palliative care

K-punk has a truly brilliant piece up about Children of Men. For one thing, he does a terrific job of decoding the squeamish-making situational conceit of the work - a world in which women can no longer have children - a conceit which of course sends us when we first hear about it almost automatically in all sort of directions that aren't really borne out by the film itself (anxiety about working women, anxiety about homosexuality, anxiety - a la Pat Buchanan et al - about the death of the "white race," etc...) K-punk's version is much more (aesthetico-ideologically) optimistic and truer to what we see on screen...

The third reason that Children of Men works is because of its take on cultural crisis. It's evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. (If the sterility were to be taken literally, the film would be no more than a requiem for what Lee Edelman calls 'reproductive futurism', entirely in line with mainstream culture's pathos of fertility.) For me, this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?

Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and repermutation. Could it be, that is to say, that there are no breaks, no 'shocks of the new' to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the 'weak messianic' hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?

I'm going to say more about this on my own site when I get a chance, but one of the (very basic) things that I loved about the film was that, despite the fact that human life itself is dwindling out, that these people are living in either the aftermath or the final stages of what looks to be the ultimate catastrophe, one which will surely culminate, within a few years, in the end of the human race, they go about their business - commuting to work, stopping for coffee, watching tv, etc. The film pounds us with the savage uncanniness of the thought of rejiggering our retirement accounts, redoing the kitchen, or, of course, seeing movies as the world ends around us...

Think of the dystopian works that share this stance: 1984 and the cafeteria talk, Josef K. thinking about his missed breakfast at the opening of The Trial, etc...

One does wonder about the economic organization of this imagined world. Certainly it's not our system - can't be. Uncreative destruction without growth, hyper-full employment, hyper-inflation geometrically beyond Weimar precedent. There's no sign in the movie of what has happened on this score, save for the fact that we see no one - save for the coffeehouse people, presumably - who isn't a public servant.... And there are ration books...

If it is socialism, it is of course a stripe of national socialism. But what do we make of a fantasy of a socialism that can only arrive by natural dictat, after the real end of history, just before the end of mankind itself?

9/11, of course, wasn't the end of the world in any sense, no matter what anyone wanted us to believe then or wants us to believe now. But I do distinctly recall as I shuffled around Brooklyn Heights that day, a sense that something strange in just these terms was afoot. On the one hand, there was a palpable if tacit giddiness that seemed to stem from the idea that there'd be no more work that day, tomorrow, maybe even the whole week. People I ran into coming home early from work were excited to be off, if also horrified. A snow day, as it were, for the entire city. (It is controversial to register this ambivalence, of course - remember the recent dustup about Thomas Hoepker's photograph?) Something else to think about, something to do other than paper shuffling or service work, or studying etc. On the other hand and at the same time, I am quite sure that many of us, just days or hours or minutes or even seconds after the climactic scene, were thinking "but what about that work that I have to do." I know for a fact that an acquaintance of mine, despite being aware in a general way of what was going on, continued to work at his dissertation chapter in the university library, tapping away as the whole world freaked out.

Just before the first tower fell and I was forced by the cloud of dust to head home, I remember making deals with myself about just how much time I could give myself for this sort of thing. I was reading for my oral exams at the time - I think I decided that I would take that day off but no more. In the end, I started reading again on September 13. Or maybe it was the night of the 12th.

Long story short, I think our fantasies and fears about catastrophe, dystopia, and the end of the world have quite a lot to do with somewhat banal anxieties and ambivalence about the work that we do, the conditions under which we work, and the possibility that our work situations might one day change. But I'll say a bit more about this soon.

Anyway, more later. But do go read K-punk on this - I'm not saying here anything he hasn't said far more penetratingly and eloquently. It's a brilliant post...

Long Sunday in The American Book Review

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”

Progressive avant-garde?

Something I stumbled across in a bookstore, yesterday, in Asheville.  The absence of any comment–apart, perhaps, from the ambiguous sigh expressing merely, "Ah, but the science of it all"–should not  of course mislead you into assuming only the worst, most simplistic or didactic approval of any of the most obvious potential glosses, naturally.  In other words, all pervasive ironies aside, I just thought it was interesting.  (Certainly a cultural context worthy of attention, in any case, for historians of artistic, creative and political groupings, generally.)

Continue reading “Progressive avant-garde?”

Lazy Me

Might I recommend this lovely article, by Scott McLemee.

Dropped out of the calendar

From Walter Benjamin, section ten of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations):

It is–if one follows Bergson–the actualization of the durée which rids man's soul of obsession with time.  Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscenses that had worked their way into his pores during his sojourn in the unconscious.  Proust was an incomparable reader of Fleurs du mal, for he sensed that it contained kindred elements.  Familiarity with Baudelaire must include Proust's experience with him.  Proust writes:  "Time is peculiarly chopped up in Baudelaire; only a very few days open up, they are significant ones.  Thus it is understandable why turns of phrases like 'one evening' occur frequently in his works."  These significant days are days of recollection, not marked by any experience.  They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from time.  As for their substance, Baudelaire has defined it in the notion of the correspondances, a concept that in Baudelaire stands side by side and unconnected with the notion of "modern beauty."

Disregarding the scholarly literature on the correspondances (the common property of the mystics; Baudelaire encountered them in Fourier's writings), Proust no longer fusses about the artistic variations on the situation which are supplied by synaesthesia.  The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements.  Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing.  Only in this way was he able to recognize in it the challenge meant for him alone, a challenge which he incorporated in the Fleurs du mal.

[...]

The correspondances are the data of remembrance–not historical data, but data of prehistory.  What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life.  Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled "La Vie antérieure." The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapor of tears, tears of homesickness.  "The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears well up in his eyes," writes Baudelaire in his review of the poems of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.  There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated by the symbolists later.  The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life:

Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d'une façon solennelle et mystique
Aux couleurs du couchant refléte par mes yeux.

C'est là que j'ai vécu...

The breakers, rolling the images of the sky,
Mixed, in a mystical and solemn way,
The powerful chords of their rich music
With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

There did I live...

[...] "Recueillement" traces the allegories of the old years against the deep sky:

...Vois se pencher les défuntes Années
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées

...See the dead departed Years in antiquated
Dress leaning over heaven's balconies.

In these verses Baudelaire resigns himself to paying homage to times out of mind that escaped him in the guise of the outdated.

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Look Now, Pay Later

For a time and  time and time and time and time and time of fear, he already had a few brave words:

Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won’t read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don’t pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.

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Serious Figures

John
CR
IT

Matt
Jodi
Ken
A

Alain, David, Alphonse van Worden

Alphonse (day) Alphonse (night)

This will, hopefully, clear some things up around here.  For one, that's not Zizek we're all holding.  Everybody, even YH, should go play God right now.  And yes, once complete, the Long Sunday Lego set will, one presumes, be made available for "purchase."   Obviously, this would be a declaration of No Theory Day, although you know I think they've been mistaking our No Theory Days for "Theory" over in The Valve.  How bizarre.  Let's call it No Theory Morning, rather.

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About Long Sunday

  "Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure:  it was a masterpiece of English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English began unconsciously to lust again for their work- and week-day." - Nietzsche Beyond Good & Evil

And then courtesy of here:

[…] Capitalism’s ever-lasting Sunday is the perennial workday of surplus value and surplus labor. The time of capital, thus characterized, extends the end of history into the dead eternity of surplus time. In the time of capital, there is no “now” that might not be simultaneous with any other “now”; there is no “now” that would not be intent upon its return in another, none that would not itself stand under the law of returns and appear as the mere revenant of another “now.” This means, however, that the time of capital is the time of the dead “now” as its own second coming as revenue and surplus, as re-now and over-now. It is the automatic time of a homogenous continuum, of which Benjamin says in “Fate and Character” it is “improperly temporal.” Every “now” owes itself another “now” and owes itself to another “now.” And it itself is meanwhile only a deficient “now,” replicating itself in yet another “now” that is equally deficient. This formula of a “now” owing to another “now” characterizes not only capital time and the time of the Capital Christian epoch, but the philosophical conception of time in the epoch from [End Page 89] Aristotle to Hegel and beyond: it describes the negativity of the “now” that is now already past and passed on into another. And just as the time of this epoch is “improperly temporal,” its history is improperly historical, frozen in the reproduction of the ever-unchanging schema of debt and debt-increasing compensations, consisting in the “paradoxical relaxation of a dead Sunday.”

Capitalism is not only a cult and a permanent cult of immediacy; it is both of these, both cult and permanent, only because it functions by accruing guilt. This is the third and the decisive trait, emphasized by Benjamin in the essentially religious structure of this economic form and life form. He writes: “Capitalism is probably the first case of a cult that produces guilt rather than atonement. In this respect, its religious system exists in the downfall of a monstrous movement. A monstrous consciousness of guilt, unable to find atonement, reaches for the cult not to find atonement, but rather to make the guilt universal—to hammer it into the conscious mind and finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt, so as to finally interest Him in atonement” [GS 6: 100-01].  (from Werner Hamacher’s “Guilt History Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’” - Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002))

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Long Sunday Indeed...

From the Washington Post:

One reason for the slow White House response, said a Republican who has been in contact with several officials, is that so many high-level officials and aides were on vacation. Vice President Cheney, for instance, was in Wyoming and did not return unil Thursday, and Nicolle Devenish, the president's top communications adviser, is getting married in Greece with a number of mid-level aides in attendance.

So the question: Is this simply a case of (utterly unprecedented) PR ineptitude, or (as AvW has it) are they actually trying to tell us something important?

All the Names

In lieu of a proper explanation of where this blog comes from, where it's going, and all the rest, just thought I'd share the list of names that we considered for this blog, in order of appearance from first to last. Spent a long sunday indeed sifting these out of the LS email archives.

Long Sunday
Bottleneck
Rogues
Voyous
Por Ahora
For Now
For Now, Voyous
Voyous (for now)
Northwest
Klippot
The Rhineland Intelligencer
Novel Disseisin
'tis Maria's Hand
Persistent Critique
Condorcet Paradox
Plan O
Beagleton
Condorcet
Hapax Legomenon
Log Rhythms
Beacon Fires
Night-Fancies
Black Bubble
99 Problems
Brown Rainbow
Triumph Over Mastery
Noble Rot
Bupkiss
Bupkus
Passages
Bizarre Conceit
Condorcet's Complaint
Sunday Falls
Un Coup De Des
All the Names
Oui Monsieur oui vous êtes mort

Every Day is Like Sunday

There is something about the experience of Sundays which makes the Kafka quote resonate for me, though perhaps not in the Aggadic sense that Franz intended. Because I associate Sundays less with Kafka than with a more prosaic set of lines, from a poem by Dylan Thomas, ‘That Sanity Be Kept’. I always imagine Thomas’s poem must have been written on a Sunday, though there is no evidence for this belief apart from a few suggestive lines.

Sunday is certainly not a day for those, like Thomas’ narrator, ‘sitting at open windows in their shirt’, observing ‘what passes by’. It is a day to walk arm in arm across English parks, lending love illustration. The pathos of distance in Thomas’s narration is that of a writer who does not feel fully part of the world he is observing, observation is a consolation for isolation, the writer is inevitably an outsider. Here one sublimates ones inability to lend love illustration by illustrating others doing so. The dispassionate tone of ‘regarding’, ‘observing’ (twice), ‘watching’ (twice), ‘seeing’ conceals the passion of a will to power as knowledge. In the poem’s final lines this becomes apotheosis: the narrator is ‘like some great Jehovah of the West’, achieving that omniscience to which the poet or the intellectual aspires, even though such knowledge is known to be a burden.

In the chapter of Husserl’s Ideas entitled ‘The Annihilation of the World’ the philosopher considers the possibility that the physical world be completely destroyed. Though we can conceive our embodied ego no longer existing, we cannot think the annihilation of the cogito, the transcendental ego, as it is the precondition of any ‘world’ rather than a product of it. The total absence of consciousness is inconceivable, an insane thought.

Thomas’s narrator could almost have drawn on the insight. Separation’s counterpart is the nihilism of an observation (whether phenomenological or poetic) which contemplates the world’s destruction. Thomas already conceives it. ‘Thinking of death’ is sure enough the contemplation of the narrator’s own demise, his embodied disappearance; but it also seems the possibility of this world disappearing, perhaps in the act of a vengeful God whose omnipotence complements his omniscience. Thomas’ narrator, seemingly implacable, aloof, ‘unobtrusive’, all but threatens it. This is the nihilistic implication of the apotheosis, that either myself or the world could go under, what would it matter? Impotent melancholy’s alter ego is the fury of destruction. That sanity be kept, this is to be contemplated, though it is an insane thought it is one which will keep him from insanity. The thought that he is no mere ego, but Jehovah, this megalomaniac notion is surely the result of his separation from alter. But it is his simultaneous recognition of others who, despite their painful distance, are not so very different from himself, this thought can keep insanity at bay.

Thomas’ narrator is the third, the phenomenological observer who recognizes the recognition and the misrecognition of others, ‘marks the couples’ as well as could a philosopher, but as poet brings language to bear where concepts only say so much. It is at the level of the symmetry of words that ‘invitations’ prompt ‘inventions’, a ‘gesture’ calls up a ‘grimace’. We read too quickly and overlook how well drawn this picture is. But the subtle symmetry of expression does not last; the penultimate stanza moves uncomfortably towards the imbalanced, the upset, in rhythm as in life.

Thomas probably wouldn’t recognize himself in such a reading. It may be too abstract a take on what is actually rooted in place and time. After all, he gives us the detail of a particular world, the alter of Englishness confronting the Welsh self, Welsh difference amongst English self-sameness. And what would Thomas say were he around today, looking down on the same park? He would no doubt see on the ‘littered grass’ not ‘matrons’ and ‘brass bands’ but cohorts of carefree Sunday Times readers. Or ‘letting the traffic pass’ he would see countless Sunday shoppers thronging the unquiet roads, a different litter in tow. They too somehow lend love illustration. Though beneath their calm exteriors one could detect, now as then, a certain insecurity, the dark fear of being alone or being unemployed, unable to pay the extortionate mortgage without their precarious double income. It still expresses itself in gesture and grimace. A dawning sense that this could be all there is to their lives, what Thomas calls (in a line I carry about with me every Sunday) ‘a vague bewilderment at things not turning right’.