From today's NY Times:
Johnson’s advisers put it to him straight: Saigon was going to lose, Hanoi was going to win, and there wasn’t much time to waste. The choice was clear: lose the war or expand the war, find a formula of words to mask failure or send more troops and increase the bet on the table. Johnson chose to expand the war.
Michael Richards is the latest to say something racist or anti-semetic and then says "I am not a racist." I think we come across this kind of reasoning a lot. I am a college teacher and students will say, "I'm not the kind of person who gets a C." I know the example I have just mentioned is light years different from the Richards example, but I think something important unites them. There's absolutely nothing 'wrong' with a student saying "I'm not the kind of person who gets a C," even when that student has just received a C (from me). A little more seriously: "I'm not a cheater," is something a student will say . . . after being caught cheating.
That is, lots of people want to distinguish between "the verb" and "the noun." The verb is the thing they did, the noun is the thing they *are.*
Jon Stewart, and perhaps not just him, had a joke about this same tendency when news came out about us torturing inmates at Abu Gahrib. He showed a clip on his Daily Show of Mr. Bush saying "America does not torture," and Stewart had a funny line (which I can't accurately reproduce) where he said something along the lines of: "It doesn't matter so much if we actually torture people, along as we're just not the kind of nation that tortures people." Again, people want to distinguish between what they *do* and what they *are*.
People want to distinguish between an ideal vision they have of themselves and protect that even from actions they commit. The ideal vision is not touched. 'Denial' is precisely 'denying' that one's actions or observable behavior can affect or degrade the ideal 'me.' And so it is actually this strange and quite 'philosophical' notion -- one that does not require having actually read much or any philosophy -- that our selves are somehow immune from our own empirical, real-world actions that prompts these kinds of ridiculous claims that go against all 'evidence.' But it doesn't work the other way! If Michael Richards had managed to handle the hecklers (though I have no proof he was heckled; the tape doesn't start with that), had turned their heckling into a classic Kramer moment and even supercharged his bit with it, two things would have resulted. First, we never would have heard a word about Mr. Richards' appearance at the laugh factory, and second, Richards would have said to himself, "I'm such a great comedian," that is, the action 'making people laugh' would have been judged to coincide with, and be an expression of, his ideal self-image as a comedian.
Some events, some archives, resist analysis, resist theorization.
An affect from some lower circle of hell, a trauma from purpose to completion,
I wonder how long before our need for a defense kicks in, and with it some theoretical accounting.
Taking advantage of a little Sunday shyness then, (and shivers on my part, having just hiked/dog-chased a few dark and slippery miles of the Appalachian Trail in sleeting snow along the Tennessee, North Carolina border), also in untimely spirit of a simple sort, here is a bit of a printworld article on LS that appeared back in the July-August issue (#27.5) of the American Book Review (humble cost: $4 and sendable to American Book Review, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4241, Normal, IL 61790-4241 – the issue includes a very good article by Pierre Joris on Rasula/American poetry, and an interesting exchange between Joseph Tabbi and R M Berry on narrative transcendence, Lyotard and Wittgenstein).
Michael Joyce is the author of Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture among other, better-known things (though I recommend that one). It is a very kind article (and typically gracious– as those who know Michael will attest).
Blogs seem the most Calvinist of networked pursuits, a constancy of good works measured out not in coffee spoons but in relentless soupçons of comments and track-backs, cross-postings and intertwinings (or what Ted Nelson, the erstwhile John the Baptist of Hypertext, called intertwinglings)...
Long Sunday, of course, summons (and its home page subheads) Kafka's...phrase only matched in its melancholy evocation by my ex-wife Martha's characterization of August (she also a prof) as "a month-long Sunday night"...
Although, of les nostalgies des jours I'm partial to T.Bone Walker's, "They Call It Stormy Monday, but Tuesday's Just the Same," closely followed by John Berryman's "Dream Song 134," which goes
Sick at 6 & sick again at 9
was Henry's gloomy Monday morning oh.
Still he had to lecture
Continue reading "Long Sunday in The American Book Review" »
Maurizio Ferraris, in his Introduzione a Derrida writes:
Kant's idea is that, once having found the categories through which the subject relates itself to the world (le categorie attraverso cui l'io si riferisce al mondo), it is still necessary to specify something intermediate, partly sensible, partly insensible, that will assure the passage from the pure forms of the intellect (the categories) to sensibility.
Melanie Gilligan asks an interesting question of Rancière. Anyone care to offer a response, thoughts?
jane dark's sugarhigh not only has some swift Adorno for us (especially good for LS) -
The consciousness of the unfreedom of all existence, which the pressure of the demands of commerce, and thus unfreedom itself, does not allow to appear, emerges first in the intermezzo of freedom. The nostalgie du dimanche is not a longing for the working week, but for the state of being emancipated from it; Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday. The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.
- but there's also a new term for us to learn today:
The anxiety of having to pay the rent, having to show up for work on Monday, is now only a start. There is a new anxiety into which that anxiety now hemorrhages. It's no longer enough to find happiness is being always at work; that fades over the long Sunday. One must place that work within the space of flows, within the interlocking, competing and colluding organizations of interstatal politics and transnational capital, and this knowledge comes with a price: weltsystemangst, "world system anxiety."
The pleasure of the world-wide accessibility of your texts. The sense that you type into Burma, Moscow, Brazil's backwater-ranches, Central Park West. The unbearably light weight of the whole that you move with your insomniac fingers. The job well down, everywhere all at once. And what drives it, what need it fulfills, what hole it fills.
The international-access - and international-labor - of the blog (especially as voluntary work) remains under-theorized...
Whatever. I must admit, I fantasize at times about international business travel. That I will be called to present in Sao Paolo, Cape Town, Copenhagen, and yes, above all, Shanghai. That it will be all Lost in Translation, all the way down. Laptoping myself towards the sublime.
A few weeks ago I took exception to the following comment by John Emerson to this post:
To me when Schmitt writes "Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable" on the way to the "friend-enemy" political distinction, he's using a simple-minded logic to stack the cards in favor of conflict and war.
In response to Emerson, I asked him repeatedly to substantiate his claim regarding Schmitt. According to my memory, he never did so, yet kept insisting that, for Schmitt, the point of politics was war - or, in a softer version, that Schmitt was all for war. Rather than substantiating his own claim, Emerson asked me to substantiate my own, which I did, but I never provided a direct reference.
Anyway, while re-reading through Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, I was reminded of the following passage (a mere seven pages after the passage cited by Emerson):
It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action, by no means as though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with the friend-enemy alternative vis-a-vis every other nation. And, after all, could not the politically reasonable course reside in avoiding war? The definition of the political suggested here neither favors war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism. Nor is it an attempt to idealize the victorious war or the successful revolution as a 'social ideal,' since neither war nor revolution is something social or something ideal.
Schmitt, of course, could very well be wrong about his own concepts, but, if Emerson (or others - Emerson's claim is common enough) wants to sustain his reading, the ball is, as they say, in his court.
Keith Gessen as interviewed by something called the New York Inquirer:
The trouble with blogs arises when they go from being diaries (very private expressions, telling us something only that person knows) to being basically attention-grabbing mechanisms. That fake blog we had up was the result of my frustration with lit-bloggers. Back in the day, you would occasionally stumble upon some person blogging about their very private reading, what it was like, what their reactions were. Those people still exist, but they're drowned out by people who are just purveyors of literary gossip--who comment on books they haven't even read, who, as Marco likes to say, are just basically freelance publicists. It's one thing to be corrupted by, say, the pressure of writing for the New York Times Book Review, or the prospect of employment somewhere, or a blurb. But to sell your birthright for a couple of review copies and a link on a blogroll! For shame. So I spent a few weeks making fun of lit-bloggers and it was therapeutic. But then I stopped when I discovered the Alexa traffic ranking system and saw that I was practically the only person reading these things.
(via The Valve, of all things...)
Surely he's not, you know, talking about us. Right? As far as I know, LS has never received a single review copy (but feel free to go ahead and make me a hypocrite, expensive presses! I'd especially like a set of Moretti's new numbers, and I'd gladly review the $200 set right here on our burgeoning site...), we don't really gossip (does this count?), and, as far as I can tell, we publicize only the revolution to come...
We do, however, often enough comment on books we haven't read. In fact, in my case, almost always. But, really, who has time in the age of the instant-and-always-on, the age of the blog?
Anyway, I'm looking forward to my next issue of n+1. I'm even trying to talk my neighborhood bookstore into stocking it. Freelance publicist indeed...
Aw shucks, make it the largest wine cellar in Europe, I say (just think how jealous the cinephiles of underground Paris would become). Everybody knows there is an inverse relation between the number of nukes sitting under various egomaniacs' thumbs on any given day and such fancies as a "genuine fear of nuclear war." Come to think of it, maybe there are other examples where this is the case? The more people blog about (middle-brow) "literature," for example, or abuse their borrowed talking points as aggressive intellectual all-purpose currency with others, the less likely literature, or the flexing of the intellect becomes?
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