

Before I attempt to bring some threads together, a bit of anecdotage, that may also prove illuminating about value and global communications.

A few years ago, at a time that I was working in Manchester, England, I happened to be in North Carolina for a conference. There I received an email from my friend Jean Franco, who taught for many years at Columbia (she is now emerita) and is one of Gayatri Spivak's closest friends. She'd just got back to the States from London and said she had "an immense favour to ask." Gayatri had phoned her from Hong Kong, "in a state of agitation," because she needed to get hold of a book by Tony Blair, The Third Way, in advance of her keynote at the British Sociological Association conference in Manchester at the weekend. It was now Wednesday. Jean passed along Gayatri's temporary email address in Hong Kong so we could make further arrangements.

Assessing the Damage

 Obviously I didn't take part in this Spivak event, partly because I thought that it would just be a repetition of the same old debate (and more importantly because I just had way too much to do). But it seems to me that just the opposite has happened. The tired old debate has been completely surpassed. The contributions of the Long Sunday "side" seem to me to have shown where the real enthusiasm and the real intellectual seriousness lie. (This should not be intended to take away from Amardeep's contribution, which appeared at The Valve, as it were by accident.) The sheer variety and the number of people coming out of the woodwork to participate is impressive, to say the least.

And I'd be willing to bet that if someone had suggested a Trilling essay or something in the analytic tradition, similar levels of enthusiastic participation would have been in evidence on the Long Sunday "side" -- as long as it wasn't some type of attack piece, like half the stuff in Theory's Empire. (For example, I don't think that most of Quine's work dealt in dismissive polemics based on lazy stereotypes.)

So as far as I can tell, the debate between The Valve and Long Sunday is over, and Long Sunday has won by a mile. There's a lot of cool stuff going on at The Valve that has nothing to do with this debate, of course -- I certainly hope that that will continue, and I will visit there for such materials. But there's no more use in repeating this particular set of arguments, and I look forward to never discussing the concept of "Higher Eclecticism" again.

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

Circulation, Spivak, and The Skin of Cats

The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, blogger at the novel fugitive ethical.

1. Let's say there is a European staying in my apartment. Looking up from his work the other day, he asks what I am reading. I do that awkward combination of gestures and words that one does at someone who speaks mostly foreign languages, simultaneously muttering and pointing, Spivak, Scattered Speculations, etc. He replies earnestly and in broken English that it looks interesting, and goes back to work. Today, as I sit down to write this, he asks to borrow the essay when I am through. I say yes. I make no mention of its content, its difficulty, its eclecticism, indeed and honestly, how could I? He will simply understand it, or he will not, or, perhaps his encounter will defy reduction to something as simple as all that. It is not for me to speculate on his level of comfort with written English, much less with certain, hyper-syllabic theoretical vocabularies. Nor is it for me to apologize in advance for the peculiarity of the offering: he has shared with me his work, and I will share with him this essay. That, on some level, is all.

The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism

The following is a guest post by Aren Airuza, blogger at the moving going somewhere?.

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether to engage––as may be expected on a 'literary' blog––in 'close reading' in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses, and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I'd like people to think more about.  I ended up going with the latter, and at length.  But first, prefatory caveats.  Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me.  It has always seemed crazy.  Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly.  But it still seems 'intuitive' that capitalism runs on crisis.  There's an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive:  "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us."  This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later.  (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I'll try to address that in regard to value.)  What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and 'culture' in that mechanics.