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?

back to NOW.....

2006-04-25T14:20:00.000Z

I began here with a committment to thinking about the politics of the now (or as I may yet call it more coinsistently the Now, with that lovely Germanophilic capital at its start - all zigzagged and cross) . I have since then been somewhat proccupied with those Germans and Austrians that made me and continue to make me, with Kafka, Beethoven, Marx, Mahler and Hegel...

But this now, THE Now requires a more intense folding of their texts and others into each other - not as so many literary games or jeux de pensée - but as refusing a crude historicism of their texuality and, indeed (or especially), of our textuality. In this sense, I begin with a blasphemy that runs as deep as any I can think of - to think of the Now, is as much to think of how that now is constituted by bringing it into encounter with what it is not (in line, perhaps with what Zizek calls 'historicity' in For They Know Not What They Do), as it is to sketch out its core ontology.

[addition today: 26th April at 12.33]

Zizek's 'historicity' is the name he gives to a way of doing history that holds on to what he terms the ‘ahistorical kernel of the Real’:

The paradox is thus that historicity differs from historicism by the way it presupposes some traumatic kernel which endures as “the same”, non-historical; and so various historical epochs are conceived as failed attempts to capture this kernel.

What is crucial here, it seems to me, is that neither present nor past has a stable specificity; they circle round each other in a dedaly dance of portents, swooping down on each other like great black harbingers of the other's demise. The mutual reproach is the point here: Nowness cannot engage the political without some sense of its own limits, its own precariousness, but a precariousness that points up the places where it has to marshal other resources, materials from beyond.

There is a traditon, the so-called classical poststructuralist tradition, which I still find somewhat seductive that has tended to want to obliterate the Now, to mark it out as in some sense metaphysical, romantic, a marker of a devastatingly naive presentism. This is a view of Now that makes sense. Indeed one could almost call it 'common sense' - and that's the problem.

We don't need Gramsci to note that so-called 'common sense' has been the quality of discourse of a certain 'rigidity', the 'folkore of the future' as Gramsci puts it. I want therefore to be always suspicious of the denigraters of the Now; and yet I don't thereby want to slip back into a critique of its detractors that would rely on a similarly common sense orientation.

The modality of engagement here is thus dialectical, but much messier than that might at first suggest. Common sense is part of the fabric of naturalisation, somatisation, of making material, manifesting what comes from nowhere, what is made with a whim and what then becomes fixed, held together by force. The Now is always its refusal...

I want to think my way into the Now by thinking not just about events, happenings, discontinuities and islands of experience, but as a political instanciation, to draw on a terminology I know spurious would know and use, a political mytheme that makes action not only possible but absolutely necessary.

This Now sits between reflection and raw materialism, between historicism and presentism, refusing over and over (with the stubborn resolve of a pious and stoic victim of political and discursive violence) the bland impossibility of folding being into doing. Writing into the world, then, being in it as text, for text, is not really what this is about.

It is about insiting on the agency of the writing, of its incursive, rude, impudent, squalid and sometimes cumbersome scrambling into the public, the open and closed spaces of cities, homes, offices, places that have been rudely disconnected from activism.

Listening with Kafka: a barred exit

2006-04-25T10:41:00.000Z

In 1914, three years after composer Gustav Mahler’s death, Kafka began work on a short prose fragment, which he completed some time in 1917 and to which Kafka’s editor Max Brod later gave the title ‘Auf der Galerie’.

Click here to see the fragment in German

Click here to read the fragment in English

I want to begin by addressin the fragmen's writerly-performative quality. The structuring of the text around two incompatible narratives works as a critical play on the epistemological groundedness of authoriality and subject positioning.

This critical pleasuring in the ambiguation of the authorial/narrating voice also engages at least two incompatible ‘types’ of masculinity: the ‘active’ (but, perhaps, deluded) masculine hero and the passive (but, perhaps, less deluded, less aggrandised) weeping observer.

The two paragraphs effect this duality through both narrative and indexical means: for Roland Barthes, the structure of narrative is usefully articulated through what he terms nuclei or ‘kernels’, events in the narrative that are crucial for that narrative’s cohesion – events that cannot be dispensed with if the narrative (or diegesis) is transposed from one medium to another; the index is a medium-specific operator that fleshes out the bones of the chain of nuclei through an accumulative action, grounding the diegesis in the medium of its telling.

What is significant here is the way in which Kafka attempts to subvert this functional duality (a duality articualted by Lukács as the difference between ‘Beschreiben’ and ‘Erzählen’, finding a useful complement in Jakobson’s ‘metaphor/metonomy’ duality ) by fundamentally integrating the telling of the diegesis into its writing: Kafka heaps writerly (medium-specific) indices onto the telling such that it is inseparable from its writing, inseparable from its qualitative grounding as a specific mediality.

This classically ‘modernist’ gesture – the intense medialisation of an apparently universally translatable ‘message’ – is also readable as a set of quite specific meditations on cultural agency, gender and the location of what David Schwarz has termed the ‘listening subject’.

The first paragraph plays out a hyperbolically ‘Freudian’ narrative of masculine agency. The father proxy in the ring must at all costs be vanquished by the young visitor in order to save (win) the suffering sexualised (consumptive) equestrienne from her brutalisation at the hands of the monstrous father.

The equestrienne stands as the cipher of Verkehr between the two men, a ‘transaction’ that helps mark the patrilineal and Oedipal ground of masculinity and the woman’s place in that transaction as Waaren (literally ‘goods’ or ware). The visitor is thus able to activate his masculinity by penetrating the membrane of the circle along a teleological vector; the trauma of this violent action is marked by a sudden (putative) silencing of the music with a shout of ‘Stop!’.

This shout, ‘durch die Fanfaren des immer sich anpassenden Orchesters’ (‘over the fanfares of the incessant accompanying orchestra’), rises above the degraded Alltagsmusik of the circus in order to figure the visitor as the bearer of a reproachful, ‘higher’, cultural counter-capital. Moreover, not only does the visitor traverse the boundary of the ring, but he ‘plunges’ into it: ‘stürzte in die Manege’ (literally ‘would tumble, fall or plunge’, continuing the conditional mood). This precipitous drop into the ring adds to the sense of trauma at the visitor’s incursion, which, within the Freudian logic that this paragraph sets up, is a hyperbolic (pathological) overstatement of the act of penetration.

The epistemological trajectory of this paragraph is underscored by the deployment of a range of figurations of sonic materials which draw on contemporaneous imaginations of the music/noise dualism. In this first paragraph, sound(/music) engages a complex array of tropes. On the one hand, it helps characterise the paragraph as ‘monstrous’ through the Orchestra’s cacophonous Brausen: incessant, it churns out stock fanfares, and the other noises generated my inhuman mechanisms – ventilators, steam hammers – are indexical expansions of the core image of a merely utilitarian (commercial) music.

On the other hand, sound functions as the sonic channelling of two opposing engagements of power – (i) the patriarchal monstrous brutilisation of the equestrienne marked by the Brausen and (ii) the traumatic ‘Stop!’ of the visitor – both marked by a character-giving utilisation of sound, accompaniment versus voice. In this duality of inside/outside, the first engagement of power is environmental in character, part of a circular, circumscribed ‘inner’ territory of degradation that locates the father proxy at that centre, wielding a range of masculine cultural resources that are simultaneously canonic (masculine strength, the driver of the action) and dissident (cruel, brutal).

Sound marks this territory by ‘accompanying’ the action, figuring it as a degrading sadomasochistic spectacle that can be ordered for its audience by the addition of sonic markers, like a perverse Hollywood narrative, accompanied by a ‘hidden’ post-Wagnerian orchestra.

The second engagement of power is a highly charged singular act of ‘sounding out’, carried on the voice, a mark of exemplary masculine subjectivity, but also the duplicitous bearer of a masculinity in crisis: vocal production can be seen at the fin de siècle as a supplement to the canonical mediacy (mediality) of writing where, as Sarah Webster Goodwin amongst others has shown, ‘voicing out’ draws attention to the sonorous body and is therefore dangerous in that it is grounded in the delicate body-physical, that privileged (and demeaned) site of the feminine in the nineteenth-century misogynistic imagination.

In Kafka this stands for an atavistic but ironic ‘recuperation’ of a model of masculinity lost in the great administration of the law, lost to the figure of the impresario mediator – voice as a last hope in the face of the brutalising anonymity of public masculinity, commercial culture, mechanised production.

But all this is not so.

Or so the next paragraph would seem to suggest. The sudden eruption of the indicative mood is traumatic: as Boa puts it, ‘the thudding syllables come as hammer blows to destroy the speculative edifice of a possible story’ and it is no accident that Boa should reach for the metaphor of hammer blows, resonating the ironic hyperbolic ‘Zarathustran’ masculinity of the first paragraph and thereby underlining the epistemological incongruity of the second with it.

This paragraph, by positing a second epistemologically dissonant version of events alongside the first, forces the narratee to rethink the reliability of the first paragraph fundamentally. It is thereby tempting to think of the story as presenting two realities, one false and one true, the first paragraph clearly a fiction, the second marked as ‘real’ by the indicative mood.

Yet this reading assumes a simple mapping of verbal mood to narrator reliability which, I suggest, is difficult to sustain in the light of Kafka’s use of language here: whereas the ‘truth’ of the first is questioned by the conditional mood and by the overblown heroism of the young visitor with its hyperbolic Freudian sexual circus, the second is called into question by the dream-like tone of the language: it is unfolded, almost as if in slow motion, in a long chain of clauses all of which relate back to a single grammatical subject - the adoring grandfather figure [‘der Direktor… vorsorglich sie auf den Apfelschimmel hebt… sich nicht entschliessen kann, das Peitschenzeichen zu geben… neben dem Pferd mit offenem Munde einherläuft…’].

This relay of clauses fixed to a single subject is a masterful writerly play on the German structuring of the clause around verb positioning, the closure of each link in the chain marked by the finite verb, heaping narrative action upon action to draw out the narrative line, and the narratee with it, towards an expected closure; but that closure is attenuated; the equestrienne takes her bow and, in the strange dislocated coda marked out from the rest of the paragraph by a hyphen, a characteristically dissident use of punctuation, the visitor to the gallery weeps ‘without knowing it’.

The beautiful strangeness of this ending, its pointed and studied ambiguity, brings one to rethink the simplicity of the unreality/reality dualism, and to call that binarism into question, to leave the boundary between the two porous.

As in the first paragraph, the content of the second is underscored by references to sonic materials, and, like in the first paragraph, those materials help flesh out a pointed juxtaposition of active and passive masculinities by recognising two kinds of sound – voice and accompaniment: however, it is the ringmaster that has ownership of the voice here, crying ‘English words of warning’, ‘exhorting’ the groom to be careful, and, like the visitor with his ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph, he implores the orchestra to be silent.

The silencing of the orchestra here underscores the epistemological dissonance between the two paragraphs: in the first, the voice is owned by the visitor and engaged as a reproach to the banality and cruelty of the circus; in the second, the voice is commanded by the ringmaster, and is engaged to structure the audience’s (narratee’s) attention drawing it to his ‘kleine Enkelin’, the skilful equestrienne, by the silencing of the orchestra.

In the strange coda, moreover, the visitor sinks ‘in the final march as if into a heavy dream’, activating that commonplace trope of music as a place where subjectivity is lost, a place of dangerous and debilitating pleasures. The music operates here like a ‘sonorous envelope’.

There is a tendency in the post-Enlightenment Western European imagination of music to perceive it as a way of ‘transforming’ or temporarily suspending everyday modes of being, of moving beyond the mundane into a higher (or at least different) state of consciousness.

In Kafka, this tendency takes on an ironic or critical edge: the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic is here blocked by the crossing and cancelling out of exit trajectories. One way leads to the ludicrous over-articulation of masculinity in the plunging thrusting ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph by the (assumed) silencing of the music; the second leads to a debilitated, foreclosed masculinity, in which the music envelops the visitor and returns him to a womb-like state in which ‘crying without knowing it’ marks his infantilisation, an abject returning to the semiotic.

In both instances, the ‘way out’ is barred.

Beethoven's ears and the way of the man (ii)

2006-04-24T13:19:00.000Z

The Q-b principle

In his repeated attempts to circumscribe and take ownership of this terrain, the Überhörer has not given up the ghost: in the last 30 years or so, tremendously acrimonious wars have been fought in the States over the terms and limits of the musicological terrain. In a rather hostile reader’s review of an early version of some of my work, for example, I was held to task for what he or she (the reader chose, understandably, not to reveal their name) took to be the overemphasis of the book on ‘theory’: ‘I would suggest that he streamline the theoretical sections of each chapter so that the author gets to the documents and the points more quickly’.

Of course, the point is an easy one to make and, to be fair to that reader, it was made about materials rather different to what I am writing oday. Nonetheless, the point could be said to be symptomatic of a commonly-held view from within musical scholarship that, in order to say anything interesting about music at all, one must ensure a certain downgrading of ‘theory’ and discipline it to the needs of the musical discourse.

The blasphemy I enact today is aimed precisely at this assumption for, in the end, the determination of the appropriate ‘balance’ of theory and musical discourse is simply a matter of how one draws the line between the two. I would go further even than this to say that one of the demands I want to make today is that we radically loosen the boundary between so-called ‘theory’ and musicology in order to open up the discourse to the kinds of dialoguing that, for some 15 years now, have been the bread and butter of other disciplines.

There have been, of course, a number of high-impact theory-cognisant publications in music, most notably, on the nineteenth century, by Rose Subotnik, Carolyn Abbate and Lawrence Kramer. And these have made an extraordinarily important contribution to the enriching and expansion of the field.

And yet, the (compounded) blasphemy that I want to commit here is to question whether, in the work of these scholars and others like them, the commitment to a certain (and for many, admittedly, already too lax) disciplinarity has not held them back from really testing what it is the discipline is all about, how it is constituted and what its limits might be, and the extent to which we should remain beholden to those limits. I don’t know the answer to this question, but isn’t it an interesting one?

And what if, contrary to the assertion made above, that questioning were to lead us into places we never imagined we could go? In another response to something I rote a lon time ago, another anonymous reader, less hostile, but equally perplexed by the work, suggested that the discipline just isn’t up to it: ‘Frankly’, he or she says, ‘I cannot see the point of publishing work that will be inscrutable to the majority of graduate students and professional scholars in its areas.’ If that reader is right, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs: is musicology so delicate that ‘difficult’ theoretically-charged writing has no place in our discipline?

Are we still so caught up in the kinds of disciplinarity that Adler so carefully laid out for us over 100 years ago as to foreclose the really tough ontological questions about our scholarships? I would like to suggest, rather, that the terms of this disciplinary fragility, the putative ‘limits’ to what its exponents are capable of, are by no means determinable in advance of their testing.

I teach and work in an music department in which all undergraduates are introduced to the core concepts of Althusser and Gramsci in their first year and in which Kramer, Adorno and Žižek are commonly set texts across the undergraduate curriculum; our graduate students deal as a matter of course with Lacan, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Bourdieu, Bhabha and poststructuralism, to name but a few, and are no less musicians and musicologists for it.

The assumption that the one excludes the other is the problem here, it seems to me, and it is an assumption I refuse to accept. In short, there is, then, something strikingly contemporary in the predicament of those nineteenth-century hegemonic thinkers on music who sought to police the boundaries of the terrain of musicology: perhaps, blasphemy of blasphemies, musicology really has only just begun to find ways of testing itself.

listening as a cultural-historical category (i)

2006-04-24T10:40:00.000Z

I've always been fascinated by the meaning of listening, or rather the ways in which we take listenin to stand in for other things. The hysteric, the neurotic, the psychotic - in a sense these might be understood different kinds of listeners, different kinds of fans, different kinds of social pathology. In short, these three listeners constitute different economies of desire.

One of the core tropes that attends my thinking over and over again is that of listening, in both its metaphorical and literal meanings: listening as eavesdropping, as close scrutiny, as allowing space for someone to speak, as lending a sympathetic ear, as hostile aural scrutiny, as covert listening.

What strikes me in the juxtaposition of men and listening is that, in confronting the genderedness of their intellectual tradition, many men are particularly poorly placed to listen since their interests, as far as they are concerned, are best served by making as much discursive noise a possible. It is something of a cliché to note that men are poor listeners, and even more of a cliché to note that men like to talk about themselves.

Yet, at the level of the operation and wielding of public discourse, this is a particularly apposite characterisation of those public nineteenth-century masculinities that might be said in some to have workshopped the modern personality, cliché or no cliché. In this sense, listening is for those men something of a critical problem since, in the closely policed gender matrix of the nineteenth century, listening is densely gendered: masculine authority is invariably aligned with active engagement of the public space, and not with the kinds of interiority and melancholy distraction associated with new fixated listening that was all the rage in concert halls by the mid nineteenth century.

And yet, men did listen, attending public concerts in their droves, publicly displaying their pleasure at the music, never seeking in any way to hide that moment of consumption. So how does this square with the demands of public masculinity? How are we to read this alongside the clear anxiety that the public display of consumption occasioned?

It is my assertion that the answer lies not in some inadequacy of the materials or in a simple ‘misreading’, but in the very limits of the discourse itself: the way we theorise the relationship between what might be termed a theology of music and its socio-cultural practice is what causes this problem.

There are specificities in each of these discursive instances that will, by their vary nature, find different political articulations: part of the function of masculine culture in the long Austro-German nineteenth century is to maintain a radical distinction between theologies of music and the instance of music’s consumption.

It is for precisely this reason that I keep tryin to write from the subject position of a listener, as one who attempts to scrutinise closely and critically the ways in which men utilise discourse, and to focus carefully on both the internal logic of public claims made by men and the ways in which the ‘masculine’ language of public discourse nonetheless undermines that logic despite (perhaps because of) itself.

Listening to the way learned men spoke and continue to speak about themselves, their views on music and gender and their anxieties about their own worth, I am struck by the continuity between their various discursive positions and the intensity of their invective against threats to their world order, and it is in the intensity of the language, the excess of some of the ways in which men project themselves into public discourse, that one can open up inconsistencies in that public language, inconsistencies which often point to inner anxieties and equivocations about the exercising of their hegemony.

In so ‘listening’, one is often forced to take up a precarious subject position that is difficult to maintain without intense and continuous vigilance: to try to listen closely to these men and their various rages against the feminine, is to be in constant danger of collapsing into complicity with them, of succumbing yet again to a kind of careless communitarian misogyny by default.

Yet there is also a danger, as great in my view as the one I have just outlined, that one try to overcompensate for that first danger and thereby remain silent about the institutional misogyny of one’s intellectual and disciplinary forbears, remain quietly acquiescent to their assumptions and allow their testament to woman’s putative inferiority to be spoken unchallenged, its effects reaching quietly and insidiously into the present. Its names are many, but objectivity may well be one of them.

Beethoven's ears and the way of the man (i)

2006-04-23T17:04:00.001Z

I return again to the beginning, to that strange fragment I encountered about 15 years ago penned by that strange and troubled man Adolf Loos in 1913.

I am speaking of the short fragment 'Beethoven's ears' Its theme, the decline of listening into a kind of undead consuming, figured through the transformation of the concert-going public’s ears into ‘Beethoven’s ears’, works as an avant-garde reproach tinged nonetheless with nostalgia: ‘they have something wrong with their ears now, they all have Beethoven’s ears. […] All their anatomical details, all their ossicles, labyrinths, drums, and trumpets, have taken on the diseased forms of Beethoven’s ears’.

The disease of the ears here could be understood as invoking not simply the classically modernist exasperation at the deadly atavism of audiences, that same issue dealt with ad nauseam by Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno and many others, but, and this is crucial here it seems to me, an attempt to transform that atavism into something akin to a sickness: in short, this is an attempt to somatise the generalising claims of conservative audiences and to make them, through reference to the body, highly particular, to render them local, and to undermine any claims they might make to speak for more than their own rather limited class interest.

This is a strategy that has an almost limitless application, but the body is specifically employed here (synecdochically presented here by the ear, the ossicles, the diseased inner canals) to afront the generality of middle-brow bourgeois taste with a discursive shock: the cultural effectiveness of middle-brow bourgeois culture is curtailed by its limitation to the tiny realm of flesh-for-flesh; as Scarry puts it, ‘those without power’ will have a ‘body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding’ (my emphasis), and this body marks a territory that contracts one’s sphere of existence, ‘down to the small circle of one’s immediate presence’.

Scarry’s extraordinary observation has run quietly but deliberately throughput much of what I think about ans much of what I write, and her observations on the power relations at work in the West’s disciplining of the body have proven extraordinarily useful. In short, this has been the way of hegemonic man: to shore up his precariously constituted power by carefully maintaining his monopoly on the public discourse, by limiting the feminine and other counter-hegemonic voices to the realm of the local, the body, and by seeking out and vilifying those mechanisms that seemed to undermine the effective operation of the contemporary gender machine.

For Loos, the body, flesh, especially that most delicate of orifices, the ear, operates as a metaphor for a masculinity curtailed. Whereas the complaint of a Wackenroder or a Hoffmann might have been that listening intervenes too overtly in the flow of discourse, for Loos, the loss of what we might term ‘virile hearing’, its ossification, marks rather a certain ambivalence to the relationship between bodies, virile venturism and the modern.

Although, one might argue, Loos’s particularly Viennese modality of modernism is one marked with a contempt for the crassly virile, it is nonetheless a virility that for him holds on to the possibility of some kind of radical masculine ideal of the effective, active: this is the duplicity of the Loosian moment which, on the one hand, is radical in its critique of the simple Hausherr and his attendant bourgeois Gemütlichkeit and yet which, on the other, nonetheless makes recourse to the kinds of conventional rhetorical strategies we encounter all over Wstern European witing on music – Loos explicitly reengages (whilst also problematising) the trope of somatisation in order to attenuate the masculinity that attends the male urban concert-goer.

That creature’s masculinity is a sickly and deviant one, touched by an unhealthy and deadly fixation on the mouldering ears of a dead hero, not his.

There is a striking echo of this sentiment sounded by the reluctant radical Heinrich Schenker in 1894 in his beguiling short essay ‘Das Hören in der Musik’ [‘Listening in music’]:

The greatest triumph, the proudest delight, in listening to a work of art is in raising up the ear to the same level [‘Macht’] as the eye. One need think only of a landscape, a broad and beautiful one, framed by mountains and hills, full of fields and meadows and woods and streams, full of all this, which nature creates in all its beauty and variety. And then one might climb to a place, where one can take in the whole landscape in a single look… In the same way, there is, somewhere above the artwork, a place from which one can see and hear from the spirit of the artwork all its pathways and goals, its dawdling and raging, all its variety and limitation, all its dimensions and relations.

Schenker’s figuration of the most ideal modes of listening as a studiedly quasi-Nietzschean pleasuring in the lofty isolation of what we might term the Überhörer, to bastardise Nietzsche’s other formation, is fuelled by a rage against the particular, the local, the piecemeal. In this rage against the metonym and the synecdoche, Schenker, like Loos, both engages the discourse of somatisation and refutes it: the Überhörer must enact a modality of being that is both a heightened physicality (listening that ‘sees’) and yet call for its annulment (this heightening, of course, is an unattainable ideal in the mundane body, so this Schenkerian ‘body’ must be somehow beyond the limitations of mundane fleshiness).

Whereas for Loos the listening audience is attached to a dead man’s ears, the mundane listener in Schenker is doomed to stay in the valley, weighed down by particularity, imprisoned in a body that will never fly.

Nietzsche’s take on the burden of listening is one which has clearly impacted on both of these figurative plays around the topoi and tropes of listening. In Also Sprach Zarathustra (first published in 1892), Nietzsche has the prophet Zarathustra recount a disturbing episode where he meets a group of ‘inverse cripples’ on a bridge over a fast-flowing river; the most terrifying of these creatures is the genius with a giant ear:

And when I came out of my solitude and crossed this bridge for the first time, I could not believe my eyes and looked and looked again, and said eventually: ‘That is an ear! An ear as large as a man!’ I looked closer and truly, under the ear something moved, something pitifully small, meagre [‘ärmlich’] and gangly [‘schmächtig’]. And truly, the monstrous ear sat on a small thin stem – but the stem was a man! With a magnifying glass to one’s eye, one could make out an envious little face and also, that a puffed up little soul was dangling from the stem. The people informed me, however, that the large ear was not just a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believe the people when they speak of great men – I held on to my belief that here was an inverse cripple, who has too little of everything and too much of one thing.

The inverse cripple, then, and specifically the giant-eared genius, would seem on first reading to represent quite simply the burden of specialisation, a burden Karl Marx had made much of in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).

It is, however, the strange and hateful envy displayed by the giant-eared genius here that opens up another reading, one more attune, perhaps, to the medico-political context in which this text was written: that ‘envious little face’, peeping out from underneath the giant ear works under the logic of what we might call, paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, an obscene politics, in which, as we have seen, body and epistemology overlap, where the physical predicament is always already political, ideologically encoded onto the bearer of the animated cadaver, always inscribed (and continually re-inscribing) onto the fleshly limits of the self.

The estrangement or specialisation that would have been recognisable to Marx in this figure is an intensification or somatisation of the material domain where the body is made to stand in for the political territory, and that ‘envy’ draws our attention to their being something out of balance that is legible, availbe to scrutiny both for its victim (hence the envy) and its critics.

The obscenity of this micro-political encounter is grounded precisely in its consensual disdain for the imbalance, a primary mechanism, as we have seen, for the operation of hegemony: Zarathustra dismisses it an yet its victim is also fully cognisant of his own uncanny out-of-placeness.

Between Nietzsche, Schenker and Loos, then, there is a covert agreement on the nature of bourgeois listening: as a debased and amateurish practice that marks the man who engages it as fey, effete, distracted, impotent, listening is to be disciplined by a rhetorical return to the figure of an ideal, perhaps even Arcadian, body – the airy and light Überhörer, the clean body with new ears a long way from those fetid undead ears of Beethoven, a lofty refutation of the lob-sided ear-burdened genius from the mountain tops.

Attending all three of the negative figures of listening (the undead Beethoven-ears, the dilettante valley-dwelling listener, the over-specialised ear-burdened ‘genius’), there is a devastating haunting: the uncanny spectre that stalks the tradition is an ideal so abstract and yet simultaneously so fleshly as to confound the logic of the soma/psyche division. It is the very impossibility of man himself that haunts these figurations: he is open to contagion, fleshy, limited to the sphere of his body, yet yearning for a way of being in which that body might forever expand, spread itself over its terrain.

he is beautiful

2006-04-22T21:27:00.000Z

He is SO beautiful. I can hardly stand it. Tall, big, so big, with eyes that could start a riot. He moves like he could any moment reach over and snuff me out. His limbs are strong, lithe, big and notty, his arms indignant at their confinement to his t-shirt. I feel I could die in his vicinity.

I want to die, to get closer.

When will he give himself to me?

When can I submit to this bestial slab, or it to me?

A smile plays across his face like a thousand grass heads nodding in the wind in knowledge of something they should not know. It moves slowly from the fleshy corner of his large well-shaped mouth towards the middle, playing down along the tubes of meat, and for a moment the mouth half opens, breathless, moist

and quickly closes again

as the smile curls onwards to the other side of his face.

Under that nose, that impudent fleshy nose that lands so many punches, takes so many knocks, misshapen, tough, ugly and yet beautiful - that nose is a narrative, a complex space of memories, a countless retelling of encounters - under that nose the jaw sits in judgement, sallow, tight, hard, straight...

My desire for him is like a razor sharp incursion ino my being, a stick, a shove, a thump, a slap an intrusion.

Stung by my desire for him I turn and face the window. I hear him breathing I smell him sweating I know he is moving and I fear that more than I fear anything.

He is going to hit me...

the wolf is upon me...

I call him solitude.

the unbearable drabness of me-ing

2006-04-22T10:53:00.000Z

The house is empty.

The back door is open and a cool spring breeze plays at my naked feet.

11.50 and still not dressed. The self-disgust is overwhelming. Still not finished, still tinkering with that bloody book. My cat lies on the desk watching with a performative disinterest that belies his underlying fundamental autism.

Quiet.

The stillness is deafening. I cannot stand, I cannot sit... fidget, walk, stand, stop and then walk again and sit

and stand

and sit.

... pottering in the kitchen, coffee ceremony....

nothing.

Tedious.

Reading this week's LRB - thin again.

Sighing occupies three seconds.

Tired.

Ache.

The upstairs neighbours are slowly surfacing and the dog owner next door is shouting at the dog again. And then ...

all is silent again.

Breathing.

The humming of my computer

It used to be Sundays that filled me with dread - the snoring of my parents, the awfulness of tea with my grandmother, the deadening blandness of that food... jelly with a skin, cold custard with bananas, cucumber sandwiches, sliced onion in vinegar. SPONGE CAKE (sorry for shouting)...

But now it is this day, Saturday that I loathe. No one here, no one coming, nothing. Work to finish, to make whole, to make worthy, to make safe, and yet to make new... this work of all works is loathsome.

Rubbing my eyes with the smalls of my hands

makes me dizzy

So tired. Might sleep some more.

Monday ever closer and its starts all over again.

Round and round and round...

Leoš Janáček’s terriroty contra Kafka

2006-04-22T09:40:00.000Z

In Franz Kafka’s prose fragment ‘Auf der Galerie’, written between 1914 and 1917 and published in 1919, a deliberate and somewhat laboured splitting of the narrative perspective is posited as a formal game, a kind of critical pleasuring and ambiguating of the authorial voice. The fragment consists of two paragraphs, each of which relates a version of a narrative.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the two paragraphs each relate a narrative that is fundamentally incompatible with the other but which takes place in the same space - a circus ring [‘in der Manege’]. A visitor to the gallery [‘ein junger Galeriebesucher’] is posited in the first paragraph as heroic, active, as the saviour of a frail consumptive equestrienne [‘irgendeine hinfällige, lungensüchtige Kunstreiterin’], driven endlessly round in the ring by a malevolent ring master:

…vielleicht eilte dann ein junger Galeriebesucher die lange Treppe durch alle Ränge hinab, stürzte in die Manege, riefe das: Halt! Durch die Fanfaren des immer sich anpassenden Orchesters.

[…perhaps then a young visitor to the gallery would rush down the steps through all the circles, plummet into the ring and shout 'Stop!' over the fanfares of the orchestra playing the appropriate music]

The second paragraph posits the onlooker as a passive impotent outsider, watching from the gallery as the equestrienne is gently led round the ring by an adoring grandfather. The paragraph begins ‘Da es aber nicht so ist’ to highlight the shocking disparity of the two visions, marking the first paragraph as artificial, or speculative, the second as somehow more truthful.

The duality of this vision is thrown into relief in Kafka’s fragment by the use of the subjunctive mood in the ‘heroic’ paragraph [‘Wenn iregendeine … Kunstreiterin … getreiben würde’] and the indicative mood in the ‘impotent’ paragraph [… eine schöne Dame … hereinfliegt’].

Yet the syntactical ‘so war es’ of the indicative mood is used in the second paragraph to relate an enveloping serenity, in a dream-like tone and is unfolded in part, almost as if in slow motion, in a long succession of clauses all of which relate back to a single subject - the adoring grandfather figure [‘der Direktor… vorsorglich sie auf den Apfelschimmel hebt… sich nicht entschliessen kann, das Peitschenzeichen zu geben… neben dem Pferd mit offenem Munde einherläuft…’ etc].

The vistor, positioned some way from the action and unable to engage with it, drifts finally into a sleep-like state and weeps, without knowing it [‘… im Schlußmarsch wie in einem schweren Traum versinkend, weint er, ohne es zu wissen’].

This remarkable short fragment demonstrates most eloquently the extent to which Kafka’s work can be located within the confines of what Deleuze and Guattari have termed, using Kafka’s own term, a ‘minor’ literature - a literature which is located within a ‘deterritorialized’ language:

The impossibility of writing in German is for the Prague Jews the feeling of an irreducible distance from their primitive Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German is the deterritorialization of the German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses, like a "paper language" or an artificial language.

The notion of a ‘deterritorialization’ of the German language that Deleuze and Guattari speak of here is perhaps one of the most insightful observations in the critical literature on Kafka: this deterritorialization restricts the minor literature to a politicised and collectivised mode of expression; the personal is always marked out and expanded into the communal; in the cramped space of such a literature, there is no room for the genius effect, no masters; this literature is, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, characterised by the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’, a de-subjectifying and opening out of the writing machine into an array of anonymous expressive effects.

Indeed, the visitor to the gallery might himself articulate just such an assemblege, both as imagined into or projected onto an idealised community, the performed self if you will, and simultaneously as that other self that is banished from within - exiled from the colonial centre and yet constantly drawn back to that centre, back to that very administrative language through which that centre sets the exiling of its minorities into motion.

Janáček’s territoriality

How different this predicament is from that of Janáček and yet how resonant with many of the critical concerns that Janáček would have recognised in the condition of the colonial Czech before 1918. Like the two ‘characters’ from Max Lederer’s ‘Three encounters’, the Prague Jew Viktor Troller and working class radical Czech Václav Marek living either side of the river in the Heřmanice district, the two banks connected neither by ferry nor bridge, it is almost as if Kafka and Janáček were mirror images, two sides of the colonial predicament, both exiled from an authentic unitary self, the one striving for a state of absolute artifice the other for the lost ‘authentic’ origin of his ethnicity.

In the context of this useful binarism, Janáček'a comments on the German language in comparison to . Czech are quite striking:

In the heading I envisage a Czech name in its Czech version next to its German one.

That was how the guard called out the name of the railway station on 18 August 1917.
How the different ‘spirit’ of both languages shone through here. Our version is ranged in with the notes of a warm triad D flat-F-A flat.

The German version cut harshly and roughly into the same triad, with a dissonance of a seventh; it has crushed the third syllable and torn off the last one; it has ground into grumbling the sweetness of the first two. In the Czech version you hear a song which winds along in equal lengths within a rainbow of colours; o-a-a-y.

The German that Janáček so brutally denigrates here is no deterritorialized German but rather an articulated language of the symbolic order of the Austrian state. For Janáček, there is a clear Czech/German binarism at work: the German is hard, violent, dissonant, oppressive, whereas the Czech is soft, song-like, delicate, consonant, angular.

The evocation of Czech as somehow ‘rounded’ in contrast to the angular (fractured) German also has a rather crudely articulated gendered dimension: the notion of Czech as somehow ‘song-like’ recalls some powerful tropes from fin-de-siècle European literatures which attend gender representations and representations of acts of singing or performing music.

Janáček’s evocation of the ‘song-like’ tone of Czech as a contrast to the declamatory tone of German engages the dualism of the ‘inarticulate pre-verbal’ and ‘linguistic utterance’ which is founded on the construction of song as somehow pre-verbal, of nature.

As Lucy Green has shown, the image of , in particular, a woman singing engages several common-place misogynist constructions of the feminine that pervade literature from this period: first, ‘the self-possessed yet alluring concentration on the body’, is engaged such that, whilst in song, the woman is embodied drawing attention to her body, its connection to resonance and the precariousness of the voice - and yet, the very self-possessedness of her bodily state takes on an alluring and dangerous power, the ‘power of the mask’ which is unavailable to onlookers like Kafka’s passive visitor to the gallery; second, the singing woman articulates and underpins her ‘association with nature,’ during the fin-de-siècle when women continued to be barred from the masculine instrumentality of technology, the sound source of her singing ‘locked in her body’; third, ‘the appearance of sexual availability,’ is articulated in the connection of the paid singer to the prostitute, making her body (her embodiment?) available to those who can pay for it; and finally, the image of the singing woman evokes ‘the symbolisation of maternal preoccupation’ where the mother singing to her child in private is the corollary of her availability, articulating the age-old mother/whore dichotomy that persists in many contemporary misogynist discourses.

In this sense, woman is the singer par excellence, and is implicitly evoked in Janáček's comment as the counterside to the ‘masculine’ penetrative agency of the colonial language.

In the context of these tropes of the feminine, wilfully engaged by Janáček in many of his letters to Kamila Stösslová, his journalism and his theoretical writings, in order to sketch out something like a Czech linguistic and musical identity, the choice of the controversial and misogynist 1890 novella by Leo Tolstoj as inspirational matter for a string trio and his first quartet "The Kreutzer Sonata" is striking.

The quartet, written in 1923, is a reworking of the [lost] trio from 1908 of the same name which was written for the Russian author’s 80th birthday. Like Kafka’s onlooker, the male protagonist of Tolstoj’s novella who narrates the tale to several well-known stock characters from fin-de-siècle Russian boulevard literature is driven to action by his passivity, by the position of onlooker as his wife seems to him to be engaging in an affair with her accompanist Truchačevskij, and he is driven to murder her in a jealous rage.

The representation of male violence triggered by crazed sexual jealousy is utilised by Tolstoj in an explicative postlude to the novella, written 1891, as a reason for advocating celibacy and ultimately denigrating marriage as an institution: sexuality is dangerous - the best relations between man and woman are those as between brother and sister.

The novella explicitly engages the feminine performance tropes which we have already encountered - the alluring mask of the performer, her sexual danger, her availability and her castrating power over the impotent onlooker: jealousy in this sense is a metonymic transferrence of impotence into activity, the exaggeratedly phallic death of Pozdnyšev’s wife by stabbing functioning as an overcompensation for Pozdnyšev’s own sexual inadequacy.

The Czech reception of the novella provides an interesting context for our understanding of Janáček's reading of the novella. Two apparently opposed and yet mutually dependent critical feminist topoi emerge in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Czech women’s literature: the first is an essentially materialist argument which seeks to wrest Czech womanhood from the drudgery of marriage by decrying the domestic brutilisation of women at the hands of domineering husbands and thereby vilifying marriage as a kind of institutional slavery; the second seeks a more ‘decadent’ refiguration of woman in which the feminine is re-inserted into an over-sensualised nature and becomes phantom-like, disembodied - a kind of implicit critique of her over-embodiment in other Czech literary sources.

These two tendencies impact clearly on the Czech reception of the Tolstoj novella and would have been commonplace debate in both Czech and German speaking communities in Prague and Brno.

The critique of domesticity and/or marriage finds many vivid expressions in journals and periodicals from the period. See, for example Ludmila Markovičová in 1910:

Woman is already humiliated, destroyed, spoiled in the very institution of marriage, in which she is by the vilest means bought, enslaved, imprisoned, chained, beaten down. She has nothing to lose, because the necessity of marriage has broken in her the most precious treasure, her consciousness of her own purity, power, worth and rights.

This resonates with Janáček's comments on how he sees the narrative of Tolstoj’s novella in his own quartet: ‘I had in mind a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death’. Other examples might include Laichtrová-Havlíčková’s column entries in the Ženská Revue, Otakar Auředníček’s ‘Karriéra’ from his Intimní dramata (1895) and countless other works by Božena Benešová, Felix Tèver, Božena Viková Kunětická and Anna Ziegloserová.

The other critical topos we have mentioned is in some ways a refutation of the materialist position. It attempts a re-enforcing of women’s sexuality by dis-emboding her, freeing her body from male domination and thereby emphasising the strategic value of her sexuality as a source of power over men. A good example of this can be found in Růžena Jesenská’s, Román dítěte (1905):

She tipped her head back and her golden hair flowed all the way down into the water, into the gloomy water. And she spread out her arms […]. Music sounded in the water, like the magic organs of distant churches and the waving of wings and like the voice of those two little bells in the smallest tower of St. Nicholas’ church.

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry links embodied and dis-embodied representations of the body to more explicit social and cultural power relations:

In discussions of power, it is conventionally the case that those with power are said to be ‘represented’ whereas those without power are ‘without representation’. It may therefore seem contradictory to discover that the Omnipotent will be materially unrepresented and that the comparatively powerless will be materially represented by their own deep embodiment. But to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power.

The gendered consequences of this are quite clear: the literary expression of misogynist constructions of femininity may take the form of an overembodiment of those without power, or their exile from the body of writing altogether.

The dis-embodiment of women, then, engages the interests of both the decadent critique of Tolstojan sexuality by such figures as the Russian emigré Merežkovskij who wrote frequently for the Lidové noviny, Janáček's preferred Moravian paper in the 20s, and a particularly ‘colonised’ manifestation of the decadent fascination for what Robert Pynsent has termed the ‘fluid self, a dissolved or fragmented self’.

What distinguished Czech and other colonised decadent movements from those of the colonising Western European powers, is their fascination for loss, for a hidden origin.

This is particularly evidenced in the Czech fascination for martyrdom, the body in pain that is the embodied presence of an historicised and idealised Czech oppression, a territorialized discourse of suffering that is focused in on the discursive territory of the body, a body which, dissected by its colonial predicament, nonetheless sought flight into disembodiment.

One of the seminal images of loss and return that has often been figured in much European literature of the dispossessed is the figure of the primal mother. In Tolstoj’s Dectvo, for example, the Russian landscape is feminised as an enveloping maternal space, the ‘paradisiacal setting’ for the young boy’s first experience of the world.

For Janáček, too, there is a sense in which the feminine might offer an alternative sense of the re-territorialised, the antithesis of Kafka’s deterritorialized German. Much has already been written about Janáček's remarkable feminine figures in the operas: Bystrouška, Káťa, Jenůfa, Emilia, and so on.

Their psychological complexity is staggering, their presence alluring, always central to the dramatic logic of the operas in which they appear. However, these women are not so dissimilar from women from other nineteenth- and twentieth-century operas.

The specificity of Janáček's uses of the feminine is connected in particular to his strident efforts at a postcolonial reterritorialization of his language, his music and his very sense of identity, of who he is and where he belongs, what Deleuze and Guattari have termed a ‘primitive Czech territoriality’.

What is particularly striking in this territoriality is its fixation on the concreteness of an identifiable space - Czechness is linked to specific, newly re-articulated and circumscribed borders, to the formidable materiality of land, to an embodied primal mother laid out across the paradisiacal landscapes of the Czech homelands, a primal mother limited to the back yard and yet elastic enough to shift focus from the strictly local to the Moravian dimension, then to the broader Czech dimension, then outwards again to what David Short and others have termed a kind of ‘Czecholslovakism’ and thence outwards to the panslavic dimension, a dimension that Janá c ek was admittedly less willing to embrace after the founding of the Czechoslovak state.

Like Masaryk and Palacký, before him, Janáček struggles to find an alternative model of nationhood and national identity to the colonial order of the Austro-Hungarion state. We find a useful parallel in Masaryk’s notion of the ‘small state’ and Janáček evocation of the Czech language as somehow soft and rounded, in short a more feminised langauge.

It would seem that in Janáček this alliance of the maternal-feminine embodied woman contracted down to the small circle of her immediate physical presence, and the Masarykian territoriality of the small state, re-emphasises a construction of 'Czechness' as somehow natural, as pre-symbolic in the Lacanian sense. So how, then, does this homological territoriality of the feminine body and the Czech body impact upon Janáček's reading of Tolstoj's novella?

Rachel Wilson has suggested that Janá c ek saw Tolstoj’s novella quite differently from Tolstoj himself, that he saw the novella as the depiction of a woman unfairly punished for expressing sexual longing:

…the folk dance structures in the last movement further reveal [Janá c ek’s] attitude to Tolstoj’s heroine, affirming her sexual liaison as an entirely natural, entirely ethical rebellion.

I’m not sure that we can be so categorical. However, Wilson clearly recognises the extent to which femininity, as a culturally-charged and politicised cultural form, impacted upon Janáček’s reading of the novella.

Exactly how the novella works ‘within’ the quartet itself is difficult to ascertain and ultimately beyond our grasp; but the kinds of cultural resources that would have been available to Janá c ek through which to read the novella are not beyond that grasp.

In short, the terrorised territorialised body that sits at the centre of the quartet is a peculiarly postcolonial assemblage, quite distinct from the Kafkan assemblage. The Kafkan assemblage allows Kafka to imagine his father stretched out across a map of the world, allowing him to live only in those spaces not covered by the patriarchal body.

For Janáček, the patriarchal body is not something with which one should try to reach an uncomfortable, self-denegrating rapprochement. It is the expulsion of that colonial body, stretched, like Kafka's father, across the map of Europe, that is the final telos of Janáček's postcolonialism. In this sense, the first quartet mediates Czech discourses of identity and gender through their territorialisation.

A third blasphemy: autonomy and the bourgeois self

2006-04-21T02:16:00.000Z

This third blasphemy is linked in no small part to the intense humility that comes with encountering something reified, somthing so oversued that its prodigious utility drips with heavy import and yet at the same time it has become thinned to the point of disappearing from view: I am speaking here of the so-called bourgeois self, a strange phenomenon. 'He' is the victim of his own false consciousness, a consciousness he seeks to clothe in the systematic mystifications implicit to the category of the aesthetic, as if there were some non-material alternative to the objective processes of production.

Yet it is in the notion of the 'absolute truth' of closure - of the ontic nature of music, for example - that the bourgeois citizen of the organic Prussian state expresses a Sehnsucht for consumption, a mystified and spiritualised consumption, magically transformed into the gratifying, alienated pleasures of the alienated ego.

Yet how could it be that the austere complexities of German Idealism in particular, with its self-denying, disciplined penchant for the systematic exposition of its materials, might articulate an uncritical acquiescence to consuming, Handlung? The answer lies in the metaphysical nature of the arguments which reduce socially-mediated constructs such as closure, autonomy, the ideal, to articles of faith.

Since Idealism is motivated by an anxiety - an anxiety which has an ethical starting point, one which yearns to be able to undermine the relentless savagery of commoditised culture - it uncritically accepts the illusion of 'otherness' as an escape from that savagery. Despite the nobility of the attempt to find that critical 'other' against which to measure the brutalising operation of rationalisation, the construction the aesthetic - a systematised disciplining of consumption, a mystified, distanced consumption that dislocates the self from bodily gratification - serves merely to create the illusion of an activity that is removed from the forces and relations of production.

The danger in such an illusion is that it makes gestures towards a critique of the commodity, and yet, in so doing, it provides it with a radicalised metaphysical function, 'raising it up' from the relations of production to the level of an unquestionable absolute.

It would seem, then, that Michael Rosen's critique of Hegel as some kind of necromancer, casting his spell over much subsequent thought holds some water. Yet the acquiescence to the capitalist project, grounded first and foremost in the notion of 'dialectic as mystification', still does not grasp the essential complexity of the relationship between the Idealistic text and its historical predicament.

Perhaps the most profound manner in which the critical Idealism of Hegel and Schelling transcends its historical predicament is in the implicit argument it constructs against ontological complacency. Whilst, on the one hand, the dialectical and organicist reasoning of Idealism is deeply embedded within its own historical configuration and, to a cetain extent, a prisoner of that configuration, there is, on the other hand, much that can be saved from that tradition which has a striking contemporaneity even today - in particular, the unwillingness it has to accept 'simple' truths simply because they seem real.

This avoidance of the empirical solution denies the object of scrutiny a simple ontological existence and leads to a mode of reasoning that is concerned first of all to dissipate the conspicuity of Cartesian and early proto empirical forms of reason, those modlaities of thought that emerged inthe firs years of what Lacan has termed the 'ego's era'.

The consequence of this historically grounded concern is radical. In dissipating the conspicuous ontology of the Cartesian paradigm, German Idealism is radical in the sense that its arguments spring from the materials under scrutiny, from their historical predicament and yet it maintains a critical distance from that predicament. In other words, Idealism encounters the new 'absolute' of the commodity, articulating its ontological boundaries, and yet stands back from 'completed' or circumscribed forms.

If we accept, then, that a commodity is some reified entity supercharged with aura, and yet reduced to its most simple economic function, as carrying such a function within itself, as if that function were simply moulded into its own interior storehouse, then this avoidance of completed or circumscribed forms can be read in two contradictory ways: either Idealism mystifies the economic function of the commodity, so making it seem to spring from some natural metaphysical source, or it attempts to undermine the metaphysical basis of commoditised - closed - forms through a radicalising turn of philosophy.

In the notion of musical autonomy, for example (the notion that music, might in some snese be above the humdrum of the material), these two agendas jostle for supremacy. On the one hand, the notion of autonomy gives the score, the neat musical commodity of literate post-Cartesian culture, a central position and facilitates the commoditisation of the dissemination of music in printed form. On the other hand, an 'autonomous' music sustains for itself a kind of cool, clear distance from the society from which it sprang, casting a critical eye over the social intitutions from which it emerges, throwing the flaws of such institutions into clear relief. In both cases, the notion of a complete finished work is radically problematised.

The confrontation of these two agendas springs, it would seem from the great dichotomy of liberal capitalism, an economic model characterised both by a sense of political life as properly an expression of the majority of the enfranchised populace and by the necessity for sustainable economic difference. In short, the great dichotomy of liberalism has always been expressed in its janus-faced attitude to the individual. As a constructed, culturally mediated unit, the lowest unit of the liberal society, the individual has always been upheld as an autonomous 'free' protagonist, an agent of wealth generation and yet, he is nonetheless consistently in retreat from the processes of rationalisation that provide the economic framework for that 'freedom', he is the victim of such processes.

The anxiety of the German Frühromantik is thus founded on this dichotomous state of affairs: the positioning of the individual as both the heroic protagonist and as victim gives rise to a structiral anxiety or splittin of aesthetic doiscourse; this anxiety that lies at the heart of German Idealism. In short, the profoundly dialectical problem of autonomous music is a problem that reflects the two liberal individuals: critical autonomy as an encoded parallel of the heroic protagonist and uncritical (commoditised) autonomy as a similar parallel of the brutalised victim.

It seems, then, that critiques of the Western European art music canon based purely on notions of its autonomy as a simple 'turning inwards' from or wilful rejection of the public domain are uncritical in their undialectical apprehension of the problem. It is certainly possible to draw simple causal connections between an impotent German bourgeoisie, frustrated by political isolation, and the 'inwardising' genres of the early nineteenth century.

Yet such simple causal connections reduce the complexity of post-Cartesian culture to a mechanistic set of ideological agents. These 'vulgar' Marxist arguments fail to grasp the matter at hand as a sophisticated array of socially-mediated codes. To decode this culture, therefore, requires a willingness to confront, on all levels, the mutual ambivalence of autonomy and function in the musically aesthetic object of scrutiny.

The fact that such terms as autonomy, ontology and the ideal are not clearly-articulated or fixed points in this epistemological configuration bears witness to Idealism's awareness of its precarious position between covert mystification and radical critique of the newly commoditised culture.

This precariousness is eloquently expressed in the fluent interaction between the categories of the ontological and the ideal. The former seems to articulate a drive inwards, a retreat from external conspicuity into a secretive world of intimated treasures whereas the latter offers a schematic account of general forms, removed from the profanity of particularity.

The interplay of these two categories in musical autonomy is complex. On the one hand, they share a synonymous function in the articulation of separation from the external, closing the sphere of the work from the mundanities of objective reality.

Yet, on the other hand, their antagonism is based precisely around this relationship to the external. Since, for ontological modes of speculation, the inner space is the storehouse of truth, of the essential reality of the object of scrutiny, there are some useful resonances of the commoditised object that carries its economic function within its own internal storehouse of truth as a kind of ontological materiality. This commodity parity in ontological thought is thus to be contrasted with the schemata of the ideal.

In this mode of speculation, the sphere of activity is articulated not according to its unique interiority but according to its generality, the ability it demonstrates to show all levels of the world in a single closed and pure structure. Its 'ideality' is thus consequent upon its ability to spread itself outwards across all levels of discourse as a universal demonstrative model whilst maintaining its status as 'model'.

Autonomy is thus confronted with the dichotomous coexistence of a mutual compatibility and a mutual antagonism within its operation. In this sense, it is perhaps wisest to ascribe to autonomy the status of a sphere of activity, a socially-mediated practice. As an activity, autonomy is thus encountered not as a unified ideological phenomenon but as a dynamic and complex response to a nascent culture in the process of cohering around the economic model of the commodity. Autonomy, therefore, is not commodity by another name, but its counterpart, its incubator.

food and love and food and love and food and love and food and love and ...

2006-04-18T23:16:00.000Z

My lovely friend Norse Goddess (yet to harvest the heroes of the blogoshpere) had a cat named after a British condiment who every morning, as she put it, demanded both food and love in equal quantities and at regular intervals (usually every 10 minutes for at least 2 hours). RIP sweet feline pickle.

OK - this relationship between food and love. What of its politics? How are pleasure (sexual, culinary, physical, cultural) related to the putatively rational discourse of citizenship? How can food or sex or attraction to anything, anyone, anyfood be political?

Lets begin with the easy stuff: food begins where friends leave off (no... good food does not rely on being lonely... pay attention now...). It heals, sutures, makes whole what friends fracture. Friends make it necessary and I love them for it.

Yes, I am large of food loving, large-ish of flesh and sort of big of appetite. And I love to cook for friends and I love to eat. These pleasures on the political left have had hard time. At least Marx was smart enough to raise growing vegetables ( I think he referred specifically to potatoes growing in a field) above the level playing cricket (sorry RiMi).

And yet the left persists in its disdain for pleasures such as these - to enjoy boeuf bourgignon (that most camp of 1970s British imaginations of French cuisine and yet one of its most accurate) is somehow gratuitous, inauthentic, disingenuous, a simpering pretention. And yet to cook beef in red wine for a long time, with bayleaf, small onions, mushrooms and orange peel makes great sense (it must of course be good beef from an animal that has loved and breathed a good life).

It's not that lefties (like me) dislike good food, it's just that they (I, we) find it difficult to embrace foods that are (however cheap - this at least is not a form of vulgar materialism) marked by anything other than an honest proletarian class origin.

But the real sense of this food (regardless of whether it was eaten by the tolpuddle martyrs) is what makes it a global treasure - food that works, food that pleases, food that sketches out the potentiality of an Arcadian abundance at the table is a pleasure of hoping, a pleasure of daring to desire a future of open giving. Eat yourselves better - recipes for utopia to follow.

Delia and Rosa Luxembourg - sisters of different soviets!

how academics stay beige

2006-04-16T18:20:00.000Z

There was a time, long long ago, in a far away land called the 1970s, when academics in the Western hemisphere might have attempted to tackle various government attempts at eroding their intellectual autonomy with a certain activism: perhaps a polite march or a withdrawal of labour or an attempt to tackle the government head on in public works. On the surface it seems this is exactly what is happening now - the strike in the UK on the 7th March and the current UK academics' withdrawal of labour relating to the setting and marking of assessments would seem to be exactly this kind of action.

But lets be clear, although I support such action, the real issues that academics ought to have been addressing over the last 20 years have gone largely unchallenged (although of course there are inevitably noble exceptions to this rule).

Under Thatcher, Reagan and their kind, the academy has been consistently brutalised, intellectual autonomy ever more curtailed and the provision of education has been forced to submit to the operation of so-called 'market forces'. Our betters seem to understand this market as some kind of natural (that is, already-existing-in-nature) phenomenon and they believe this with an almost messianic commitment.

We ought to be clear, however, that the market is as metaphysical a concept as, for example, Hegel's Geist. That is not to say that metaphysics is in and of itself a flawed or tendentious discourse or that it operates always in the name of mystification.

Quite the contrary, truths can often come from the strangest and most bizarrely counter-intuitive places. My point here is to note the fragility of any such claim to the 'naturalness', especially with regard to the market. It is, fo course, a constructed system that can be resisted, changed or mitigated. All that is needed is the will to dare to think outside it.

There are as many economists who will tell you this is not only possibel but desirable as will tell you that the world would end if it weren't for lobal capitalism.

Now, even if, at the very worst, the best we could hope from the chattering classes was its refusal of complete instrumentalisation, surely the academy might be one place where the global system gets to question itself, put itself o the test. I hope for more, however.

One symptom of the demise of intellectual autonomy in the name of market-led processes is the burgeoning of audit culture. In a recent communication from the various subject specialist bodies in the UK, for example, a number of our colleagues there were asked to comment on a suggested league table of academic journals: each country in the EU ought to be represented, and the list should distinguish between internal quality and national quality.

The core issue it seems to me is that this listing/scoping is clearly meant guarantee a dominance of the field by a small number of intellectually safe and politically conservative journals and will inhibit open and critial discourse and ensure the ossification of any discipline. And how are academics responding? Guess what.... they're just going along with it.

Here would have been a clear opportunity to resist interferance from politicians but the academy once again had proven itself unwilling to take what in effect would not have been an altogether dificult stand.

I remember commenting once to a colleague from a British University who espoused critical discourse in his work but in his human relations showed cavalier disregard for human dignity (he was involved in sacking a number of his collegues and friends) , that the tension between critical discourse and radical politics had grown ever wider and that critical academic discourse seems to have fallen to its own seductive charm. He suggested that personal trajectory and 'other' issues were also in play.

My response to such obfiscation has always been to bring it back to the integrity of the discourse: if you say one thing and do another, then we have a problem.

That is not a simple observation, but a quite complex one and one which takes energy to work through (saying and dpoing are not as easily extricated from each other as might appear) and this is where my second blaphemy will start: adapting Lacan, I will always say this - there is no such thing as the market.

post-the-first: Beginnings are always by nature traumatic.

2006-04-15T13:24:00.000Z

They (and there is always more than one, of course) bring with them not so much a wide-eyed, forward-looking and open-mouthed breathless expectation at the infinite and shiny possibilities of the future (I like hyphens), but the almost crushing weight of a future of bad possibilities: what if I or we were to stray by the tiniest fraction of a tiny microchoice and wander down the worst of all pathways?

The future here and now is just the potentiality of that awfulness, its ever nearing probability, an infinite grayness, as Kafka once called it.

It is the present, not some abstracted or eternally deferred notion of presence but the political nowness of now, that productive mythological ground of action that makes all radical (and some conservative) politics possible, that is our concern: we have been told so many times by the dearest of opponents that the present is just a kind of instance, a simpering micro-dally in the play of omnidirectional meanings.

But this is where we start - in refuting that brutalising abstraction, in refusing the denigration of the now. The now is always, of course a construction, but it is a construction that can be put to work. In this red-hot present, let's begin again and again.

Nothing is safe in this present, nothing still, nothing closed. That potentiality at least can do good work; that potentiality at least is something to conjure with. A politics of the now, a politics of being in and engaging with the world as it finds us.
Blah-feme begins with this first blasphemy.