A. on the argument

"Argumentum derives from the theme argu, found in argentum and signifying "splendor, clarity." To argue signified originally, "to make shine, to clarify, to open a passage for light." In this sense, the argument is the illuminating event of language, its taking place."

-Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death

Voice, voice, voice (grit, mud, friction)

The following is a guest post by blahfeme, author of the weblog, blah-feme.

Voicing, finding one’s own voice, passive, active, middle voices, voice leading, voice-overs, voice training, to voice as if to say… around that word, vox, voz, Stimme, голос, φωνή, λαλιά, a number of highly territorialised and powerful tropes orbit:  the voice marks an origin, a departure, a making sound out of silence, a movement, a breath of discourse–it’s life.  A becoming and an authority.  Voices do not sing–to sing is to transform the voice into the singing voice, a voice other than itself, something always already at odds with itself–to set that voice into song, to take the prosaic shortness of vowels and lengthen them, set them onto a more determinate pitch structure, order that production differently, structure stress differently, make voicing into singing, is to bring voice into an unsettling relationship with itself, and to disturb something we have tried to keep hidden for a long time:  our voices, voicing, what we say… it is all, in the end, susceptible to the capricious terminality of material.

The terms on which the singing voice might be said to do cultural work are extremely difficult to catalogue, since post-reformation European and North American cultures at least have tended to deal more readily in imageries, tropes and topoi that are available to visual shorthanding.  The voice might thus be said to pose something of a representational problem; its sonic materiality that never settles cannot be held still.  This fidgety voice, a material capriciousness, seems always somehow just out of reach, beyond those things that we are able to say, and yet saying them nonetheless.  This point is made by Chion:

The voice is elusive.  Once you have eliminated everything that is not the voice itself–the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that colour it, what’s left?  (The Voice in Cinema, 1)

It might therefore be worth trying to grasp this problem as one that can be addressed not simply in terms of what we ‘do’ with the voice, but in terms also of what it does to us–in what ways does it intervene in the formation of our ego ideal, how does it articulate, thematise or otherwise engage gender, race, class and so on?  Mladen Dolar has recently made a striking intervention in this problematic, and settles on a conception of voice as in some sense the sinthome of the Western episteme.  In this passage, he addresses Georgio Agamben’s Homo sacer and gets to the core of that epistemic problem that haunts our speaking:

… the voice is not simply an element external to speech, but persists at its core, making it possible and constantly haunting it by the impossibility of symbolizing it.  And even more: the voice is not some remnant of a previous precultural state, or some happy primordial fusion when we were not yet plagued by language and its calamities; rather, it is the production of logos itself, sustaining and troubling at the same time.  (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 106.)

What is a stake for Dolar here is the very ground on which the split, as recognised by Derrida, between logos or word and phone, is built.  That rupture, a symptom for Dolar of the operation of culture (‘the production of logos’) on the voice, makes access to the voice extremely difficult, as if it were in some sense always spectral, always in some sense beyond the fixing operation of symbolization.

Dolar’s extraordinary insights nonetheless leave something out (and he would no doubt, as a Lacanian, be the first to admit as such since that orientation is all about marking the abyss, the missing, the lack, the sinthome).  To slightly over-characterise Dolar, there is in his book a certain disdain for the aesthetic pleasuring in the voice, a disdain which flows from the need to sustain a critical relationship with his field (this is a point also made by Pinocchio Theory in his recent review of Dolar’s book).  I want to suggest here that, although that critical relationship is crucial to the appropriate operation of Dolar’s strategy, it can also, if left unattended to, operate as a kind of dead-end political Puritanism, at its worst a kind of disavowal of the pleasuring that forms a part of any coherent political theory of the voice, especially as we encounter it in song.  In a sense, then, the question as to how the voice does cultural work is a question about the relationship between ideology and enjoyment.

When that voice takes flight in song, the volume of that encounter between ideology and pleasure is cranked right up.  Voice in this way would thus, in this extended Dolarian sense, represent not merely an impasse or a place of traumatic breaking (as Žižek makes it clear in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the mother in Hitchcok’s The Birds, on seeing her neighbour’s corpse with bloody eyes, runs from the room and cannot make any sound… the horror sticks in her throat); it would also allow for a place of joy, for ecstatic derangement, for being other than instrumental to the symbolic machine.  To enjoy voice is to become a noise maker, to become, in the eyes of those that speak from their gilded place of symbolic composure, a thug. Before my ASBO is served, then, let’s wreak some havoc.

Imagine three voices in song (I am thinking here of voices in the singular, in solo, of course, although choruses, choirs, ensembles of voices, each bring their own set of dynamics that I will think about elsewhere). 

The first, a voice that does not hover very far off the ground–a voice that seeks to stage a certain imagination of authenticity:  I think here of the quiet rustle of José González or Devendra Banhart.  These are voices that perform a certain easiness, a composure that is not, in the end, about intimacy but, on the contrary, about the spectacular.  Logos gives way to the pleasure of that staging without ever finding its ground - voice here resonates with the double-bind of singing - on the obne hand it is the simple voice of unmediated song, of song as spontaneity and, on the other, it is voice that is disciplined, held in a small territory in order to project the fantasy of immediacy.

The second is a voice that refuses the dance of authenticity, refutes the organic voice and reaches fo the flattened, open-ended hydrid voice, a voice without origin, a voice without subject. It is the voice of the machine, the voice without inflection, without meat. I think here of Kraftwerk, of Bjork of 'pluto', of the end of the organic dream of voice as the speaking of labour.

The third is a voice in flight, a voice that startles with its ephemeral shimmer, its staged-ness, its artiface - here 'trained' voices predominate - opera, Lied, but also certain forms of country, rock and jazz - they are voices that embrace their constructedness, their taking flight in technics, in their agility, their lightness, their airy openness, their purity.

Here then are at least three of the voice-tropes that operate in Western song, in a song, that is, which has consistently sought since the Reformation to rehearse what Lacan has termed the 'social psychosis' of the Western episteme. Song, that supplement to speech, that double supplement of writing, a symptom of the hardness and fixity of media, of the late modern predicament, of alienation from labour; that song is also a staging, a showing, a narrating of the predicament, its dramaturgy.

Richard Middleton has recently gestured at this possibility in his new book Voicing the Popular (Routledge, 2006) in which he understands song as offering a privileged site for understanding a certain vernacular history of the family, of labour, gender and of 'subjectivity'.  I would go further – what this voice in song does is disturb the fantastical ground on which family, gender, labour, authenticity, even, can be thought – it stages whilst drawing attention to that staging, it narrates whilst radically materialising narrative forms and conventions, it speaks whilst pointing at the breath hat makes speech possible: in this sense, voice is the hardest of all materials.

The Politics of Standing Still

[This is a guest post by John, from SlowLearner.]

Speaking at a seminar in Padova on “Democracy and War” in January 2005, Giorgio Agamben reflected on the nature of movement as a word and a concept, noting that the word “movement,” in its explicit political context, lacks a concrete definition, and, as such, “risks compromising our choices and strategies.” With the operative organizing concept undefined from the beginning, Agamben seems to ask, how can any political action that arises from its conceptualization be possible? This ambiguity raises a number of questions in itself: How does one differentiate between so-called ‘democratic’ movements—labor, political, social? How does a movement begin or end? And, perhaps most importantly—where are they going?

Continue reading “The Politics of Standing Still”

Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

Continue reading “Schmitt and Mao”

Last Men, or the phenomenology of the camp

Just a link to some video,  found at American Samizdat.   And following on from here.  Update:  um, alright.  Who says we have to let them vote?  In an entirely more frivolous vein (or sinister, depending on how you look at it...and not that we'd ever want to become that kind of blog, heavens forbid!) here's the Fema Rap For Kids (courtesy of Mefi).  More on Katrina from a rhetoric/discourse-analysis tack here.

And on yet another note, some congratulations to Baghdad Burning are in order.

How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Continue reading “How No Can You Go?”

para-digm

Let's read that one again.  In contestation with dogmatic misinterpretations of both his own work (especially Remnants of Auschwitz, as paradigmatic rather than para-digmatic) and that of Foucault (as purely "metaphorical" rather than paradigmatic), and with Kant (whose 'example' remains "the example of a [universal] rule which cannot [itself] be stated") – contestations which go to the heart of his philosophical project (as signaled most clearly in The Coming Community and Potentialities), Agamben wishes to show that, on the contrary, "the logic of the example has nothing to do with the universality of the law."  Right then.

More precisely: 

Continue reading “para-digm”

Chora

"Discourse here meets its limit--in itself, in its very performative power.  It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.  [...] Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.  This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal" or "illegitimate."  They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment.  They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded...The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news.  One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 242)

"Here one notices that there are cases in which, posed in terms of means/end, the problem of law remains undecidable.  This ultimate undecidability, which is that of all problems of law...is the insight of a singular discouraging experience.  Where is one to go after recognizing this ineluctable undecidability? Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, upon a beyond of mediation and so beyond language as a sign.  Sign is here understood, as always in Benjamin, in the sense of mediation, as a means toward an end.  It seems at first that there is no way out, and so there is no hope."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 285)

Let me attempt to make my general disposition, such as it is, explicit.  I am tempted to subscribe fully to Derrida's reading of, and resistance to Benjamin, and thus in certain respects against Agamben.  To subscribe fully to the disquiet Derrida outlines, and to the questions he poses, in this already much-cited, seminal essay, "Force of Law:  The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"   Above all, perhaps, to not be in too much of a hurry, as Derrida was fond of saying (in that yesteryear still blissfully ignorant of "teh! serious" weblogs, we can only assume). 

There are some real differences here, as Adam alluded to earlier (Agamben calls the likewise leaping conclusion of Derrida's essay on Benjamin a peculiar misunderstanding, and understandably so, since surely it's fair to say that Derrida is addressing his remarks in no small part to Agamben's Benjamin, so to speak).  For Agamben's fullest response, as far as I am aware, the reader is encouraged to consult Homo Sacer I (above linked).  The differences here could certainly be sketched out in many ways, using everyone from Kant to Heidegger to Schmitt as one's primary filter (not to mention Blanchot, Wittgenstein, Montaigne or Pascal, Rawls or Sam Weber and so on, all of whom appear in Derrida's historico-philosophical sketch).  But perhaps some summary schematics can at this point be posed, or repeated, both for the sake of clarity and complexity (if not for the added benefit of driving the larger panopticon crazy with shades of ambivalence).  Derrida is useful in this way.   But first it should be plainly noted:  even where he claims to be leaving "Benjamin the last word," Derrida is picking up where Benjamin left off, specifically there where Benjamin states:

The realm of ends, and therefore also the question of a criterion of justness, is excluded for the time being from this study.  (279)

The question of justice, as I believe Paul Passavant touched on earlier, runs strongly through Derrida's larger project, in which the ideas of a just decision, a justice to-come, and a certain 'messianicity without messianism' are at least suggestively, elliptically or implicitly, opposed to Benjamin's (and Agamben's) perceived messianism.  Not that any of these ideas are so easily understood, of course.  But perhaps it is not merely coincidental that in another nearby essay,"Faith and Reason," Derrida's discussion of these topics repeatedly returns to a single, rather enigmatic word:  "chora" (which he borrows from Plato, and borrows it not for the first time, as we shall see).  Would it be accurate to suggest that this Platonic "chora" is invoked at least partly in response to Benjamin's meditations on "divine violence," as described, in some literary fashion, by the story of Korah?  I don't know.  It is possible, I suppose, that Derrida has been responding to this essay, in one form or another, for some time.

Continue reading “Chora”

Until the End of the Day

A (very young) old advisor of mine once (way back in 1993) wrote a joint review of Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community and Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society.  It holds up pretty well, I think.  (Though in anticipation of certain precise and no doubt singularly convincing comments, I'm happy to be corrected.)  Thanks to the generous funding Long Sunday has just received from the Association of Abstruse Kitsch and Kantians, we are happily able to make the full text available to you here right now, indeed, without your having to click anywhere for at least a full 65 seconds.  As the themes are still as relevant (and what is surely unfortunate, as dogmatically contested) as ever (though just imagine, back in 1993 nobody was yet nostalgic for the good ol' days of postmodernism), and albeit at the risk of somewhat belaboring the topic:  please enjoy.  Personally I think the essay goes a great way toward advancing this conversation, the one John S. Ransom (the "S" being silent) has so wonderfully begun (though in another direction and one with which he may, of course, disagree).

The following then, is penned by Heesok Chang and it first appeared in 1993 in Postmodern Culture:

I. Philosophical Homelessnes

    Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from _The Theory of the Novel_:    "'Philosophy is really homesickness,' says Novalis: 'it is  the urge to be at home everywhere.'"   

    According to Lukacs that is why "integrated civilizations"--where the soul feels at home everywhere,  both in the self and in the world--have no philosophy.  Or  "why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are  philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy.  For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that  archetypal map?"^1^ 

    Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of  the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy's  "utopian aim" would not find many adherents today.  If anything, the "task" of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, "archetypal" vocation.  The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

Update: Relatedly, please see Adam Kotsko's valuable new review (PDF) of Nancy's as-yet-untranslated work, Déclosion : Déconstruction du christianisme, 1, in which Nancy begins to formulate a response to the essays by Derrida, particularly "Faith and Knowledge," collected in Acts of Religion (not, incidentally, Derrida's title).

Continue reading “Until the End of the Day”

further animalia, this time without pictures

More utterly hilarious Cliché War fallout from "The March of the Penguins" here.  Penguins, yes, those deceptively difficult to caricature creatures in a savage land whose greatest feat is having mastered the cocktail party effect.  I've since updated my previous post, in case you only skimmed the horrendous bloglines version (many thanks to S. for pointing out that penguins don't actually "prune" themselves, as in spontaneously lop off their own limbs, so much as "preen," etc.)  What follows are a few more thoughts on 'the animal', patched together from a further reading of John Berger and then turning toward Agamben.  Apologies in advance for their somewhat scattered, well bloggish quality.  Any comments or criticisms more than welcome.

Continue reading “further animalia, this time without pictures”

Otium Tibi Molestum Est

After having spent the entire afternoon in daydreams I opened a book and found this.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

                              

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle - a kind of gallery - is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

                                                                                                               

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them - to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea - whom we saved - cannot love us.

                            

- Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Blanchot Blogging

There could be little less discreet than writing "on Maurice Blanchot."  Hopelessly redundant, in a sense, either one must accept the theory he provides, or reject it.   There is little room for compromise. 

The real work of writing alongside, that which would work him silently (though not parasitically, or simply victim to mimetic contagion) into one's thinking.  Well, I'm not sure that I'm there yet...though the danger his writing poses in such regard, is certainly far greater than most.

Continue reading “Blanchot Blogging”

Open Memorial?

A friend of mine has an interview with Peter Eisenman, architect of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin, published in The Nation.  I've excerpted one bit, but the whole thing is rather worth reading.  One aspect of the memorial that strikes me is the apparent concern for irregularity, in particular for irregular distances, or steps.  (Agamben counterposes the "memorable" to the "unforgettable," where the "unforgettable," as represented by the tombstones, is that which resists closure or archival.)  While neither a uniform, sterilized graveyard nor purely ostentatious and inaccessible (nor excessively immune), the site suggests the opposite of what might be described as any essential distance.  Perhaps.

You once said in an interview that when you travel to Germany you go as a New Yorker and you return as a Jew. What did you mean by that?

I think that's really part of the problem. The Germans treat me with so much deference, and that makes me feel Jewish, right? They step all over themselves to be nice. Nobody treats you this way in New York. In New York a Jew is a Jew, an Italian is an Italian, a Muslim is a Muslim: Nobody's going out of his way to treat you in a special way. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany. And that's what we're trying to get over. The Germans should stop pretending that they love all Jews.

$4 a gallon

Like a cartoon character still running windmills, oblivious on air, suspended before the fall, “America...is over,” or so claims a recent article penned by Michael Ventura (via).  I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some of the meatiest parts:

Continue reading “$4 a gallon”