blah-feme

I have moved!!!

2006-08-17T14:26:00.000Z

I have moved to another provider!!!

Please click here to redirect your browser, or wait to be auto-directed....

I look forward to welcoming you to my new blogsite.

best wishes from blahfeme :-)

reading

2006-08-16T17:11:00.000Z

What is striking about the blog style (at least as I have encountered it) is not just its confessional tone, its obsequious self-pitying me-ing that we all indulge in, but, and I think this is quite remarkable actually, the intense attention it pays to writing.

Oh, I can't write...

Why can't I write?

Who will help me write?

Who will write with me?

Where is my writing community?

Will writing every get any easier?

An so on....

I have many sympathies with these feelings and struggle incessantly with writing myself. I think what is nonetheless still striking about this writing about writing about writing about writing is the extent to which it omits or marginalises reading.

I read all the time and, in fact, I read far more than I write (this is not surprising, we all do). I read regularly a number of blogs: I cite, spurious, in the hall of mirrors, hero harvest, k-punk and so on. I read them regularly because the pleasure of the text, to use that old old old Barthesian turn of phrase, is what drives me. Their writing is part of it, but my reading is also part of it. How to think this in the blogopshpere? How to make sense of this simple but disturbing recognition of the asymmetry of writing and reading here?

We are all atuned to recognising in asymmetry the silent operation of power: where one is marginalised by the other (forgive the pun), where one side seems to smother the other, here is where we are taught to sniff out the operation of ideology, the work of wickedness.

I'm not sure this is strictly the way to go here, however. What does it mean to emphasise writing over reading? Are we all obsessive compulsives that must write, write, write, like crazies wanting to better the last statement, take ownership of the discourse, be the person who said the best thing ever about x, y, z?

Men do this all the time: they like to steal the talking stick, buy it, intervene without leave, make their mark, speak the loudest. I have always been interested in this phenomenon, not least because most of my colleagues are men and they like to talk (a lot). It doesn't really upset or disturb me - I like to talk too (boy do I like to talk). And when no one listens, they get houghy, bad temeperd and ungenerous.

I think what makes this tendency so interesting in the blogosphere is the putative gender neutrality of writing: of course, many would say of my blog (see that subtle return again to me-ing?) 'oh it's clear he's a man - I mean LOOK at that discursive swagger'. Some, indeed, have said of me that my use of language is very masculine. Others might say, 'well hey, she seems to me to write full of the feminine - the playfulness, the empathy with others, the desire to share, be part fo a collective...' and so on.

Either way, the crucial point here is that is is never completely clear. I could, for example, write as a woman or as a man, deliberately ape the geder markers of language, try out different personas genders, avatars.

What is striking in all this (I like the word 'striking', you see) is that reading is more difficult to speak of here. It was a symptom of a certain public masculinity in 19th-century Germany, for example, to figure readers as feminine - they merely consume as men deliver discourse. This tendency is now radically problematised, but not altogether dead: in a real sense, we are all consuming women now, all obsequiously drawn (to use that misogynistic language of the German Gelehrtenstand) into an incompetent and partial fetishising of discourse and blogging might perhaps be one of the ways in which a sense of 'possession' or 'disciplining' of that discourse is effected. If I have it, in archive, I can retuirn to it again and again. It is stilled. Held in place.

The absence of reading fromthe blogger's symbolic economy, however, has another and perhaps even more problematic element: the tendency in that overemphasis on writing to overemphasise also a certain shorthanded authenticity of self: 'they don't get me'; 'I'm so tired'; 'what am I doing here?'. Now, let me make myself absolutely clear here: I do not want to give the impression that the confessional tone of the blog is something always already ideologically suspect. No, what I am trying to say (and finding quite difficult since I am always inexorably drawn back into the first person) is that discourse, especially blog discourse (like all discourses, a prosthesis born of a certain kind of material and ideolgoical technology) structures that mode of speaking of being for us.

As a collectivbe (for that is surely what we are in some sense) we are structured into the belief that the prioritising of the personal narrative over other narratives (how can I write this while Lebanon fall apart?) is not only appropriate, but desirable, ideal, best. To recognise that is by no mans to escape it, but it might be where we can begin to take responsibility for some of how we feel: when I feel alone, perhaps I might in some sense have put myself here? When people seem not to agree with my view of the world, is it because I expect them to share my view so closely that there is no room for them? Am I in some sense the architect of my own despair?

Of course, the question returns again to the first person - again and again it does this, but that surely tells us something about how this discourse of ours works on us. This at least we can share - the fantasy of individuation, what Schopenhauer termed the principium individuationis is what binds us together in a way. To uncover that fantasy would be to uncover the ground of our collectivity.

These are tough questions to ask, but they lay out a vernacular ethics that is probably crucial to the political work of Blogostan: to blog is not just to share a string of self-analytical monologues, but also to open out, to be generous of heart, to embrace difference and otherness in ways that do not reduce to lazy reletivism.

I am no model for this (really, no model at all), but perhaps thinking about reading instead of writing might eb a way to start?

Just a thought - read it if you want to.... I need you more than you need me

the trace of hatred

2006-08-15T16:22:00.000Z

This is what hatred looks like when it finally retreats, its trace, if you will: homes reduced to rubble, people's lives smashed and the new spaces, reworked, articulated, strewn and remade, where another hatred is made - these places begin to simmer, howl and twist with the heat of indignation and despair. There is in this moment of stressing the place, of marking (literally) a place with hatred, something (some thing) that reaches way beyond itself. Its event-ness, its autonomy, is vast, without end, never vitiated.

Even here, in this calm, in this afterbirth of that cowardly hatred from the air, the palpable stench of 'radical injustice', as trauma theorists have termed it, burns its way through the Lebanese consciousness. That sense can never be satiated, never fully redressed, never avenged, but fed, nurtured, held in place with each evil. It is the objet a of trauma, the sin that can never be atoned.

This sense of radical imbalance, then, is strewn across the Lebanese consciousness, writ large in Hezbollah, Hamas, part of the popular indignation, the popular hurt, the collective trauma that will never die. When commentators reach for soothing platitudes, when journalists spectacularise the Lebanese situation, there is a betrayal of that hurt, a defiling of the popular fidelity to it: well, we are just defending ourselves, just trying to secure our borders. The kling klang of that 'just' is almost unbearable - where settlers in the north of Israel seek to 'defend' territory, mark themselves out as victims, the Lebanese see an unbearable affront, an unbearable and obscene inversion of hurt, a stealing of that hurt.

The long trauma of the Israeli state is thus this - that it has had to engage in brutality, in a kind of 'wickedness', whilst maintaining its claims to a special destiny, a kind of Sonderweg. To speak of that wickedness, to allow it to be said, is to detract from Israel's status as homeland of the traumatised par excellence. Any attempt at refuting that status, or at articulating any possibility of the trauma of its citizens's history as articulatable through an inversion, as Israel itself paying back its hurt, is unbearable to it.

The politics of a kind of stalemate machine operates here, where hurt is traded against hurt, trauma against trauma. In the end, there are no equivalences here - Israel survives because it refuses to countenance its own cruelty. It is a state that sits on an epistemological abyss so great that it cannot hold itself together without resorting to a passage a l'act.

I curse the men

2006-08-09T18:02:00.000Z

UN resolutions are not for the dispossessed - they are written by the wielders of power for their own purposes (Mohsin Meghji, London)

I curse the men that slaughter

I curse the men that brutilise

I curse the men that care for their own wives and daughters whilst slughtering those of their neighbours

I curse the men that heap suffering on the innocent in the name of security

I curse the men that intensify their brutality just as the end might be in sight

Imagine it - as if to say to the IRA your time is over, we decided to send in the planes and to bomb indescriminately because the IRA are apparently 'using civilians as shields'. It's so completely without just cause and it makes eternal monsters of the men that have made it so.

I curse you because you are not men, you are creatures of another much colder blood than mine

my school

2006-08-09T17:40:00.000Z

Welcome to the School of Knitting, Neuro-ecioence and Necromancy.

The School has a strong research profile across many of these areas (Necromancy got the highest 5* grade, Knitting a 5, and Neuro-Science a 4, in the last Research Assessment Exercise in 2001), and its research culture is enhanced by a growing number of research goblins, especially in Necromancy and Knitting. A significant proportion of our elves, particularly on taught postgraduate courses, are transdimensional. The School also excels at loud and scary laughing, with a clear commitment to developing excellence across its varied spelling, brick-laying and unicorn-charming curricula.

The School is an important interface between the University and the cultural life of the underworld. New cultural facilities on Slimeside, including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Aardvarks and The SageStuffing Goosetown, provide opportunities for the School through the development of existing partnerships and new initiatives that will enhance teaching and research across a load of very old esoteric subjects that make you feel very very stupid becuase you don't understand them (stupid).

The present Head of School is Dr Pothold Stein

On these pages you will find

more about nose picking
more about pontless smiling
more about headbanging
more about overblown discourse
more about our pointed hats

vernacular tantrums or how to think Madonna with the big Other

2006-08-09T17:01:00.000Z

After a characteristically stimulating and challenging conversation with my lovely friend, mentor and colleague, DC, about the Big Other, I want to think about that Lacanian concept, not in and of itself, but in terms of how it might work (specifically, materially) with vernacular musics.

The juxtaposition is fraught (although Zizek has already been here to a certain extent) but it is one that intrigues me. That elusive concept has been formulated by Zizek after Lacan in the following manner:

The Lacanian "big Other" is usually conceived as the impersonal symbolic order, the structure that regulates symbolic exchanges; what is forgotten thereby is the crucial fact that the big Other (as opposed to the “small other” of the imaginary mirror-relationship) was first introduced to designate the radical alterity of the other person beyond our mirroring in it, beyond our recognition of it as our mirror-image. … In other words, our engagement, our commitment to the other and the other’s engagement towards us, make sense only against the background of this absolute unknowableness.

The striking reshaping of this concept here is what I want to try to work through here. If the big Other is not just about the 'linguistic community' of the subject, but also about a certain structure of meconasisance, then there is something at the heart of the subject's formation for Lacan and Zizek that is, in a sense, always already unknowable. The meconaissance of the big Other, then, the structuring of that encounter around radical misapprehension is what is useful here.

If we are to make hay with this concept, we ought, I think, to start with this notion of misrecognition or incomprehension: for postmodern thinkers, this is a no no - misapprehension suggests an erring from a righteous path, and that, therefore, an apprehension is possible, and that way, so they would have it, lies the terrible and deadly fantasy of universal ethics.

This PoMo dead end gets us no-where (to state the obvious). What is striking about the notion of misapprehension or misrecognition here is that it neither settles on a righteous path nor closes that path off - a pathway is still available to us, however tenative, however fantastical.

In this sense, then, the misapprehension at the heart of this elaboration of the bog Other is the name we might give to the structure of subject around a empty space (Zizek speaks of the Cartesian discourse of self as founded on the darkness of the void - Descartes needed to climb into the dark oven to think his subject). That space cannot be filled with specific content.

And this is where our problem starts. The question my colleague was raising, in terms specifically indebted to Zizek, was about whether the specifics of popular music's engagement of the big Other is radically different than that of, say, avant-garde art music. It's a strange question to ask in many ways, but it goes to the core of the problem of thinking about cultural difference with Lacan - is Lacan's theory (as such) immune to thinking cultural difference beyond the abstraction of a singular and generalisable encounter with the big Other. In other words, can the Freudian tradition offer anything new to say about thinking about cultural pluralism , relativism and agonsim?

My feeling is that it can, but getting to that formulation is not easy. Part of the problem, of course, is the very terms on which psychoanalysis allows us to think about listening - there is not fully-formed theory of listening in Lacan or Zizek, although they gesture towards it (this is point made recently by Dolar in his book A voice and nothing more).

Here's how it might start to go, then:

A theory of vernacular musics, and their relationship to the big Other, is a theory of listening to and making music that requires a strong formulation of ideology: strong in the sense that it refuses the playful flatness of postmodern idealism without falling foul of a seductive hierarchisation that merely replaces one kind of cultural elitism with another.

I propose to go about this by concentrating on the ways in which difference is posited, sustained and critiqued in musical practices. There are thus a number of propositions I need to make before proceeding:

1. the nature of musicking, to use Christopher Small’s terminology, is such that it cannot be neatly held in the space or work of a particular ideological trajectory - this is not to say that music is 'autonomous' or that it is some kind of romantic pre-cultural stuff that wells up from the soil. This is to say, rather, that we must be seduced by the notion that musical materials operate like language - musical forms spring from quite specific places and practices, certainly, but they do not do so indelibly marked by that place or practice

2. our technologies for thinking about music are woefully inadequate to this task - they rarely get beyond textual exegesis or contextual mapping

3. any theory of listening to or making music, nonetheless, must be cognisant of the counter-assertion, which must be held in place at the same time as that made in point 1 above, that the apparent ill-suitedness of musical materials to the articulation of explicitly ideological content is itself a symtom of an ideological situation - music's 'inarticulability' to use a term I take from the romantics, is a cipher of the persistence of an elite cultural turn

4. the incommensurateness of 1 and 3 above is a crucial starting point for any theory of vernacular musics that purports to want to understand the specificity of the vernacular at this historical juncture.

This is where we begin, then - the next few posts we be explicitly about this

gone

2006-08-08T16:21:00.000Z

wolfman left me mauled and in shame. I slept in fits without reaching depth of sleep... always waking, startled, thinking about the attack

where will it end this reliving?

the wolfman has gone, but he will return... I summon him again and again

this shame is so heavy, so deep and yet so attractive

I am drawn to it as to something so intense and beautiful but which will burn again and again

like Freud's Zwangneurose, my sickness is to repeat

repeat

repeat

the wolfman is at the door

I am ready again

scientism and paranoid reading (2)

2006-08-08T13:21:00.000Z

Beginning with the proposition, then, that the aristocracy of the scientistic turn is not just discursive, but also material, we need to ask what might appear at first as if a simple question: why? This question is calling not just for a simple diagnosis, but a crucial starting point in the critique of the epistemology of capitalism.

The traditional Marxist critique has always fallen at this point: for Marx, (at least at certain moments in his oeuvre) Socialism inevitably operates as a kind of science, a rationalised operative system that must deliver a clean and functional social model for living. The need now, it seems to me, is to go beyond that vulgar rationalism and to understand the relationship between power and resistance as a relationship that is abso;lutely internal to the system itself: in other words, Marx's critique of capitalism has operated always from within, as a symptom of that system.

The point here, without seeking to abandon the most useful elements of a critical Marxist model, would be to re-inscribe critical action into a broader configuration of the political such that it can operate beyond the epistemological straight-jacket of scientism. Where, in the rationalist model of living, might there be room for dirt, for randomness, for transgression? without attending to these matters, social theory from the left is stuck in a rationalizing idealism that in a very important sense belittles what might be termed (not unproblematically) the human.

The human in this new world, would be more than just a universalising principle, other than to note its structuring rather like the Hegelian not-all: it can never be captured as a singular unitary modality of being, never fully articulated through the symbolzations of science. It would operate as a space that is always already more than, ill-suited to, the modeling of societies, of living, of being, always in some sense dissonant (or at least not fully consonant).

Scientism finds such notions abhorrent, since its urge (put very crudely) is to capture and still the world, to explain it. The naive turn of scientism is a naivete that comes of its privilege, of its enthronement at the heart of the contemporary Western episteme.

That turn, as perhaps more materially embedded than ever, is also a turn that points to a certain impoverishment, a symptom of what we used to call its decadence. When science no longer needs to address the fundamental question of its own epistemological underpinning, when the question as to how science might be said to retrieve truth fades under a blistering confidence, that is the point at which it becomes a new kind of dogma, a new theology (and it is no surpise that the Christian right finds its home in the most scientist power of the modern era, the U.S.).

The material ground of this turn, it seems, to me, is a crucial place to start to look to understand how science maintains itself - the economics of epistemological coercion are crucial to the survival of capitalism as we understand it today. Start there and you might begin to unravel something...

and so the wheel keeps turning

2006-08-03T17:37:00.000Z

another beatiful post from ithom and a long and ponderous set of posts from spurious that yet again startle me with their left of field exuberance and their striking deliciousness...

I, on the other hand, am in one of those self-pitying moods AGAIN. God I hate feeling like this. She has left me for good and I am feeling a little blue. I know she feels it too, but for much bigger and complex reasons. I can't help thinking of her as I trot around my pad in shorts, tidying, dusting and generally ensuring I achieve nothing (again) today.

I think what I hate about these moods is that they keep me from doing the kinds of things that are important to me - I find it hard to think when I'm like this. It feels like an indulgance, an over-articulation of ego. If feels, in short, as if I'm placing too much emphasis on the care of the self to the detriment of other matters. Others matter.... that is the core credo of a leftist micropolotics I guess, but it is an extremely exacting and demanding credo to live by, especially since, as I get older, I despair ever more at the cruelty and pettiness of other human beings (a despair I most often rage at myself, I must confess).

At times like this (and I have heard other colleagues make similar statements) I feel like I am trapped inside a circularity with no exit, no place to go. Wackenroder, in 1799, had this feeling pegged right down:

Like a waterfall of thousands of roaring torrents which plunged down from the sky, eternally, eternally poured forth without a momentary pause, without a second's peace, thus is sounded in his ears and all his senses were intently focused solely on this. His labouring anguish became more and more caught up and carried away in the whirlpool of this wild confusion; the monstrous sounds grew more and more ferociously wild.

This sense of being trapped (which, by the way, works for Wackenroder as the marker for the naked saint's prophetic insight) in a circularity had also often been linked to madness in our culture. Someimes, like everyone I guess, I feel like I am going mad - the world becomes strange and frihtening and seems to take on a threatening meanace, its malevolent agency can seem almost palpable sometimes. What I find most difficult about these moments is how difficult it is to make sense of them: are they merely a symptom of a cultural predicament, an ego that has a historicity and an era, that behaves according to learnt rules? Does my putative madness fall just at those moments when that symptom asserts itself?

I hate feeling like this, that is sure, but I also find myself in a wierd and self-reflective turn, analysing my feelings in a way that often provides certain insights. I am paranoid, yes - this is the predicament of a lefty, but I am also an hysteric - the question of my gender asserts iteslf over and over and, of course I'm a neurotic - this last commonplace is nothing remarkable in an academic. But there is more here. I think I have discovered something about myself that is really useful - I really don't enjoy engaging with myself (despite all the above).

By this I mean that the kinds of modalities of analysis we have learnt to draw on seem to me so teinted, so fundamentally ill-suited for understanding self. Psychoanalysis has much to say about self: American ego psychology tries to shore up the ego; Freudian psychoanalysis tries to understand and limit it; Lacanian psychoanalysis exposes it as a sham; Jungian psychoanalysis embeds it in larger frames such as archetypes and the collective unconscious. Whilst they all have soemthing to say (although ego psychoanalysis, it seems to me is the least useful here) they seem to struggle to find a way of dealing with the harm that individualism can do not only to others (and Others) but also to that being who identifies as self.

Lacan comes closest for me to the articulation of something about the harmfulness of ego, but even he, despite all his glorious critical aparatus, misses soemthing quite profound about the nature of the self: it is not just a myth, not just a projection, not just a strategic fantasy, but it is also real. By this I don't mean to say that the self has untramelled agency or that it should be accepted without question as the only model for being. Quite the contrary: the Lacanian turn almost lets us off the hook since to mark self as fantasy is in some sense to allow us to continue to behave as before, safe in the knowledge that what feels like self is just fantasy (so we shouln't worry about it). I know this overstates the Lacanian position (indeed it distorts it beyond recognition), but it does capture somehting of the structural problem in the Lacanian turn from ego.

Perhaps a way to proceed here would be to think of self as in some sense real, but only in the same sense as any symptom of Welanschauung or Vorstellung: what is 'real' here is the palpable effectiveness of the self in perpetrating a view of the world that is fundamentally atomised. The world seems for the self to become meanacing, others take on the hue of danger and silence fills every social interaction as the marker of the hopeless impossibility of real communication. The vale of fantasy falls over everything and the only 'real' left is the real of the self.

This symptom of self-thinking, of being stuck in the wheel is the issue here: to recognise self as real is to require we attend to it, require that we bring it into a ceratin kind of focus and make sense of it. It can never fully die, I suggest since it is already undead, but it can be made to work differently, made to retreat somewhat from the foreground of discouse, made to take its place amongst other symptoms of discourse.

Perhaps the times I feel like this are the only times I can really get this kind of work done.

oh we had fun!!!

2006-07-23T14:26:00.000Z

Exasperation, tantrums and irritations mixed wih a startled sense of being an outsider (again) - what fun conferences can be, how well they articulate the misery of being an academic in times untuned to thinking...

Despite all the tensions, though, this one was really rather good fun: Spurious and RE were in fine form, especially the former who really found his obscenity mojo and made me laugh so much it hurt...

David and ITHOM were also good value, and we had long and productive chats in the heat over too much wine.

My freinds are so patient with me - I can be so hard on them, so mean and nasty, so bitchy, so undermining and yet they forgive (or seem to) and allow me to continue to run with them.

We had fun making the case for ieology critique, which we wielded with a certain swaggering arogance that comes from collective security...

what jollies

scientism and paranoid reading (1)

2006-07-23T14:05:00.000Z

We on the left are usually quite paranoid: I suppose a truly critical turn in one's personality would be a turn to paranoia of some sort. This is point made by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recently in her challenging short piece "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You" (Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.) and reworked in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). The main thrust of this piece, though, despite it having been misread again and again as some kind of disavowal of critical reading, is to point up the complexity and difficulties of thinking critically, of maintaining a space that might in some sense (however fantastically) maintain a distance from the object of scrutiny or, in some sense, might hold on to the notion of critical-political space, however transitory and, at worse, illusory.

There are at least two ways this problem has been worked through (the two that I will use here trace the shape of the discourse around this question and are chosen strategically). The first is to go the way of the right - that is to believe profoundly in the givenness of the present (or at least to work as hard as possible to persuade others of this), all its injustices, its inequalities, as in some sense the best we could imagine. In this reading, Sedgwick seems available to a call for the end of bad-tempered paranoid reading in favour of playful and celebratory modes.

The leftist critique of that would probably go something like this:

The present, in all its glorious diversity and richness, is nonetheless built on a radical injustice that must be uncovered at every turn, in every moment of political action. The injustice is radically dispersed, inculcated in every moment of exchange, every point of inter-human contact, every discursive instance. In this mode of reading, everything becomes a symptom: it is a paranoia writ large, a paranoia raised to the level of a politics. Hence, for the left, the right constitutes a way of being that radically curtails he possibility of political action and which refuses the possibility of critical active engagement of one's environment.

What follows, then, is decidedly paranoid, and, as with all paranoia, it begins with a strategic hyperbole:

They are all out to get us. No, really they are. In fact, the awfulness of our times is constituted in the very fact that they already have us.

At a recent conference, for example, I was struck by the overwhelming political inertness of academic discourses across the board. I am constantly surprised by this, and it never fails to bring me up short. At this conference in particular, we were treated to a number of what might be termed 'scientific' or at least 'empirical' papers. They all worked on their own terms - they set up a hypothesis, showed how they had rigorously tested it and then discussed some results, musing what those results might tell us about the field as a whole.

I was particularly struck in these papers not by the things they said, but by what was censored out (both during the paper itself and afterwards in questions): the question of ideology in its broadest sense seems to be something that most participants (with one or two notable exceptions) really did not want to get into. I guess the terms in which ideology critique is set up are in some sense always antagonistic to 'pure science', but I feel ever more energised by the refusal of that critical turn in science. How, for example, might the intervening in someone's world with uncomfortable technologies to test something about consciousness ever be neutralized of ideology? Why seek to avoid it? What programme might such avoidances be serving?

I think one way to think this, in true paranoid terms, is to look at the material ground of science: in most Western countries and in many developing countries also, research in the sciences is viewed as some kind of nirvana from which will flow wealth generation, social good and strategic interest. In comparison, those of us that work in the arts and humanities know that research funding is extremely patchy and highly competetive. This works as a kind of class structure - the privilege of funded research is thus always such that it does not question its ground. Maintain a discourse in abject poverty for 50 years and its ground shifts and represents itself in new forms over and over, like a castaway grasping for land...

The aristocracy of the scientistic turn, then, is not just discursive, but also material.

I'm going to be working this through over the next few weeks....

getting it wrong

2006-06-24T18:24:00.000Z

the micro-political, is has always seemed to me, is so volatile and fragile. In a recent meeting with my collegeus, I made a flippant remark that incensed one colleague. The hurt was not meant and the fallout, although short, was extremely intense. I had to put it all back together, since I had smashed it.

This got me to thinking about how personality and ideolgoy co-articulate each other. There are behavioural standards that haunt each subculture, modalities of address and language use that attend each ideological moment and certain kinds of habitus that hold sway over it all. This is what Bourdieu called somatisation - the manner in which the body as articulated through culture can hold the ideological field together, project a fantasy that the meanings of the world come from within (for a left-wing secularist like me this is the first sin).

habitus-personality-ideoolgoy

that indeed is a potent constellation, but it is one that works extremely effectively

romanticism - or why history is undone

2006-06-24T11:57:00.000Z

I want to make it whole, to think it as whole - for to do so is always to think in ways that irritate the mainstream scholarly community. I'm talking about romanticism. I want to think it whole not because I am naive or stupid, but because thinking against the grain of micro-historicism, it seems to me, is now more timely than ever. To dare to generalise, to dare to name, even - these are the sins that our contemporaries cannot bear. So let's do those things - let's refuse their law and make out with the epoch...

onwards epochs, chapters, periods and eras... let us imagine history once more as grand, meaningful, open to change and up for grabs

The historiography of romanticism is fraught. In the 1970s and 80s, we began to question the viability of ‘Romanticism’ (with that epoch-making upper case initial) as a useful historiographical label, and to rethink the very terms on which its periodisation might be possible. To use the term now, then, is to attract critical attention and to place oneself in a certain jeopardy: there is a great unease among our contemporaries at the notion that there might exist a coherent ‘Romantic’ symbolic economy; it is as if, in the very act of naming, one problematises, as if, in that very moment of appellation, one disperses the field. I hope in future work, without seeking to recuperate the most indiscriminate usages, to rethink this problem of naming in terms of two theoretical trajectories, both of which deal to a greater or lesser extent with the historicity of gender and the meaning of listening.

The first trajectory is that outlined by Friedrich Kittler in Aufschreibesysteme in which periodisation is back on the table in grand style. His assertion that, around 1800, poetry and philosophy are dominated by a worldview he terms ‘romantic’ is of course susceptible to critique, but that generalisation is strategic, posed not so much as a ‘fact’ or ‘truth’, but as a way of opening up the field, of beginning to think romanticism as a dispersed but chartable territory. This starting point is also useful because it requires us to address again, almost from the beginning, the terms on which the relationship between local and larger historical scales can be thought.

The second trajectory is more difficult to articulate as unitary because it is not, really. Broadly speaking, it encompasses several mutually incommensurate French traditions of critical and historiographical enquiry – I draw on Paul de Man, Roger Chartier, Foucault and, more implicitly than explicitly, on Lacan. This trajectory is both historicist and concerned with trying to come to grips with the nature of the relationship between local particularities of cultural practice and the broader articulation of epoch. It is also concerned with what might be termed the historicity of the subject – how the notion of subject is put into play, made whole and fragmented again, thought through, made real and represented, manifested, dissolved, phased, opened up and closed down. In line with these two approaches, then, I want to begin with his kind of strategic generalisation.

I will, then, begin ...

philosophy in/of the vernacular

2006-06-22T15:42:00.000Z

spurious and RiMi have brought me here. To this juncture so little thought but so often lived out for me in my work. How to think this place where philosophy might encounter the vernacular. It’s almost like trying to get theology to encounter Big Brother (no, not the man in the book, silly). They have brought me to this place kicking and screaming. RiMi started what I guess was always latent - the feeling that the vernacular has a space or place that can, in our culture at least, be pointed to, articulated, sensed. The question as to how to think this place, to bring philosophy to it, has also in some sense been in place a while. but with spurious, I begin to see how it might be done. They both think in ways that open up great vistas to me.

Rimi has recently written on this:

Much of the interpretative challenge for understanding twentieth-century popular music is to find ways of confronting this complex field of forces of power and identity with which "the people" can be figured as both servant and master. For if, in the broader politics, the claims of a popular hegemony have been made - "we are the masters now", to quote a member of the 1945 British Labour government - this is necessarily to reintroduce the question of representation (for who is this "we"?). If popular sovereignty has appeared only in mmediated form, sited in the reifying figures of Party, Nation, Leader, Class, Market (etc.), and equally cited through the foreclosures of musical style, cultural location, star-persona, and vocal positioning, this returns us o the Lacanian issue of the "voice of God" - a vehicle of invisible authority, claims to which might seem to install the people musically as heirs to an old foundational fraud.

His views are deftly laid out along a particular trajectory that for some will seem strange given his earlier work. Where did Lacan come from? Why the psychoanalytical coloration here? It is, to my mind, precisely this turn in RiMi to representation, or rather what might resist it and how, that I think is most useful here. His materialist work for the pate 80s and 90s is still in place and, indeed, much richer for its encounter with the historicity of the subject in Lacan and Zizek. What is most useful here, though, is the commitment, full and without waver, to thinking the vernacular, to daring to ask about how it is constituted, in whose name and, in the terms set up by this post, what epistemological structures sustain it.

The crucial terms of spurious's engagement are not dissimilar, although the philosophical commitment starts somewhere else, somewhere closer, perhaps to my own startign point - the Western philosophical tradition. It those pesky Germans that colour this starting point - Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel even. Yet imaging the question 'how are we supposed to think hip hop with Heidegger'; it’s like thinking popuklar mjsic with Adorno - that generation of Germans (actually several, of course) had no place in its epistemological landscape for the vernacular. Here of course is where Zizek also differs from the usual European traditions. He does not shrink from 'thinking popular culture with Lacan' for example.

Spurious, then, begins from this radicalised perspective, that to think the vernacular from that tradition is not only possible, but pressing. It will disturb both traditions, shake both up. But this is no simpering postmodernism, but a clear and structured programme.

Both refuse the silence of the LAMBs (long-awaited male believers), both refuse the neat territorialisation that haunts philosophy (at least what is left of it after the greyness of the analytics has smudged most of it out) and which keeps the popular in

It's been.... a while?

2006-06-22T11:30:00.000Z

Well it HAS been a while. I'm thinking now - does this blogging thing really work for me? I secretly know it does (of course it does - why wouldn't it?), but I do seem to be asking myself that question rather more frequently recently. I mentioned this to a fellow blogger and he was dismayed, as if to say 'never dis the blogosphere' or 'Blogostan über alles' (I overstate again).

This thing we might call 'loyalty to Blogostan' is interesting, though, isn't it? Once started, abandonment is impossible, once that first step, that beginning I made so much fuss about here has been taken and you're on your way and there is no backing out.... ever forward into Kafka's infinite drab future.

Oh the pain, the weariness... yes I know I'm being ludicrous again.

I recently have been catching up (after a long week of meetings and marks and degree classifications and tense moments and salutary insights into university process) with my friends' blogs. All three are fabulous, but each has a radically different approach.

Let me begin with spurious, that old man of Blogostan, our elder, our leader, our model.

His is clever, so clever. And clever in a way that weave itself in and out of clever, plays with it, touches it and leaves it again as if to say 'I am clever enough to be this clever but always prepared at any moment to abandon it'. He has recently been reading Avital Ronnell's fabulous Stupidity. I recommend it, and so does he. SO well written. But what is striking in his engagementnt with this notion, this idea (if that is what it is - perhaps it is a register, a state of being, a place, a choice, a hinge?) is his generosity to it and his amusement at it and , crucially, his amusement at his amusement by it.

This is very spurious - to double take, to self analyse, to place self under the microscope and to see oneself doing it. Even when stressed, brutalised by circumstances, he is always amused, always in some sense distanced from it. I think this is very straight, very male, very English, bu ways that are hyperbolic, that is to say almost camp in a way. He is striking it up, being it as if to say 'look I can do this'. I wonder whether the performative in our group is what forbids the honesty (if there is such a thing) that speaks of hurt and disappointment, at feeling never quite whole, never quite part of something.

If that is what he feels, I should like to share it, work it through, but then I was always more prone than he to cloying self analysis that never really gets beyond the me of it all (see, I can do the self-loathing thing too). Crucially, though, what makes him valuable, dear, is his humanity. He may not be best at sharing himself, but he is always generous, always warm, always sympathetic and with a twist of that humour, that smile, hat toying at the line of obscenity that is so much his own, he always makes us feel better, bigger, more engaged, more focused, more....

I move now to that new presence that has come upon us with a force into Blogostan and blows me away. He write and writes and writes, he does i SO beautifully and he always dares to ask things of hinself: what am I feeling, how did I get here, what am I to do with myself? in the hall of mirrors was made for this. I have been struck over and over by the elegance of what he does, but the intensity of his self analysis and although there is humour, this is deadly serious. There is no pity, no self-loathing here, just tough and edgy self-questioning, the kind of thing one expects from a highly pragmatic Buddhist (although, for those not familiar with the rigours of Buddhism, that may make him sound more fluffy than I want him to).

He posts some of his older things (he has always written, as if waiting for this medium) which are stunning. Read this - it's fabulous. A simple event, a simple moment (no reference to Badiou intended) in the stream of moments that we all negotiate, and it becomes heavy with reproach, touched by anxiety, suspended between states in such a way as to make language bend. I find his work always like this - wlays sufficiently playful to lift it out of the heaviest blackness, but always brutally frank. His voice is clear and difficult, strong and challenging, built for reading with commitment.

Now to my friend Norse Goddess who blogs as Hero Harvest.

We had been talking about it for a while, but she stole off and started without my knowledge. I must learn that she is leaving. She was so much a part of my younger days as her mentor and freind I watched her grow with pride an satisfaction. But she will leave. And leave she must because that kind of intellect cannot be held anywhere. We met as teacher and pupils and now it is me who must learn - she speaks with such clarity about what moves her, what makes her hurt, what burns.

Here is a recent post that says it all: music, feeling, touching and thinking are merging in ways that leave me breathless, stunned and sad, since she has left already - hers is a voice of real intensity and originality and now that it has started flying she leaves me leaden, stolid, wooden, dead. She writes in ways that I watch and know and understand, but, I say again, would that I could feel that.

And finally, HE still has not started. We have all been nagging him, all been prodding him. He would blog like no other, write like no other but he keeps us waiting. R now needs to put us out of our misery.

lethargy or the after-glow of expectation

2006-06-13T15:39:00.000Z

When expectation has been and gone, and one is left with the aftermath, it is always in some sense with disappointment. Not that there was abything WRONG with the event, or that it didn't fit purpose, but that, rather, we structure the thing ahead of time and it never quite maps onto that fabulous structuring.

Reality always misses. Ok this is not to be so self-obsessed as to deamand your pity or to insist on the overwhelming darkness of it all (this, it strikes me has always seemed luducrous, like Kafka's humour at the worst of all predicaments). My objective in saying the above, really, is that I am always struck by the soundness of the Lacanian distinction often drawn between a number of coordinates:

1. the Real
2. 'reality'
3. the symbolic order.

I won't spend much time dealing with the Real. It is, by its very 'nature', beyond language, beyond symbolisation - that which cannot be accounted for in the symbolic order. The most useful of the three terms, it seems to me here, is 'reality'. For Lacanians, 'reality' is that which articulates, points to, the Real, is its symbolisation. Indeed, 'reality' as such consitutes, as it were, a subsitence level of symbolisation, articulating that point beyond which any less symbolisation would be unbearable, too raw, too unmediated, too REAL. It is a thin flimsy film that keeps the Real out.

Expectation, then, always locates events at a much richer symbolic vein: they are always overfed, fat with it, dripping...

What expectation cannot bear is to be tested against the thinner picking of that reality, that minimum amount of symbolisatioin required for the subject to be able to bear it, stand it, hold out.

Lethergy, disappointment, exhaustion, overwhelming dejection, anger, someimes even violence can ensure from this mismatch. What expectation can feed and make fat, the event of reality can empoverish, thin out, leach.

snatching time

2006-06-13T07:51:00.000Z

Just before it all kicks off, right now in this eery calm - this is the place to be, I think - where anxiety, excitement and anticipation all role into something not unlike a one, a unity of messy and fluid emotions all tied into a singularity that is unnamable, unknowable, and yet extraordinarily palpable.

I think I have to deal with the fact that I'm the kind of person that feeds off intellectual turmoil; I am engaged by crisis and supercharged by debate. Some of my colleagues seek calm, look for an inner peace and 'happiness' that keeps them from harm. But for me, I think (and I do not mean to suggest this is an 'ought', a state of being for everyone), such an inner calm would feel like a kind of death, a second coming of nature to overwhelm what it is that makes me, leaving me like a stone, a thing, no-thing.

I do not mean this (all in the first person, of course) as some kind fo refutation of the critique of ego. Like Lacan and Buddhists and many left-wing thinkers, I understand the ego as a register of suffering, where failure to recognise the larger 'good' in others (and Others) brings with it a kind of self-forgetting, an unhappiness that is an a priori of the ego's work, its passage towards the liberal atomised capitalist 'individual'.

Nonethless, the turmoil of inner work, the work laid out along the porous barrier between self-as-social and self-as-symptom, is what keeps me from dying.

Here, in this place, in this waiting, this expectation. This is gerat place to be.

[written before the commencement of the first Board of Examiners - yes I know I shoulod get out more]

oh

2006-05-25T23:03:00.000Z

Well it's happened: the deadline has arrived and I'm not nearly finished

I will have to rush to sew up the messy seams, tidy tidy tidy and hurry around its edges... make it fresh, make it new, make it good, but, most of all, make it safe.

They wrote to say they wanted it all, immediately.

I'm in a panic.

How will I ever polish it, finish it, make it whole?

How can I make it work, at all?

I feel like I have awoken and been told I'm under arrest. The grace Josef K sought, the guilt he felt, the betrayal of his own desire. It's all here.

Shot through it is like a great behemoth of meat... shot through like a great sinewy sibling-thing... nasty little man under a giant ear

it is shot through with mannerism, rhetoric, passion, but nothing sticks, nothing works, nothing is

it is shot through with vocabulary... that's all ... vocabulary

words, words ,words... little symptoms that hiss and spit

froth and howl

like it's not me speaking

vocabulary that isn't from me, not for me, not of me, not by me

it is a contrivance that must be finished

I will go, then and finish

finish

finish

I just can't find him

2006-05-25T18:24:00.000Z

I know he's out there, my friend. He is so easy to spot. You can't miss him...

Well I, aparently, can.

I so want to find him - this new blogger. He writes so well, he thinks so well... so where is he?

They seek him here, they seek him there.

Every time I think I've found him, I think 'mmmmmm, is that him? Maybe not. Or is it?'

Confusion, dispondency....

I WANT TO FIND HIM

I know he'll be a real blogging presence ... tempestuous, exasperating, loud and all brash and shiny but with a softness and a tenderness and a wit that curls the lip and sends me out into the strange world of those other Europeans - those that speak differently to us but are in some sense so much more European than we

I imagine him reading Auster, James and laughing out loud at Kafka...

Where is he?

What is he writing?

What has he written?

I can't WAIT to find him...

FUCK YOU

2006-05-20T22:20:00.000Z

erm... quite.

I find myself today burning with both a high fever (my throat is so sore I can barely speak) and a rage that I haven't felt in a long time.

It begins, as it often does, with local concerns - my employers are threatening to withold or withdraw pay for exercising our democratic right to withdraw our labour in a legitimate pay dispute (we ar not asking for very much).

The details are not important, but the principles at work here are quite clear: in the politics of managerialism, the withdrawal of labour must be dealt with decisively because workers that recognise their worth are difficult to manage.

This is a new politics born of the last 30 years or so (but also a variant of much older hegemonies) that seeks to operate from a right-wing monetrist perspective and which figures human labour as a resource to be unfurled, managed, mined and held in a state of excitable and anxious insecurity...

This paradigm operates in a manner that precludes its proponents from coming clean about the ideological and real polotical implications of that committment to the dehumanisation of labour.

Ineed, the very terms on which I describe this situation are in some sense nostalgic for a mode of engagemnet more appropriate to the 70s . And this is the issue at stake here - there has been a far-reaching structural tun in public discourse, especially in Britian and the US, such that the very notion that one might dare to raise the question of worker's rights as such is always already ludicrous.

There is, then, a particularly complex and effective moritorium on talking about class confilct. If we are to ever make any headway in bringing capitalism out of its golden temple and into the mainstream political abatoir, then its inequalities must be our core object of scrutiny. Critical materialism was thus never more urgent.

One might thus be able to turn he critical eye on what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex and its moalities of operation. The US and UK eceonomies have both profitted some 200 billion dolllars since the invasion of Iraq in servicing the war machine (this represents in the UK's case somehting 15% of GDP). In short, the war is a business move that in he terms laud out by capitalism and the deamnds of global capital, shrewd.

This is the core behavioural pattern - maintain the stalemate machine such that there is never any resolution. This is the principle of insecurity, the managemnt and rhetorical wielding of danger - keep the workers anxious, keep us all anxious, and send in he troops, as if in response to a spectre that stands in for the real danger - the insecurity necessary to the smooth functioning capitalism itself...

Recent estimates have suggested that the fall of communism cost the UK something in the order of 12 billion US dollars a year in lost revenue (as a result of decomissioning the war machine) until 9/11, at which time that lost revenue was turned around and replenished twofold by contracts servicing the war machines in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In other words, war = business.

FUCK YOU

looking awry during Shotakovich

2006-05-18T09:11:00.000Z

She and I together, side by side in the geat hall. Norse Goddess and I. Knowing each other, sensing each other, understanding...

She sits in regal calm, engaged by Shostakovich, taken up by him. She says 'this experience has broken me since ... and I am waiting to rebuild myself'. The music gets into her, makes her work on herself, makes her suspend it all and put it back together afterwards.

I am jealous. Or I think I am (or ought to be) - obviously this music hurts her and puts her in danger. I want to help, I want to be the balm that heals, but she wants that burning - it nourishes in ways I cannot imagine.

Music leaves me always just weaker (what is the status of that just? and why do I listen?). It murders something within. Shostkovich is particulaly deadly for me. I never listen to it, but I know it, and it knows me - it always finds me...

I wish the hurt that it worked on me were more, were real, were something beyond my failure to feel what it is or might be. She is so real, so vital: she feels in ways I can only imagine. If I could only have one part of that, one part of that intensity, that mind that refuses to leave its body alone, that refuses to give in to the pressure to reason in a vacuum, that seeks out the most dark and beautiful questions. What she feels is what I have always failed to feel.

Norse Goddess and I together, side by side, in the Great Hall, having ourselves brutalised by him.

For both of us, I can only guess, it is the weakness of those materials, their glorious failure, that is so deadly. For her it seems to undo, disolve, disturb and damage. For me it brings me one day closer to the inevitable end when I achieve complete ideological compromise

Death and I and she and he.

To be replete as she... that would be to be

music and that other kind of political

2006-05-16T14:20:00.000Z

I recently gave a pre-concert talk for the Kirov orchestra's perfromamnce of Prokofiev's 1935 Violin concerto and Shostakovich's 1943 8th Symphony. I enjoyed the thrill of being backstage, of walking amongst those intense and terrifying musicians, imagining their relationhsips with the pieces, their histories, their inner world of music.

I wanted to talk about some of the ways in which the pieces reference other musical traditions (classical, neo-classical, etc.), or at least I thought I did. Instead, though, I found myself, in asnwers to questions from both the chair and the audience, talking about both compsers' relationship with the Soviet Regime. Why does this always happen, especially with Shostakovich? I suppose it is inevitable in some ways - we are are enthralled by institutional violence and the ways it intervenes in our relationhsip with suffering.

I started thinking about the new sexiness of the superego - thanks to Zizek's reading of Lacan, the superego is back, BIG time. It finds its way, in its many and various vernacular renderings, into so many discourses on political guilt, anxiety, self-loathing and has, after Zizek, taken on an almost emblematic function in our culture.

Perhaps what makes the Soviet Union so fascinating is the way in which it sought to externalise the superego - manifest it, bring it into the street, the market, the school... the way in which it finds expression there.

In Shostakovich, especially this symphony, one is struck by its unwieldy committment to resolute (almost absurd) darkness. The light, at the strange ending without ending, of the final C major triad, works as a kind of coda, not as a resolution. The heart of this symphony is despair - at musical breakown, at the falire of the materials to articulate the impasse of the ego in the grip of the supereo: where am I, who is making me do this, is it my fault, should I be here, am I the only one here, why can't I say what I think I want to say, why do I not even know if I want to say it....... questions and no question marks

These superego spasms, twists in the order of the psyche, are thus, like so many engagements of the superego, fraught with danger and the obscene enjoyment that giving in to its pressure brings with it: the more we give in, the more it asserts itself, the more we resist the more it asserts itself. Only he middleground holds out any hope of release...

To this end, the musical materials place unbearable pressure on themselves, insist on their own inadequacy, undermine themselves.

If Shostakovich has achieved anything in this sprawling symphony it is the musical sketching of the shape of inadequacy: of the material's failure to know themselves to live up to the historical trajectory of the symphonic tradition. This is a commonplace Russian encounter with that Austro-German tradition - Tchaikovsky once spoke of his 'seems showing' in his symphonies and other Russian and Ukrainian composers articulated over and over the crushing weight of Beethoven.

But that weight is not the Oedipal weight, not the crushing patrilineariy of indigenous cultural practice - this weight is that weight of a law, external and yet internal, dark, underside, an internalised alien kernal from another tradition that beats time in a alien taxonomy.

Hear me, I am your conscience, but you do not know me at all...

capitalism, blood and soil (ii)

2006-05-09T22:14:00.000Z

And so, if we are to understand the way in which capitalism makes itself felt, the way in which it arcs so delicately (and yet quite rudely) into our very being, our very core, then we must turn to a mode of inquiry more closely aligned with critical materialism; that is to say - we must recognise the qualitative differences at work in symbolic and material networks, without seeking to resolutely disentangle them. They are, it has always seemd to me, two symptoms of an underlying ambiguation, a deep-lying epistemological gap that cannot be bridged: the space betwen material and ideal is thus sympomatic of itself - the crassest of all tautologies.

capitalism, blood and soil

2006-05-09T11:37:00.000Z

In a recent post, jodi on I Cite references the complexity of one's relation with past injustices, past bigotries, on which a certain kind of 'liberal' present can be built. This got me to thinking about some of the ways in which we 'liberals' (a term of course that resonates very differently in Europe than it does in the U.S.) . The scare quotes denote perhaps a certain anxiety I feel about the term 'liberal' and the extent to which both left and right in the U.S. use it as a kind of bland catch-all.

In Europe, on the whole, although these comparisons are always susceptible to disintegration, the term has tended to catch the middleground and operates as a territory of the right, not, as in the U.S, at least in its usage by Republican detractors, as a marker of the left.

Nonetheless, the differences in its usage mark two quite distinct traditions of political liberalism. In Britain, for example, Margaret Thatcher talked freely of classical liberalism. And yet in the U.S., Reagan, despite striking rhetorical similiarities, was more circumspect in his use of that term.

Perhaps the core difference is the presence in U.S. politics, especially since the rise of Bush dynasty, of the Christian right as a political force. This presence at least ensures that what in right-wing European politics might stand for deeply self-interested hostility to the collective, gets marked in the U.S. as a symptom of a diffent kind of sickness: for the Christian right, despite its public and short-lived rapprochement with capitalism, the market is essentially incompatible with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. The structural incongruity will emerge fully, if it has not already, in the testing of the limits of capitalism, in testing the extent to which capitalism can make itself compatible with the rigours of fundamentalism: family, compuslory heterosexuality, patriarchy, a nostalgic Euro-centric whites only culture in which forms of cultural dissidence of disciplined into silence.

Perhaps here one might note a certain radicalising tendency in capitalism; but, of course, this is true only to the extent that is serves to maintain a certain wealth dynamic: capital flows slow down when there is equality; capital flows slow when there is no poverty gradient.

What is important as a fuel of of capitalism, therefore, is not one articulation or another of left or right, but the material and anti-human emphasis on fiscal dynamics, to the detriment of the social.

The fundamental flaw of critiques of capitalism (both form the right and from the left) has been to try to articulate it as a coherent ideological apparatus. It is much simpler that this - capitalism is a kind of managerialism writ large - keep money flowing, keep the blood flowing.

In short, then, the Blut und Boden christianity of the right is fundamentally at odds with capitalism in a way that we are only beginning to make sense of, only now beginning to work through. In the longer run, the home of capitalism, if the right persists in the States, will not be the U.S., but Europe and other corners of the globe where capital rules supreme: there no right-wing politically energised right stands in its way.

Talk about a rock and a hard place?

shame

2006-05-08T15:17:00.000Z

Oh the shame, the shame. I haven't blogged for over a week, now. Wringing hands, wrist to forehead…..

And yet, the sense that one MUST blog is part of a complex assemblage of ethical assumptions that attend the practice of blogging and which in turn is nestled within a broader assemblage of ideological ticks, epistemological spasms that hold the body in a tight grip, keeping one always slightly nauseous at one's own ineptitude, one's own laziness, one's own fallibility to the point of becoming a debilitating indulgence, or the symptom of an ideological system that has so embedded itself as to seem to reside within – this is what I like to term, brutalising Bourdieu’s term, a certain somatisation.

Where to start again? How to launch back into it? Can I ever reclaim that lost ground? Is it always already forever lost now?

sigh....

self pity, it seems, though, is part of the blogging subculture – the more I can demonstrate how much I am loathsome, the more I can parade my anxieties, hysterias, pathologies, the more I can grub around in the undergrowth of my own shortcomings, the more thrilling the blogging….

The spectacle of self is what this is all about, of course. See me, see suffering. And how tied into that late moment of the ego we all so much enjoy this is – here in this apotheosis, this endgame of the self, this is where we like to tarry (it’s been ending now FOREVER)…

I am weary

Not so much with me, or with my tiresome meing, but with the slow and tedious death of the self that will not die. The myth of the demise of that self, its embroilment in ‘fields’ ‘arrays’ ‘domains’ etc. seems to be a way of deterritorialising the self that persists after its holocaust so as to hold it in place, to ensure its continued operability: in a sense, then, the poststructuralist holocaust of the self is also its lionisation – this is the new hagiography. Like the infamous cockroach, the me, le moi, the ego, it persists, like a scaly parasite that eats the detritus of community, it will not die.

So the question is, how do we kill it?

Should we?