Long Sunday

'interpretation'

I would like to bounce off of Matt's heads-up about Bérubé, titled "Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)" below. Bérubé, for those who don't know, has written a critical, though certainly not 'trashing', review of Theory's Empire, the recently published anthology that wears its hostility to Theory, aka postmodernism, etc., on its sleeve. The discussion in the comments section to that post is interesting, and I urge everyone to take a look if inclined.

The question that discussion raises for me reminds me of an intellectual test that can be performed when thinking about the criticisms that 'postmodernism' and 'theory' tends to attract.

To apply this test, I chose a highly favorable review of Theory's Empire by Michael Potemra, National Review, July 4, 2005.

Populism Redux

Last but not late to the debate on populism is American Stranger, weighing in with two important posts:  part I and part II.  See also Hold That Thought.

Meanwhile, life's managers beyond the television they plush on, taking any chance of democracy with them (via Chabert).

GOD (Donner la mort) (i)

(The following comprises two brief responses to the opening of Jacques Derrida's Gift of Death (as translated from Donner la mort by David Wills).  The first is by guest author Kenneth Rufo, who blogs astutely at Ghost in the Wire  The idea for this series originates somewhere around here. –ed. (as if))


Titular Ruminations

Ken Rufo:  What would it mean to think death as a gift? To give death? And who is
in a position to give it? A few possibilities.

First, as the title's acronym implies, we have the almighty, the
transcendent creator, the beginning and, of course, the end. Our mortal
lives are his gift to us, a Christian gift. Death is God's gift to his
chosen people, for with death comes the possibility, at least the
Judeo-Christian possibility, of transcendence. Death comes from the
diving to, in effect, return us to the divine.

Second, almost opposite in inclination, death is the gift given to us
through indirection, sacrifice, and happenstance by the poorest, the
lowly, the Other. It is their labor, their contribution, their living –
and especially their dying – that gives us so much. Our privilege, be it
that of intellectual hegemony or the means by which we blithely take a
disproportionate share of the world's natural and industrial wealth.

Third, death is the gift we give ourselves. The good (eu-) death
(thanatos), the question of how to die, of one's relationship to death.
It is here that we find the most strident split between Heidegger and
Levinas, for while Heidegger founds Dasein on an authentic resoluteness
towards one's own death, Levinas finds in this resolution a
quintessential selfishness that belies those Other that makes our own
death (and life) possible. Being towards death cannot, for Levinas, mean
only being towards one's own death, hence the near universal ethical
injunction: thou shall not murder.

Fourth, death is the gift of the other, for it is through death that we
learn of our own mortality. We can take this in two directions. On the
one hand, it is through the death of others, through the realization of
their terminality, that we come to recognize our own finitude. These
“little Ds” - Ernest Becker's name for them – help us to understand the
existential and psychological importance of death. On the other hand,
death is an exemplar, a reset, a terminal experience much like the
terminus/terminal of some machine, the interface that defines the point
at which everyday life smacks into its own heuristic limits. It is in
this sense that Bataille can talk about the virtues of excess or that
Baudrillard can speak of death as a metaphor. It is in this sense that
the tragedy of Katrina accumulates meaning.
 

'Anti-trilogy': The China Miéville interview, part three

In the long-awaited third and final part of our interview, we discuss the disaster in the southern U.S., blogging, fantasy vs. realism vs. magical realism and the value for progressives of international law.
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ALPHONSE VAN WORDEN: You're blogging at Lenin's Tomb! I want to know how you're enjoying it.

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Well, it's nice to have an outlet for the occasional rant. I admit though that it i) gives me performance anxiety, and ii) creates a sense of obligation and guilt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying. I'm going to try to do one tonight, in fact.

AvW: What's your topic?

CM: It's a follow-up on Hurricane Katrina. Nothing very surprising - this is one of the problems of blogging, I rarely think I'm saying anything the readers haven't thought of - but I'm just obsessed with this story, can't leave it alone.

JOHN PISTELLI: Well, it's just a catastrophe. It's such sorry proof of the mess we're in.

CM: It's beyond belief. I find it more shocking than 9/11. It's shaping up to be a major crisis for Bush.

AvW: Do you feel it is a bit empowering though? Blogging? Contributing to the instant pool of reaction?

A Removeable Feast

R.Mutt: Looking for the meanings in Belshazzar's feast, it may be helpful to remember that it's a story about interpretation; and I think that Daniel's explanation of the writing already points to all the paradoxes of Rembrandt's painting. Daniel says "you have praised the gods of silver, and gold, or bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see, nor hear, nor know. And you have not glorified the God in whose hand is your breath and all your ways."

Fair enough, but how does the God in whose hand our breath is manifest himself? He is present first in the "golden and silver vessels" taken from the temple. After that he expresses himself in money: a mina, a mina, a shekel, and half minas. A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold. That contradiction seems be at to work on every level. While the story is a play on the "embarrassment of riches", at the same time as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property". And Rembrandt goes even further by turning the feast into a painting that, like you said, attempts to make its value, the magic of gold, concrete...

Alphonse van Worden: Do you think this could be the divine here straining to expand to accommodate itself to the greater abstraction of the prime relation of the social order, property? It - god, property, the divine principle - can't be stuck in this specific statue or estate, although it has a kind of preference for these sensual things, a gravitation toward them. But it has to be mobile as light, and yet tangible, detectable and incontestable all the same.

The contradiction here is provoking the radical style, this new art in this newly important medium. And so the relation of content to surface works out a complex relation to 'the ineluctable modality of the visual' which Calvinism and related protestant Christianities also put into action. Samson's blindness is the route to the divine; and the visual obsession of the (catholic) Paul - where the divine is seen directly, without metaphor, in its true form, and the eyes are the perfectly adequate organs of revelation - is critiqued as both inescapably fetishist and sort of artistically (as it is commercially) stagnant. More scuro, less chiaro! The relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire.

Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere. And the value which adheres in this golden-ness only grows more powerful and intense when the edges of the objects it inhabits are in the shadows, mutable, permeable, and the spirit of property (or the divine) which was trapped or locked into figures is revealed as not reducible to them; not latched to these unique material condition nor limited by the dimensions of objects. This is commercial wealth in the very act of transforming into capital proper.

'That alienation from the everyday': The China Miéville interview, part two

In the second part of our interview (first part here), Mr. Miéville discusses his prose style, contemporary comic books, the politics of narrative and his work on international law.

(N.B. See also Bionic Octopus for China's essay on the London bombings.)
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JOHN PISTELLI: Where does the question of prose style come in for you? You have a distinctive one, willingness to use jargons, to employ a wide vocabularly based on real or invented sciences as well as a penchant for the “high style” (longer detail-packed sentences, sonorous rhythms) that have earned you comparisons to Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, etc. Could you theorise after the fact about your style?

CHINA MIÉVILLE: There's more than one thing going on there. I'm tempted - as you say, theorising post facto - to think it's a triangulation of two things. On the one hand it's a predilection for the high pulp style that is, intriguingly, shared across genres. Lovecraft of course is its neurotically overblown high priest, but you see the same kind of somewhat overwrought prose in, say, Zane Grey. The fact that 'minimalist' prose in various iterations has been designated the official aesthetic form of acceptable bourgeois fiction, especially its newer hipster versions, is I think the triumph of a rather fatuous notion of a playful text, and it gives a silly but enjoyable radical pulp chic to not playing by those rules. Not that I've any objection to all precise prose, at all - M John Harrison is one of my outstanding literary heroes, and he is a prose scalpel-wielder - but the idea that that is 'how you do it' is absurd. The irony is that this reaction against a certain subset of boojy fiction is _also_ a reaction against a certain tendency in genre. Because a lamentable antipathy to Modernism and formal experimentation has taken some root in sf/f/h. You hear readers say things like 'I'm not bothered so much about the language, I just like to find out what happens.' There's an embedded, mostly untheorised notion that prose should be a window, through which you see, as clearly as possible, that it should be as nearly invisible as possible, to let us get to the content. Not only do I think that's sadly philistine, but it's also, in some sense, a betrayal of what makes fantasy fantasy. That alienation from the everyday can be achieved through form as well as content. So by playing with form like this, you get to link to your pulp heritage as opposed to trying to play by 'mainstream' rules, and paradoxically at the same time distance yourself from the failures of much genre. From Ben Watson, 'Fantasy and Judgement', in Historical Materialism 10, 4: 'The use of a transparent medium for the depiction of 'wonders' and 'ideals' - ... the flat efficiency of the prose of run-of-the-mill romance, horror, porn and fantasy fiction - betrays the fantastic subject-matter.' As not infrequently, I think Ben maybe veers toward the excessively prescriptive, but here I think he's very, very onto something.

Imagining Capital as Real (part I)

A couple of months ago I started working on a paper on the fantasy of neoliberalism. So, of course I turned to Alphonse for insight. Below, some of my initial reflections and Alphonse's insights. A longer, but still quite rough version of the paper is here:  Download enjoying_neoliberalism.doc .

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject 276).  But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree.  The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

Not the Badiou Meme

Okay, some time ago Fort Kant initiated a ‘meme’ on Badiou’s fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. He takes his cue from the Vienna Circle’s voting on the truth or falsehood of certain propositions. The meme then passes from here to here.

Of course, I have no intention of doing the meme. I would just like to take up something from AvW’s response. Now, Alph. has yet to reach the propositions themselves, struck instead by certain rhetorical gestures -

..... And this immediately places Badiou in the corps of clerks labouring away at the maintenance of the Art Market, which is fuelled constantly, and desperately, by the seemingly gratuitous issue of such prescriptions, Art is This, Art is That. It IS this, really, if hiddenly, and ought then be rendered more obviously itself (but not too obviously. It mustn‘t become out and out criticism). The predicates are of no consequence whatsoever.

Indeed. Before one sets about the content, what’s remarkable is the strident intoning of ‘Art is’. It seems to me that the chords struck by this intoning are like those of a manifesto. That is, Badiou’s ‘Theses’ = precisely the kind of statement one would expect to be made, pre-emptively, by a Movement in order to authorise and anticipate its own artistic practice.

A Correspondence

"A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot he deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews - merely because they were Jews - that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination - in this case, too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition. " Marcuse writing to Heidegger about his silence regarding National Socialism

'A truly monstrous thing to do': The China Miéville interview, part one

China Miéville, superstar fantasy novelist, author of King Rat, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, as well as a thoughtful theorist and noted Marxist, was kind enough to sit for this interview conducted (via chat session) by myself and Alphonse van Worden. (We interviewers have previously mused upon China's work; see here and here.) In part one, we discuss genre, revolution and Jane Eyre.
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JOHN PISTELLI: First, a question about genre. Not only do the Bas-Lag books belong to the genre of fantasy, but the narrative logic of each proceeds according to the logic of another dominant genre: horror in Perdido Street Station, nautical adventure in The Scar and the western in Iron Council. You've discussed in several interviews and essays the revolutionary potential of fantasy and it seems as though you're exploring the latent radicalism of these other genres by imbuing them with a conscious of the material reality that underlies the narratives they generate. In each novel, economic relations give rise to the plot: in PSS a deal between government and organized crime to maximize the profits and the capacity for social control of each results in the horror of the slake-moths, while in TS it's a mercantile economy that inspires the Lovers' quest and in IC the massive capital investment in territorial and market expansion that is the railroad is the dramatic premise. It would seem to imply that genres are what you make of them politically - you can employ them in a politically progressive and constructive way just as you can use them in the reactionary manner so evident in much popular culture. Is this your view of genre or is it more complicated than that?

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Any answer I give has to be understood as theorising after the facts. I grew up reading genre, and though I've become really interested in it at a theoretical level, at a gut basis I'm interested in genre because that's what was formative for me, as a reader. I think that what tends to interest me is the unexamined political assumptions of genre - or to be fair I should say 'usually' unexamined, because there's plenty of self-conscious revisionist genre out there, so there's a relatively easy radical chic to be accrued - and not unimportant just becuase it's easy! - by pointing out, problematising and ideology-critiquing those assumptions. One of the things therefore that I've tended to do is point out the economics that would tend to impinge on 'traditional' pulp or generic plots, like the quest narrative. So in The Scar for example - and with a warning to any readers that this discussion will of necessity include massive spoilers - there's a whole interrogation of the logic of exchange that makes for a 'real' sensible quest, and the frankly psychotic logic that would underly a 'traditional' fairy-tale-type quest. What I wanted to do there was traditional revisionism, with maybe the added twist that it wasn't just 'this is how it really is/was', but that the debate between that revisionist reality and the 'fantasy' assumptions *actually get played out* in the fantasy. So you have one character who really *is* on a fantasy quest, and she's a dangerous lunatic. That kind of game you can play endlessly. In Iron Council, during one of the western sequences, The Cavalry Ride To The Rescue. Of course their motives turn out not to be what they should be in proper white-hat cowboyism, but they *do also actually ride to the rescue*... however revisionist the reasons. At a more general level, I'd shy away from considering genre to contain 'latent radicalism'. I think it does contain perhaps a latent bacchanal, a carnivalesque in what I suppose is a vaguely Bakhtinian way and that is I suppose perhaps latently radical but also potentially reactionary. I think you can make a case that the fantastic aesthetic has a radical core. I'm not sure I'd say the same for genre, which strikes me as more of a tool, usable for various ends of various political stamps.