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«А вождь наконец-то покидал насиженную Россию ... но на смену приходила только серая страшноватость, в которой душа советского типа быстро догнивала и проваливалась внутрь самой себя. Газеты уверяли, что в этой страшноватости давно живет весь мир и оттого в нем так много вещей и денег, а понять это мешает только «советская ментальность».
В. Пелевин, Generation П, с. 32.
All that remains is the серая страшноватость, endlessly refurbished, endlessly traversed by people who are so mutilated that they no longer even want what they desire and instead devote all their energies to affirming the primacy of an unlivable world over what is left of their selves. The utopian impulse is surely an old one, but what I long for is undoubtedly much newer - "N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!" But the ce implies an autre. That isn't quite it. That is still some kind of basically religious impulse. What I long for lies too far ahead of me. All I can do with my desire is prepare the way for it by willing the total negation of that which is. The way in which the present world is constituted makes the good life impossible. What resists it is too far inside us, and the subject is too riven with contradictions to survive outside of the hell which it has created for itself. But everyone already knows that utopia is not for us. That is why they claim that it does not exist. But what could be more pathetic than to think that goodness can only exist for me? We can imagine an empty utopia. This can still animate a basically humanistic political project, one which is constitutionally resistant to self-satisfaction: as long as we are alive, we have failed. But that does not mean that we want to die. We want, rather, to keep falling forward into the infinite possibility offered by an existence free from us, beyond us, not for our children (which we should not have), but for something endlessly ahead of us, unattainable, incomprehensible, the quintessence of hope.
This is what I realized as I walked past the "Cluck-U Chicken" in New Brunswick the other day.
To me, one of the great puzzles of intellectual history, and one which deserves detailed investigation: it is not enough to recognize that intellectual brilliance come in generations. It comes rather in people who meet long before they make their world-historical contributions. University friends: Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin; Eliade, Ionesco, and Cioran; Blanchot and Levinas. What does this mean?
When I first learned of the existence of this thing called postmodernism, I was amazed: how had something so vast as to be practically uncategorizeable - a something encompassing not just aesthetics but a sense of reality - have escaped my attention for so long (I was about twenty years old)? And then I realized the more amazing thing: this something had preceded me, according to the standard periodization, by almost twenty years!
What does this mean for one's position with regard to a cultural development - that is, whether one has seen it come into being, or, on the other hand, been born into it? In one case, the observer realizes the thing as it is happening around him. In the other, one looks around and realizes that one has been blind to one's own reality, not because it has crept up on you, but because you are saturated with it.
How many scholars of postmodernity are younger than it? What is the effect of this lag of the scholars behind the object of their scholarship? What will happen when those born after, say, 1980 will come to dominate academic discourse on the postmodern (if there is any such thing as academic discourse by then)?
Striking as it was for me to notice postmodernism, what I discovered was, in large measure, a corpse.
Imagine a photographic portrait. What is portrayed? Two subjects, looking at each other: the eyes of one through the photographic apparatus, the other's - mediated only by the air. The photograph records two people looking at each other. The photograph preserves the object of one of these and the subject of the other. The complements of these - disappear? Yes, as Barthes wrote, this photographed person is dead and is still going to die. But there is more here. He is looking at me (I am the photographer) - best if both the photographer and the photographed are dead. Then I can be both, looking at myself looking at myself. Three subjects behind one set of eyes, juggling all three, suspending all three in simulated life and simulated death.
Is this the opposite of what I find so terrifying in 'postmodernist' art? That the communicative circuit which is so dilated in the photograph of a dead person (or even one still living) is utterly destroyed here, with no creator and no recipient at all? Just the circulation of texts? The old nightmare: human creations leaving human beings behind. Cavell's idea of the film: seeing a world which does not see us. Is this what the experience of postmodernity is? Why are these images - Kabakov, Prigov, Rubenshtein, Petrushevskaia, Sorokin - so saturated with death? But it is not the death depicted in some of these which is terrifying, but some other death, one which pervades these texts and the experience of them.
The pornographic and the obscene are inalienably linked to the perverse which circumscribes the sphere of the negativity of desire. That is, what the 'I' desires is to be the desire of the 'other,' which is the desire to become an (impossible) object, the cause of desire or objet petit a. Desire, which always hinges on the destruction of the object (Hegel), finds its expression in the mutilation of the desired object or, as Lacan puts it: 'I love you, but, because, inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the objet petit a - I mutilate you.' Sacrifice is the theatre of this drama of the desire of the other. It is in ritual sacrifice that 'we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other,' which Lacan calls 'the dark God' of discourse. Thus the theatre of the pornographic - ontologically connected with Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty' - reaches its climax in sacrifice which represents, in Bataille's cosmology of the sacred, the highest expression of sovereignty, emanating from the negativity of desire.
-Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, "Vladimir Sorokin's Post-Avant-Garde Prose and Kant's Analytic of the Sublime," Poetik der Metadiskursivität: Zum postmodern Prosa-, Film- und Dramenwerk Sorokins, ed. Dagmar Burkhart (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1999), p. 29.
There are no needs, only desires.
Is it possible that human life will finally become livable when - the great dialectic of history completing the movement begun at the dawn of civilization - the economy - realizing its total independence from human existence (absurd appendage!) - shrugs us off, and we are left to feast on the crumbs that fall to us from its the unimaginable fury of its cyclone of exchange?The students admiring their technological learning-tools do not seem to realize that, for these tools, students are fast becoming a formality. Contrary to the usual apocalyptic fantasies, I dream of the day when the machines become advanced enough to leave us alone.
Anyone who endeavors to study the human sciences must be vigilant lest his standpoint regarding the material being studied (and what a contemptuous term to use when the material is the sum of all the intensities of the researcher's experience, compressed into the abstracted, momentary existence of a human being as datum, multiplied by the innumerable individuals covered by the most casual historical speculation - this 'material' far exceeds the researcher on all accounts) cause him to lose sight of the reality of historical experience. Just as bad as an unproblematic attachment to the material, to personal sympathies and the selection of one side against another is the attitude of superior detachment, bolstered by a few dismissive platitudes about the human condition and a skillful compartmentalization of professional and personal experience. Anyone committed to the human sciences must remain unreconciled with the object of study. He must also resign himself to the impossibility of assuming a proper attitude toward the pain which wells up from every fissure which thought forces in the hardened material of forgotten history.
I wish that someone had told me earlier about the importance of Mimesis. This book contains an education. Auerbach may be too quick in his traversal of territory which is, to modern eyes, so fraught with dangers and ambiguities, but the enormous erudition and extraordinary capacity for penetrating judgments (even if such a thing is riveted to a particular mode of thinking which every fashionable PhD dissertation seeks modestly and hypocritically to overturn), that to read Auerbach is to get a feeling (perhaps too strong) that one now understands the crucial conceptual foundations of European literature - that one has almost glimpsed the basic terms of the project of European literature.
Along the way, there are exceptionally lucid readings, not just of Dante, Rabelais, and Montaigne, but of medieval texts which, being unknown to me, serve all the better as markers both of evolving problems and of consistent or enduring ways of seeing the world.
Auerbach is not so fond of innovative concepts and terms as Bakhtin, but it would seem that he covers in two dozen pages, and with much more attention to the concreteness of the text, some of the essential features of the latter's analysis of Rabelais: "The revolutionary thing about his [Rabelais's] way of thinking is not his opposition to Christianity, but the freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena" (p. 276). Meanwhile, the reader, exposed to 'the world in Pantagruel's mouth,' finds himself "perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence, gigantic and grotesquely extra-normal events, and Utopian-humanitarian ideas; he is never permitted to come to rest on a familiar level of events" (p. 272).
All this without the unnecessary condemnations of degraded Romantic concepts of the grotesque or laments about the repressive machinery of an all-too essentialized Christianity transparently standing in for authoritarians everywhere (hence his popularity with people of modest imagination and virulent anger). What is more, Auerbach's method, relying on an extremely close analysis of the language which constitutes the text in question, is infinitely more concrete than Bakhtin's generalizations, which do more to suggest that for him every text is simply raw material for his polemic than to indicate a sincere engagement with, to invite the vengeful visitations of Heidegger's ghost, what is there. Suffice it to say that I wish people would take their examples from Auerbach and not Bakhtin. But the disingenuousness of the latter makes him infinitely convenient, for one can readily do with him what he does with the texts he mutilates.
Enough of Bakhtin. Let me include another bit of Auerbach's brilliance, this time with regard to Montaigne who, it is safe to say following the analysis in Mimesis, must qualify as the first prominent homme de lettres. Montaigne valorizes the general development of a human being in the round, so to speak, against any kind of specialization - a very popular bit of rhetoric today. But what is the historical basis of the concept of the well-rounded person? Tracing the confluence of classical ideals - unearthed by the emergence of humanism - the demands of courtly social interactions, and the emergence, more than ever, of learning as a source of distinction (someday I must read Bordieau),
[T]here arose a non-professional, strongly social, and even fashionable form of general knowledge. It was, of course, not encyclopedic in range although it represents as it were an extract from all branches of knowledge, with a pronounced preference for the literary and for the aesthetic generally; humanism, indeed, was itself in a position to furnish most of the material. Thus arose the class of those who were later to be called 'the educated.' Since it was recruited from the socially and economically most influential circles, to whom good breeding and conduct in the fashionable sense, amiability in social intercourse, aptitude for human contact, and presence of mind meant more than any specialized competence; since in such circles, even when their origin was middle class, feudal and knightly value concepts were still dominant; since these were supported by the classicizing ideals of humanism insofar as the ruling classes of antiquity had also regarded preoccupation with art and science not as a professional matter but as otium, as an ornament indispensable for the man destined to the most general life and to political leadership: there soon resulted a sort of contempt for professional specialization (p. 307).
Despite the inevitability of specialization in the present age, something of the old ideal still lingers in certain domains of upper-class life, as, for instance, in the contradictory and atavistic concept of college education - that strange throwback to which I owe my economic superfluity and social discontent. But the ideal of non-specialized and purposeless knowledge has other interesting consequences. "For the more general a man's culture and the less it recognizes a specialized knowledge and a specialized activity, at least as a point of departure for a more general survey of things, the further removed from the sphere of the concrete, the lifelike, and the practical will be the type of all-around perfection striven after" (p. 308). One might want to supplement Lukacs's analysis of the etiology of reification with this idea. If the scientific mode of thought encourages a contemplative approach to life, then this entirely formal sort of knowledge encourages the reification of thinking generally.
Someone should write the history of anachronism.
Reading Auerbach, I realize the strangeness of the world Dante created in the Divine Comedy. First the impossible coexistence of the eternal presence of souls in the state meted out to them by divine judgment and the limited freedom of those very souls to experience - and to interact with Dante. As Auerbach puts it:
Here we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante's realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth - among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante's inhabitants of the three realms lead a 'changeless existence.' (Hegel uses the expression in his Lectures on Aesthetics in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.) Yet into this changeless existence Dante 'plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual needs and destinies.' (Mimesis, p. 191).
This leads Auerbach to note that those residing in the afterlife - and most especially in Hell, since they are cut off from the divine - retain their contact with earthly life, which is the place where their fate is determined, "[f]or it is precisely the absolute realization of a particular earthly personality in the place definitively assigned to it, which constitutes the Divine Judgment" (193).
Not only are criminals classified in God's penal system according to their crimes only - so that everything else - the peripheral stuff of their character - can shine in the brilliance of its contrast with their eternal neighbors - but, more importantly, the crime, once committed, seals the individual's classification for eternity and, by implication, the identity of the individual himself. People have unchanging identities in God's world, and the choices made by people, inseparable from their identities, determine their eternal fates.
It would seem that justice, as equitable recompense for one's actions, with the idea of eternity as developed in Christian thought, must assume as its condition of possibility the unchangeability of human character - for all eternity. If the possibility that human beings are not identical with themselves over the course of a lifespan would make a mess of contracts and criminal law, just imagine what it would do to Divine Judgment! Human beings, separated from their bodies and earthly life, deprived of the temporality in which one can have concrete feelings, desires, experiences, etc., must, in the afterlife, retain the identity without the temporal condition in which it is possible. Hence, the image of eternal life in which everyone is somehow assigned a particular stage of life in which he or she remains forever (what do transsexuals do in hell or heaven?)
Personal change destabilizes the eternal scheme of creation. Nietzsche's thesis, slightly altered, that personal identity is the prerequisite for power, finds its ultimate realization in the Christian universe. Eternal judgment is the apotheosis of personality, as that which traps people in a state of consistency, allowing them to be subjected to the authority of God.
«Из неизвестного места подул ветер, чтобы люди не задохнулись» - Андрей Платонов, Котлован
There is no other writer whom I find so difficult to read, and it is not for the depictions of violence, or disease, or despair. It is these tiny moments of quiet compassion that make Platonov unbearable for me. Many writers of the 1920s combined the linguistic experimentation of an earlier period with the terminological innovations of Soviet power to produce the improbable combinations in which the bureaucratization of metaphysics could take place: the wind howls in Pil'niak and one hears, amidst the whispers of ghosts and the wails of witches - glavbooom!But how can that compare to Platonov's «А я сама не хотела рождаться, я боялась - мать буржуйкой будет»?
-Баба-то есть у него? - спросил Чиклин Елисея.
-Один находилса, - ответил Елисей.
-Зачем же он был?
-Не быть он боялся.
According to the BBC: The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. The United States is playing a large role in it. Nothing I say could make my thought more concrete.
In the Library of Babel, it becomes clear that the meaning of a text depends not on the writer of the text (there is none), but on the context in which the text is read - and the presence of a reader is necessary for this context to be actualized. While it seems that there must be myriad texts in the Library from which no possible language or mode of thinking could derive meaning, there is the rest - all mechanical in their composition - which, when interacting with a particular method for decoding information from text, yield up content.
The existence of a physical limit to the combinations of characters possible in the Library's standardized books points most clearly to the incommensurability between language and its referents. There is, ostensibly, no limit to possible quanta of reality, but the means for their representation in language are limited mechanically.
There is something uncanny about the library in which one could find the answers to any question a human mind could formulate - and so any answer such a mind could understand - but where looking for such answers and asking such questions is utterly useless because what has been revealed is the hideous materiality of language. One returns to the question a child or an illiterate might ask: how can these idiotic little black pictures mean anything in the first place? The answer, in some roundabout confirmation of a basic idea from Saussure, is that this is possible only when there are empty spaces left for the words to fill.
Old Goriot is a fascinating book. It could be approached from any number of directions. One of the first which emerges for me is its influence upon Dostoevsky's conception of Crime and Punishment: what does a talented young man do when he realizes that the Social Contract was a swindle? It would not do to take the comparison too far, but Vautrin sounds strikingly like Raskolnikov at times. The odd juxtaposition of the gruesome and the saccharine finds its way into both novels. In one, they meet in the figure of Goriot, in the other - let's say, provisionally - the Marmeladov family (the only nuclear family in the novel). Both have self-sacrificing women, although the poor sisters and rich society women of Balzac's novel are reconfigured as Raskolnikov's sister (who gets her own corrupt and wealthy suitor) and Liza, the obligatory bearer of consummate humility.
Rastignac and Raskolnikov are both young men whose talents brook no comparison with the wretched stop reserved for them by society. More interesting, perhaps, than the difference in responses is the degree of success each meets in defiance of his lot.
But of course Old Goriot is as much about the its eponymous character as it is about Rastignac, who enters from one side of the narrative and departs from the other, his future rather more open than Raskolnikov's after the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. As far as Goriot is concerned, his story might have found a parallel in a slightly more melodramatic Kafka story told from the point of view of the father's disappointment in his inadequate son.
Goriot's love his daughters is as exaggerated as the squalor to which his devotion has reduced him. In his imagination, God's attitude toward his creation compares unfavorably to the old man's regard for his daughters. Several times, our narrator describes his feelings for them as those of a young lover.
The relationship is mutually parasitical. He has given them the fruits of his life's work, but he has denied them the capacity for independent existence. Again and again the daughters lament that they have been given into marriage before they had a chance to learn to think: "Fathers ought to think for us." Both end up in the clutches of avaricious and contemptible men. Both take on lovers as a matter of course, but Rastignac soon discovers that this is not a particularly lucrative position. The relationship of mistress and lover is likewise that of reciprocal exploitation. The father cannot bear to be apart from his daughters, but he has promoted them to circles into which he cannot be admitted. They are at the mercy of a social system which strips them of the money which granted them access to it. In the end he condemns the institution of marriage for separating daughters from fathers and the succession of generations for leaving daughters without the protection of their patriarch. The reproduction of the species and the process of life are obstacles to the feedback loop in which father and daughters are supposed to remain, profiting from each other as they wither away. Given the state of the world, the old man knows that his daughters could never be faithful to him. As is so often the case, he reveals his wisdom in the ravings of his dying hours:
'Neither of them!' cried the old man, sitting up. 'They are busy, they are sleeping, they will not come. I knew it. You have to die to know what your children are. Ah! my friend, do not marry; do not have children! You give them life; they give you death in return. You bring them into the world, and they push you from it. No, they will not come! I have known it for the last ten years. I sometimes told myself so, but I did not dare believe it.'
He invests his life in them, but he expects a return: a lifetime of attention from them both. But he knows it will not come. Like Georg Bendemann's father knows that his son has been plotting his betrayal with the Russian friend.
This relation of parent and children brings to mind that of Vautrin and Rastignac.
It is a facile observation that capitalism is like a religion, or, more precisely, that it does much the same thing as religions do. The evidence for this is the incompatibility of an established, religiously governed way of life with capitalism. Islamic banking is a non-sequitur. It's an unresolved dialectic or a preposterous joke. The absurd notion of the 'conflict of civilizations' finds its moment of truth in the manifest incompatibility of these 'civilizations' with the one force which dissolves them all: capitalism. If a 'civilization' comes into contact/conflict with capitalism, e.g. "Islam" vs. "the Western world," then the civilization is on the verge of extinction. Religion is an atavism, like all other forms of community, like all binding agreements except those supported by the institutions of capitalism such as the law and, what really supports the law, the organized violence of the state. The servile nonsense called protestantism can of course support capitalism, but those religions which forbid usury and condemn profit, while always coexisting with forms of unequal exchange, cannot coexist with the enshrining of unequal exchange as the basis of the social order. What happens to them when placed on this precipice is perhaps what we are witnessing today - what we call fundamentalism and explain in the stupidest way.
But a question: what are the dual histories of Christianity and capitalism in Russia? Christianity and feudalism? How did the church respond/what happened to the church in the early 20th century? What is the relationship between devout Christians and incompetent capitalists?
I once tried to justify my love for Kafka to a pair of incredulous friends. My failure was total. Not only were they not convinced, but my own faith in Kafka's works was shaken by my inability to locate their substance. After numerous false starts, I was confronted by the nihility of that which I was trying to defend. Why is Kafka great? I was left with the most idiotic of claims: because he is really unusual.
And so, let me make another attempt, in a vacuum this time. Something of the extraordinary nature of Kafka's modest oeuvre makes itself evident when one reads interpretations of his writing. Invariably, these interpretations appear grossly inadequate to their task. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the satisfactory interpretation of Kafka is the despair of any theoretical scheme. This is the obstacle which none of them manages to overcome. In each case, the attempt brings the interpretive method to the brink of its own dissolution. Strangely enough, the reason for this seems to be that each one works so well.
Kafka as the prophet of totalitarianism, Kafka as the psychoanalyst avant la lettre, Kafka as theologian for an absent God, Kafka as writer of minor literature. All these attempts are idiotic.
Without access to any of the works I have read or the many more which I have only perused or read about, I cannot substantiate my easy dismissal of all this scholarship, no doubt written by people more learned and intelligent than I. But whenever I read an interpretation of Kafka, I am left with the impression - although I have succeeded in articulating this impression only now - that the interpretive process crushes the supremely delicate tissue of the work, smashes it into dust, and leaves nothing but its own superstructure standing.
Any interpretation of Kafka in accordance with a given theory leaves nothing except that theory. Kafka disappears. He is explained away. If one wants, one can reduce Kafka to weird father-son relationships, monstrous women, dark corners, beds, and laws written down in porno books. Gregor Samsa and the protagonist of "The Judgment" are sons who can find no light in the shadows of their fathers. So total is their domination that they turn into insects or carry out their own death sentences. There's quite a lot of guilt here, you know. Or "Investigations of a Dog" is a theological allegory: dogs are to people as people are to god. But the allegorical aspect is totally irrelevant to the narrator's pursuits. The dogs' obliviousness to humans is less an indictment of their ignorance than it is a dismissal of the irrelevant "higher" beings. What the investigator is searching for is eminently immanent to the world of dogdom.
If K.'s attempts to reach the castle are like man's attempts to reach God, then God is absolute banality.
Kafka's works are striking in that they seem to be symbolic, when they are not. If "The Metamorphosis" seems to be the most symbolic work, then maybe this accounts for its popularity. It is the easiest of the stories to understand.
If Kafka has been misread by those emphasizing the tortured interiority of his works, then what to make of "The Cares of a Family Man?" Was the audience supposed to laugh at this story too? It is wrong to interpret laughter as signaling the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes one laughs in despair. This is not the kind of tepid laughter that one encounters among people at uncomfortable parties.
A few years ago, there was a book released portraying Kafka as an active man-about-town, successful bourgeois bureaucrat, and connoisseur of high-end pornography. The attempt was to humanize him, I suppose, and that is a worthy enough endeavor. There have been enough hagiographies of Kafka. It is all too unfortunate, then, that in the 21st century, to humanize a person is to point out his hemorrhoids. Kafka purchased pornography? You don't say! [and really, you don't, insofar as the 'pornography' was a literary journal. Show Kafka a modern Russian pop video, and he would probably have cried.] The publication of Kafka's office writings does not do much to convince me that he was an exemplar for the managerial class or that one can produce the works he did while 'enjoying' the 'life' which is served to us with added vitamins and minerals.
If the attempt to humanize a writer means making him as banal and worthless as I, his reader, am, then I think I prefer the hagiographies. There is a reason I read Kafka instead of re-writing him.
If I were an artist, I would create life-like statues of attractive naked women and position them in a landfill. Honesty and freedom. I would insist that this is not an allegory, but merely a paraphrase of life as it is.
1. Spectacle makes the concrete abstract and the abstract concrete: the world is pure surface, where anything can be possessed, but only as an image. That is to say, passive contemplation replaces activity: only pseudo-consumption is really possible, since one cannot do anything in a totally reified world.
Here, Debord reveals his debt to Lukacs.
2. "The true is a moment of the false" (sec. 9): The totality can only be grasped negatively, as the sum of that which has been occluded by the spectacle and the spectacle itself.
3. The spectacle steals work and non-work (rest): work moves away from life and toward the construction of the spectacle; leisure time is the opportunity to be subjected to the spectacle (to one's own alienated labor); leisure is a spectacular simulacrum of concrete freedom.
But what is the wholeness of which spectacle has robbed us?
4. "The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents." (sec. 31)
5. The spectacle is at once a confirmation of already achieved abundance and the denial of its practical realization: the liberation of humanity from alienation and need.
6. The economy, as second nature, liberates humanity only to impose a new, equally permanent and equally impersonal (though voluntary!) compulsion.
7. The conquest of abundance necessitated the opening of a new sphere of production - that of desire. The economy's most important product is consumption (cf. sec. 40-43).
8. The use-value of a commodity in the age of pseudo-activity lies in its exchange-value (cf. sec. 46).
9. "The spectacle is money one can only look at." (sec. 49)
10. The function of civilization is now the support and reproduction of the economy.
11. The "economy loses all connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges from the social unconscious that unknowingly depended on it" (sec. 51). Are authentic needs not social? Or is the support of the spectacle a false sociality which is slowly emerging?
Economy is the social subconscious. It must be made conscious and subjected to the reality principle.
12. Stars live exemplary lives as representations of society's unfulfilled promise - but they also turn the byproducts of social labor into the most desirable things: "power and vacations" (sec. 60).
The public figure is always-already spectacular, i.e. not real, nonliving.
13. The commodity economy breeds spectacular rivalries and antagonisms which are themselves commodities. The infantilization of society creates inter-generational conflict; homogenization produces cliques, fads, subcultures; radical otherness is effaced in the world of pure apprehensibility. Everything can be acquired - but only as image, only as object of contemplation. Radical otherness - the Real - recedes as noumenon. Kantian philosophy becomes intuitive (cf. sec. 62).
14. Youth itself is a commodity - the correlate of endless production and necessary obsolescence; ideal youth becomes eternal and endlessly the same - a demographic through which one passes.
15. Concentrated spectacle is totalitarianism, culminating in the cult of personality as surrogate for the existence of the masses.
16. Diffuse spectacle: capitalism celebrating itself as inaccessible totality.
17. Self-conscious hipsterism and the phenomenon of 'it's so bad it's good' are tacit admissions that there can be no talk of quality in a cultural sphere approximating Borges's Library of Babel. All demographics are provided for, and one must choose from the superabundance which makes its absurdity undeniable: stupidity, corniness, gimmickry - all become commodities; the undesirability of bad things made in bad taste makes them desirable.
18. The collection - the most idiosyncratic thing possible - is manufactured en masse. This is because idiosyncrasy is also manufactured.
19. Marxism is non-teleological insofar as its goal as theory is to make historical development conscious of itself. After that? Total openness as against the false choices of capitalism and the mechanical determinism of idealist misunderstandings.
20. The bourgeoisie are the only revolutionary class that has ever won (sec. 87); they are the class of the economy. The proletariat must become the class of consciousness - that is the necessary condition for a new society.
21. The wake of the October Revolution revealed the survival of the economy above all - the bourgeois economy could exist without a bourgeoisie: the bureaucracy with its goal of primitive accumulation would serve in its place.
22. Stalinist totalitarianism is a sort of surrogate for the capitalist spectacle - but rather than transforming reality like the latter, it only forces (with the direct application of violence) a transformation in the subjected population's perception.
23. The power of totalitarian bureaucracy is directed first and foremost to the denial of its own existence. (sec. 106)
24. Judeo-Christian religion marks a temporal revolution - a universal, unidirectional movement of time - a temporality affecting everyone and everything. It was not a complete revolution, however, and its telos was merely the beginning of the Real - the kingdom of God outside of time; but it was a definitive break with cyclical time nonetheless. (sec. 137).
25. The bourgeoisie introduce the concept of work as the transformation of history; work becomes a value in itself because it makes the world, and is not merely a condition of life. (sec. 140)
26. Global capitalism introduces universal history, but only as the temporality of the economic process, as universal reification: history is given to all just as it is taken away again.
27. The reified time of life under capitalism acquires a pseudo-cyclicity: nights/days, weekdays/weekends, vacations: it is itself a resource for temporal commodification - ultimately for the lifestyle-commodity itself.
28. "The spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory" (sec. 192) - the random juxtaposition of fragments which have become illegible, the construction of a false unity (as a spectacle) of a fragmented world in a fully integrated present which communicates the totality of fragmentation and the impossibility of communication: diagnosis of the postmodern condition.
29. sec. 196: structuralism as apology for the spectacle.
30. The charge that capitalism creates false desires does not necessitate the existence of true desires - merely the gratuitousness of what exists and the possibility of something better.
Anyone aspiring to an understanding of the present must come to terms with the past. But the past is constantly expanding. Every generation entering the present of history must therefore become wiser or, if that proves impossible, more superficial than those which preceded it. There is something to be said for the perpetual lament for the degenerating present - there is, indeed, a change in the horizons of knowledge that is always taking place. Maybe the destruction of the literary canons has something to do with their own unlimited growth. Perhaps relativism is a concession to the impossibility - as the rate of acceleration increases and the permissibility of ignorance declines - of an adequate and attainable realm of common knowledge.
I regard myself as an uncompromising person. At first, this sounds like self-praise, and, like all self-praise, it is no doubt unjustified, for a single exception is enough to puncture insecure vanity, and such an exception is always available. All the same, this label ceases to flatter as soon as one reflects upon the general approbation accorded to the concept of compromise. But I cannot agree with this judgment.
Compromise is, essentially, nihilism. It is the concession to total relativism, to the idea that one idea is as good (as bad) as another. For when two parties compromise, they arrive at a position that is equidistant from both original claims, and which is therefore incapable of doing justice to either. To admit to the possibility of compromise is to forsake one's commitment to the original idea.
Compromise, like political moderateness, is the claim that all points of view are equal and equally worthless. It is not so much a matter of respecting the other as it is a total destruction of the possibility of meaningful difference. My position is as (in)valid as yours. By compromising with you, I betray my own position and assert that yours should be betrayed as well - in the interest of expediency, or peace, etc. All claims to the right apprehension of the matter slip into an abyss remote from all positive statements. One compromises with the other because the other is there, not because there is evident truth in the other's claim - this is something else entirely; it is re-evaluation; in the most basic sense, it is a repudiation of one's earlier claim. This is not the same thing as systemic compromise, as in the American political system, where all commitments are nullified in their aggregation, where the system is to preserve itself by amalgamating the delusions of the masses into an innocuous mixture.
A claim comes with a corollary - that claim is right, or it is not right. The resolution of this question necessitates action: the defense of the claim or its repudiation. Defense can succeed, or it cannot. If it does not, one is at least left with the truth of one's convictions, or the conviction in one's truth. Insofar as the functioning of a system or organization presupposes compromises, it nullifies the individuals within it. The structure which allows me to keep my opinion for myself by preventing its expression in the social realm divorces that opinion (and my opinions as a whole) from the possibility of realization.
Something of this problem is already captured in the dual connotations of the word 'compromise.'
Truth is not discovered about things so much as it is stabbed into them. The paper-thin material of the world gives way under the weight of truth. Those who seek knowledge are working to bring about the Apocalypse.
Unceasing consumption induces indigestion, and so, I feel compelled to return to this blog and reverse the flow of information, however insignificantly, in utter disdain of the endlessly proliferating obstacles to such frivolity. Has it been a while? It could have been worse ("Behold, I come quickly ...").
And if the process of writing another post, although effectively contributing nothing to my short list of accomplished things, brings relief, it should not, I hope, be read in light of what I just wrote about the sickness that comes with the consumption of texts which I have neither the time nor the energy to absorb.
It would be entirely unoriginal to characterize the world's scholars as a herd of ruminants, busily reconstructing their fodder into the only production of which they are capable. I can only hope to be so prolific. As far as the usefulness of all this creation, perhaps it is no better than the metaphor toward which I have been tending with a feeling of delicate revulsion. Or maybe it is even worse, for nothing sprouts from it - except more bovines, perhaps.
But if academics don't do anything useful with those brains of theirs (and for all the noble defenses of the humanities I could mount, there is a difference between preserving the "treasures" of "civilization" and endless self-extirpation in the interest of projects which only pretend to have contact with political reality), then this is at least in part because academia is, whether accidentally or intentionally, a repository - an institution, no less! - for those dangerous and altogether undesirable elements of society which might, if deprived of the opportunity for unceasing busy-work, busy themselves with certain, more concrete, forms of criticism.
[Please note, this is conspiracy theory No. 2 regarding the purpose of academia: there are those who are merely processed by the system, i.e. die Studenten, and those who are contained by it and do the system's processing, i.e. die Professoren. See also conspiracy theory No. 1]
And as far as the first category - the blessed students for whose ostensible sake this whole structure exists - the perpetual complaints and polemics regarding the always-already irrelevant humanities and the constant demands for practical skills - the expansion of the university to accommodate those who were always destined for the meat-packing plant in one form or another brought with it, quite naturally, a new set of requiremetns. The humanities never mattered to the people who did; it is simply that the universities did not have to produce high-level cashiers and managers of cashiers, and the rich people who rebelled by becoming professors could continue to dispense healthy portions of the refrigerated high culture which those who would assert their superiority to the mob which they exploited needed to pass the time (and show that they needed something with which to pass the time).
[One is reminded of the contemporary notion of exercise. Those who do not need to work need to demonstrate that they have enough idle time to pretend to look like they have to work - but no one would ever confuse those who work and those who work out! The latter is a demonstration of one's superiority to compulsion].
To put the matter briefly, if reading Marx in an academic environment makes me sick at the thought of the utter pointlessness of the excercise of reading Marx in an academic environment, anemically discussing texts which were, at least once upon a time, intended to provoke action, then perhaps there is still some hope for me as a human being. On the other hand, it would be much easier just to give in and feel the comforting waves of contented cretinism wash over me as I settle into even the minimally tolerant lifestyle of a "contingent" academic. But if not cretinism, then what? What is to be done? Write stupid books, starve, wait for the inevitable (the unpredictable).
