Love is a qualified term

Love is a qualified term. There are lots of adjectives that go in front of it: agape, amorous, fraternal, paternal, maternal, familial, platonic. But what if, underneath (and perhaps excluding) these different demarcations and evocations of love, there was one fundamental meaning and significance of love?

This is where we switch gears. What if love can’t have a modifier? That modifier really suggests something else, something apart from love, or something that wishes to attach itself as an appendage to it. Here’s where I say that love is writing.

Writing, of course, is also a qualified term. In the course of this exercise (my senior thesis) I still haven’t come down all the possible paths. I still haven’t explored the implications of Love as Writing. So, to begin, let’s talk about love in terms of Badiou’s essay “What is Love?”. In that essay, I think that it’s safe to say that love is in direct relation to sextuation, that is, real physical and social relations between human bodies. There are several imperatives that Badiou invokes: these philosophical procedures are labeled as “truth procedures”. They are the processes and methods by which we find truth. These processes are: Art, Politics, Science, or Love. These various processes are true to the extent that they instantiate ‘humanity,’ which is to say that these processes legitimate communities, life, and the utopian concept of human togetherness.

Already, it’s easy to see that I’ve chosen three legitimating factors that color themselves within the lines of Art (utopia), Politics (community), and Science (life). And then, there is the fourth term, Love. Badiou goes into an analysis of love in both male and female sextuations: in the male variation, love legitimates the other realms concurrently within itself (it is equal to an extent, its role and priveledge are vital to the process, but only insofar as it is just a tad less equal to politics and art because it is only true if they are true). The female position on this is very different: we see that love is the surrounding factor, the procedure that totalizes and legitimates all of the others. It is the truth that is the most true. What does this mean?

Writing is dialectical, it is for the utopian, and it speaks the political.

In the introduction to this essay, Badiou launches into his main argument with a note on philosophy and novelistic prose, something that “women” have excelled at. Here, I believe that it’s crucial to let go of the generic and physical implications of women and consider the possibility that women is a qualifier for his later conception of love. If women is a type of code name for his female model of love. What is philosophy in all of this? And why is it that novelistic prose merely “thinks the thought of love?” Here, I believe that the quantum leap is made in terms of love as writing–specifically the discursive relationship between the following:

Philosophy and the novel (literature): If the novel thinks the thought of love, it can be said that love itself is philosophy. Philosophy is the truth procedure that legitimates humanity in toto: that is to say, it legitimates art, politics, and science. The novel is the animation of this truth procedure: it is the narration that does not interpret at a glance; the thought but not the interpretation. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the explication of the thought, the procedure behind narration: the imperative and the truth.

The singular and the universal: The reader and the world (humanity) that it accesses through this truth procedure (this procedure of love is played out on a number of different valences, which I’m still trying to illuminate thoroughly, but I’ve listed them below).

The producer and the “consumer” who is transformed: Through writing (and the reading of writing) love does not allow for passive members of humanity. Love instantiates the reality of art, of science, and of politics. It transforms dismantled into dialectical.

 

The philosophical incarnations of love:

Aesthetic (the utopian): the aesthetics of love as production. The imperatives of writing for a utopia; the needs for an aesthetic imperative. Works I’m using: Schiller, young Lukacs, young Geothe, Hegel.

Political (writing as Real, as phantasm): the image of “thoughts”; the dialectically legitimate (material) image (work) and the phantasmagorial. This last word means something like a method of translating and conflating reality into merely an image. A mythology, a process. A mythology as a mode of conflating reality and the political via translation (a note on ontology as a political hermeneutic). Works: Schelling, Adorno, Brecht, Lukacs.

Scientific (dialectical): what are the direct demands of philosophy and humanity’s animation if indeed it is literature? What is realism? and how are these goal accomplished? How do we break out of the images (ideologically binding utopias, mythological phantasms, and the like), to reach a legitimate and ultimately emancipatory type of love? Works used: Hegel, Marx, Badiou.

 

 

We can always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but are our feet in the shoes?

I keep thinking about the opening pages of Aesthetics and Politics and Lukacs’ subsequent response. There’s something fundamentally missing from his response because he fails to fully see what Bloch is saying. Subjects and impulses come up and re-index themselves at seemingly random moments: Lukacs’ response seems to say “and what does it matter if the topic of conversation isn’t grounded in the Realist Tradition?” But just the opposite is true. At the very moment when fascism was on the rise in the thirties, a renewed interest and reemergence of the Expressionists makes the most sense. It was a movement, in so many words and over-simplifications, of a desire to break out of a social reality and a condition that was intolerable for the subjective participant. And yet, this artistic experience is only possible authentic (in the imagistic sense) for that singularity. What Bloch’s use of the Expressionists signals, is that utopian impulses exist in the most oppressive ideological conditions and enterprises. Whether or not Bloch, himself, had this unspecific appreciation for the Expressionists, I highly doubt, since he frequently queued up the need for greater material integration of specific works into his critique. But then I think that this might have only been one way of addressing a critique whose sole purpose was to show Realism on the first valence.

The recurrence of a “utopian” image, or rather, the image that carries the latent desires of utopia within a full veil of ideological and social constraints that it cannot see, is a theme that Adorno’s letters to Benjamin picks up. He says of the collective image, that it was always a commodity fabrication and that the real objective point of reality for the collective is in its systematic subjective alienation (Aesthetics and Politics p.119). And on this point, I was reminded exactly of the Expressionists, for their systematic alienation from the authentic core of their own aesthetic production. Whether or not Expressionist art is conscious of this, is secondary…less than secondary, it seems to be necessary in order to produce a meaningful “Real” conception of the movement. Additionally, Bloch’s instance on the Expressionists’ desire to spontaneously break out of the material confines of capital (surely not a notion that Adorno would encourage) is itself indicative of the mythological implications of the image. But the its true import is of the dialectical nature of The Myth’s exposition throughout history.

For Adorno, the mythological image is that which nullifies the ideological and the utopian elements of its translation/comprehension. In a short of short-hand way, I think that there is even a case to be made for the Kantian-idealist status of art in mythologies, since they can never be anything better than Either/Or, both and neither. As my professor once said, it really is the limit of the Kantian argument (insofar as Practical reason is concerned).

But of course, in the aesthetic realm there is always more than practical reason. There must also be judgement. And in the case of the mythical image’s insistence on its status in the ideological: in fact, it is the greatest key to the ideological. Considering Bloch’s short opening piece, it is theoretically sound that he would choose such a topic for “debate”. This debate launches into the core of the utopian desires in an impossible ideological climate: and whatever the implications of the conversations, they were neither submerged into a quasi-historical narrative on good and bad art, but had everything to do with the modes of historical excavation and interpretation of a given impulse.

Spirit, Actual, Ethic (Aesthetics and Politics): Part One.

I figured that is time for a proper entry. I’ve gotten through the first three bits of this book: “Bloch against Lukacs,” “Lukacs against Bloch,” “Brecht against Lukacs.” There is a fourth part that I’m about halfway through now, and that section is a series of diaristic entries by Benjamin on Brecht. I should comment on the form and organization of these writings, first.

After the Presentation, Bloch’s “Discussing Expressionism” is so slight an entry in the book that it is hard to believe that it opens the door to nearly two hundred pages more of inquiry, analysis, and debate. The entry is only twelve pages, and it denies its ostensible form as a polemic. First, it seems to know that it is a piece about renewed interest, the picking-up of a thread, more than a “for or against” operation. I wonder if picking up such a discussion-thread has to incite a type of debate along its course, to get the momentum of debate going. After all, there are plenty of entries and essays that do discuss a topic, but are libel to be left static and “interpreted” in an endless array of citations, before a genuine discussion is brought about. But I think here, that Bloch ultimately asks for more, even only if in the title of his work, than a polemic. [That's why I like seeing it in this volume, where that request is met...]

Bloch is concerned with the spirit of Expressionism, the ways in which it permeates time and politics of a given instant. I think this is crucial for the beginning of this book. Where Lukacs would like to dismantle the whole project of Expressionism from the start based on its ideological flaws that are awakened in technical difficulties, Bloch highlights the mere insistence of existence. It seems, more than engage in a direct polemical debate with Lukacs, the man and philosopher, Bloch is more interested in dismantling the more material and categorical implications of such a debate. He insists that there is something to be learned and valued from the persisting spirit of the Expressionists, who placed importance on the immediacy of experience. Whether or not these experiences were materially or ideologically sound, has an import of lesser degree.

In a sense, the spirit of creation and of experience, Bloch points out, has the ability to permeate time and space, and therefore is the kernel of the human desire to experience something outside of the ideological and the categorical. He dismisses, correctly, the attack that the Expressionists were in any way tied with the Decadence movement, or any other movement. This is a qualified claim, and precisely the moment where, I think, Bloch goes down the wrong ally-way.  The spirit of Expressionism is to find that which is not totally consumed by ideology, which is not weighed down with systemic organization and categorization. It refutes the possibility of being categorized by being “incomprehensible” to the system outside of the system of primary experience. This is a negative characteristic, and one that undermines the entire project. Because if the only imperative of a system like Expressionism is to “express” there is no objective (or even subjective) referent to the revolutionary aesthetic that is claims to hold so dear. For if the Expressionsts have been unparalleled, yes, it would be in the spirit of ‘a-political’ experience that they themselves might call ‘trans-historical’ experience. And, of course a-political engagement is short-hand for engagement that is consumed in dominant ideology, and trans-historical aesthetic experience might enter into the realm of the eternel, but only once it has leaped from the platform of its particular economic and ideological enjambments. What I’m saying is, art must always know the terms of its own position in context to its present incarnation, or else it is subject to subsumption in another dominant form. Which, is what happened to the Expressionists, who were unable to Express anything more than their experience in capital.

This, leads me to take up the Lukacsian line of critique. He responds to Bloch in “Realism in the Balance.” I think that, first, he shows that the Expressionists are not Realists because they are not real, insofar as they have been cut off from the kernel referent which would allow them to adequately express a true reality or possibility outside of ideology and economy, since they lack the demarcations of those categories in the first place.

Red moon, blue sea, empty house

the hopeless and interminable feeling of artistic surges over in an expressive force, like the desire to speak to the boy who was left alone too long. left alone far too long and without a letter. the impression that stifles every refined word that i could drum up but haven’t learned, any project or open-road is closed-off by my idea of tomorrow’s hours, all-accounted and necessary, obligations and seasonal rifts. i wonder if tonight, the copper moon will cast a crooked shadow on a buckled sidewalk crack and let me see the trees and tiny snow flakes, burning against the full highland sky, heath freezing over like a weaving of icicles. and i could see stones moving in ghostly shapes, and what would it mean if i saw a face? a human face? this heavy and blunt despair falls away into the absurd gray hues of this computer screen and the wall opposite me and the person across the room, even shadows have lost their mystery–they wear the weight of bored and hunched shoulders.

i can only think by what i cannot say, i have no words that are mine and i don’t have the practice or precision to form them against the uniformity of a shaping knife. blind, surging spirit and feeling have spilled me out somewhere from first high, and now i spin a rabble of trash into glass, inviting others inside.

i still swell up like a bloated fish against the pitfalls of a well conditioned routine. everyday commonality is a phrase that means banality and my community has poisoned itself with false, fleeting dreams that are always smoking off glowing embers somewhere over the horizon–the romantic volcano would burn us in the street if we came too close to it. and oh, how we love our feet and fingers.

we see that we are on the land above the sea. we walk on water not by faith but by stones, pavement poured over and into the water like shell mounds that will not die.

and i am polluted by agreeing to regurgitate words before i’ve understood them. i stand choking above a toilet just after the second course– gagging and nauseated but i signed up for more, more, more, for the promise of more.

it’s clear to me, the politics of continuing the meal: we fall away from praxis and push it further still by force, pointing out until we have become masters of self-deception, of proving lacksis. we reaffirm just what we tell ourselves we patiently wait to fight against. we sit weak and sick on our own acids, at the grand meal of tastefully selected paradise in the dumps of New Jersey, where even the tomatoes are grown in cement.

more, more, more;

it was perhaps the worst slogan–
“WE WANT EVERYTHING,”

of course you do.

The empirically aesthetic fiction of politics

so  many more things can go wrong on a computer than on a type-writer. and yet the typewriter has me stumped. The ribbon is twisted. It’s making me completely angry… not at the typewriter. It’s a different kind of technical problem. I think if I tried to survey all of the different kinds of “technical problems”, or the estrangement that I have with italicizing something, it makes me very uneasy.

I didn’t realize it until a little while ago. Here I am, staring out my window, but I’m writing, with as much confidence and fluidity as if I were laboring over the lines. And if I make an error, something will highlight it for me. If I need to imprint the words or shift a letter, all I have to do is push a button. It’s not about the typewriter, either. That is just the thing that came before this… they are made of the same sentiments. What I feel, though, is the separation of my thoughts and their production. Is this real? Cloud data somewhere, and as long as we have this, it will be around well after my youngest sister has her last grandchild. Of what I made in a cloud, it will be seen in the numbers that make the image of the cloud, and the final product is a virtual list, fluidity, production.

I was talking last night with some friends. One said that he feels pure theory is self-indulgent crap, and that there has to be some empirical use for it. I had a hard time understanding his comment. Of course, I see that theory can be self-indulgent, like that presenter at Cornell a few months ago who said that his theory only worked in theory. (He was talking about some post neo anti fascist babble about the blood and the earth relating to the Hobbsean myth of humanity. For this I can submit Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach.) But his own argument seemed to preclude itself from theory, full stop. If something only works in theory, it seems to me that it is a mere fiction. And that something is a fiction, it must be understood both empirically and theoretically. Which leads me to my second critique of my friend’s statement, that the aesthetic may or may not really be an empirical use of theory. But theory is not to be used empirically. At least, not in any pedestrian sort of way. Like the man who said that his theory works only in theory, I would say to him that he was writing fiction, and that it would best be left to the theorists to make sense of his fiction. And to determine that his fiction was in fact a fiction and not a theory, one must inhabit the uses and abuses of imagined theories and sorts of other fictions from the empirically theoretical, and not the theoretically empirical, which is always a fiction.

And so it seems that theory is not a theory unless it is used in such a way that allows us to see the “empirical” (which is a fiction, as well, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very need to “find” the empirical).

I wonder, though, about the uses of a theoretical standpoint in the empirical production of aesthetics (forgive me if I start to sound cute). In the last day of the Idealist Tradition, we were having a stupid man’s discussion of the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. I should say that my understanding of the whole thing is a little stupid, but all in all, I think that the class was useful, even if only negatively. Okay, so we were ending the Idealist Tradition on a bit of sour note with Nietzsche. I really do need to spend time finding out just why I hate him so much…

The Idealist tradition “dies” but for me, it only dies insofar as it is ignored. I can’t go much deeper into my analysis of N right now, aside from the fact that he can neither be an anarchist nor a fascist. His fascism is impossible because it demands a rejection of all structure, and he cannot function as an anarchist because his anarchism depends upon the hierarchical construction of a united society. So, forgive all of my childish antics and my trite tone and lack of style when I say that Nietzsche seems to me like the crystallization of modern hysteria. This idea is malformed though, and I’m sure that someone has already written on it.

Here, I’m pulling myself back in to the discussion of the aesthetic and the ethical. I do see that the Fascists could have been great modern artists, insofar as they have precluded themselves from the real implications of being a fascist. In short, they were never really fascists, and if they were fascists in the way that people love to categorize them as Nietzschians, they were just scaley-eyed followers from the get-go. They did not know or posses the theoretical knowledge of their own aesthetic kernel. They might as well have made boots in Berlin.

I don’t know if I’m saying what I mean to say, and that’s because I am really undecided about the matter. No, I am not saying that Nolde was not Nolde, rather that he did not posses the means, empirically, that made him great. In a sense, i do understand that the aesthetic seems to be subsumed in the political, since it best operates (on an empirically functional level) when the actant is not aware of his situation. At best, he is only partially aware. In literature, I am thinking of Flaubert.

So, if aesthetics are not the mediatory device, and are instead understood as the kernel within the political, at the very worst, as something half dismantled from the political, what can I have to say about the production of art?

The way we move beyond both the “aesthetic” and “the political” to the first degree, is t borrow Fredric Jameson’s mathematical metaphor and kick it to the next power: we enter the realm of theory to deal with the empirical realities of imagined theories and politics.

From the merely aesthetic, just as the merely political, it is impossible to see which one is the empirical application of what, and at what time. It is also impossible to see the break between artistic greatness and technical skill, whose inspiration lies elsewhere. Theory, then, is the positing of these competing “first valence” phenomena, and placing them against not only themselves but against history and their contingent places in “empirical” reality. If you would like to call the theoretical a vacant category of metaphysics, you’ve got to be kidding yourself.

For an entry on the proper designation of theory and its production as “aesthetic,” I might need to eat some lunch, first.

the forms of sorrow

I talked yesterday of suffering. Yes, I think that much of what I said was true. Suffering is that which dominates the lived life. But it is this life of suffering that kills us; it threatens the form and content of life if it is not put to some other use. Goethe wishes to find strength enough to break outside the content of his sorrows, find fortitude to work in that other form of writing, ostensibly the essay, to reflect in language, God’s imprint on his soul. Sorrows cannot do this. Sorrows are mere reflection, mere existence. There is a Brecht snippet I’m thinking of in the Me-ti parables “How One Helps Oneself,” when Tu-su, broken from his lovers, bored of his soul, wishes to escape himself. All that time he traveled he was miserable, without a dream and without a purpose. Rather, if he had a dream or a purpose, it hung about the trees, forgotten in human wandering.

Yes, I think that he was leading the lived life. He fell ill from his heart and soul’s discontent, and lay to die, when a fire caused him to take part in the civil war raging around him. The final line of this parable goes “If, during this time, he was never heard to say that he felt emotionally well, that can only have been because nobody asked him about his feelings.”

We must not forget about life–its limits and its implications–in order that we might wallow in reflection of our soul. Lukacs’ forms of life on the bridges of existence, yes those must be burned. But always? The form of life is what maintains us, constricts our suffering and demands something more than feeling, although our sublated action might well be tainted, plagued, with melancholy. The point is that it is not merely melancholy.

So it is not enough to say one thing or the other; it is not merely suffering, nor can there be genuinely political existence without this lived suffering, for it reminds us that it is not our soul and only our soul that aches, but our bodies that ache in common, in human form.

He looked at my hand as he held it, as I held his arm. I turned and he held me in his arms. I saw his face and kissed him. He felt so thin. “You have to eat more. Please, you have to take care of yourself.” The wear on his face from exhaustion. The relief of being in his arms. I put my hand on his face, felt his soft beard. As I said I love you I thought of Badiou—and that here we were, trying to cross a bridge of our own. It was imaginary; our love is bigger than us. It was the rain and every tempered pulse, it was still knowing. “Love is more than me or you. We cannot change it or make it go anywhere. It is; and I’m not afraid. We have to do this,” I said. And he knew. He rested his head on my arm; I combed his wet hair with my hand. I looked out across the pond and the leaves on the trees stung out vibrantly against the heavy rain and the gray sky. I looked up at him; splotches of water hit our faces. We laughed. I took off his glasses and held his face close to mine. I held him. We must have been looking at each other, my eyes and his eyes. I felt his soul around me. The wind blew and leaves scattered through the air, haplessly to the water’s surface.

today’s edition of “is this normal?”

Goodness is madness, it is not mild, not refined, not quietistic; it is wild, terrible, blind, adventurous. The soul of the good man has become empty of all psychological content, of grounds and consequences; it has become a pure white slate upon which fate writes its absurd command, and this command will be followed blindly, rashly, and fiercely to the end. That this impossibility becomes fact, this blindness becomes clear-sightedness, this fierceness becomes Goodness–that is the miracle, the grace.

Gyorgy Lukacs “On Poverty of Spirit”

The psychological content of goodness is it’s divinity, but that is to say nothing of the real feeling of pain and torture that the soul feels as it does Good. Goodness, yes, is the breaking of everyday forms, it jumps from the bridges of formal postulations into what–? And that the soul might jump, might break away from form, is the first and strongest moment, precisely because it is not felt, but rather understood. The formally ethical, formally moral, inhuman constraints by which we attempt to define the human are in fact what deny its existence. It’s almost not worth mentioning the tattered constellation of the psychological soul that falls away into the unknown, other than the pain is uncontrollable.

But what was I thinking in the first place? The formal logic of love made it impossible–it foreclosed itself from me. And what does it mean that Goodness, for its divine incarnation in an utterly formal world fractures the tenderly aching soul? Has the soul been foreclosed from life, even if that life is unlived? Lukacs says that this is all psychology. No, no, not all, but merely psychological. But the human is marked for its ability to be good regardless of its psychology, it can touch the rashness of Goodness, the transhistorical reality of it. Oh that these forms might be broken, if at first they were the real life, or were they always forms? Can goodness be anything but usurped by form? If the life cannot be lived in them, in morality and duty, might goodness ever really be fulfilled? And at the end of this, are my arms only stretching into the blistering whiteness of it all, for some rope dangling?

A constellation of bore holes

I was reading, and stumbled upon this. The words are infinitely more beautiful than my own–

We are talking here about life: one can live without life; in one must live this way frequently, however, then it must occur consciously and with clarity. To be sure, most people live without life, but don’t notice the difference. Their lives are merely social, merely interpersonal; you see: they could be satisfied with duties and their fulfillment. As a matter of fact, the fulfillment of duties is, for them, the only possible exaltation of their lives. Since every ethic is formal, duty is a postulate, a form, and to whatever extent a form is filled out, to that extent it has its own life–to that extent it exists farther apart from any direct relationship. It is a bridge that separates; a bridge upon which we go back and forth, always coming upon ourselves, but never meeting anyone else. Such people, moreover, can’t step out of themselves, because their contact with one another is, at best, a psychological matter of sign-interpretation, and the strictness of the duty gives to their lives, if not a deep inner form, then at least a safe and firm one. The living life lies beyond the forms, whereas the everyday life lies on this side of them, and Goodness amounts to being given the grace to break through the forms.

Gyorgy Lukacs. “On Poverty of Spirit” Soul and Form.