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 first half of On Interpretation-

Jameson’s first chapter On Interpretation begins with a lengthy introduction and repudiation of previous modes of interpretation. He begins with Althusserian Marxist variant of structural causality, which is embedded in that thinker’s structural approach. Structuralism is very important to Jameson’s conception of the dialectic of Utopia and ideology as manifested in modern literature, but not without considerable qualification. To begin with, Jameson argues that structural causality as it was fought in various encoded political battles (namely the French Communist Party against Stalin) used the concept of (semi) autonomy was used as a reductive term to quantify the various levels of economy and society. The debate was that Stalin’s use of causality allowed his particular brand of ideology to cross cut and flatten the various levels of culture and society in order to maintain a direct (and alienated) network to subjects. This, Jameson argues, is a syllogistic approach to a structuralism whose causality is rather situated within mediation between these structures, and not the levels, themselves. The difference between autonomous levels in structuralism, versus a structursl relationship of mediation is that, synchronically, the relationship from one level to the next to the next, are inextricably inter-woven and show a kind of origin within the “base;” that is, the relationships lose their autonomy insofar as they express the homology of relations themselves. (Which, as a side note, clearly also counteracts post-structural critiques that quantify the levels as autonomous and interchangeable into a situation that is not only undialectical, but also un-Marxist.) All of these qualifications serve to suggest that Althusserian Marxism must be understood as a (modern) modification of the Marxist mode of interpretation, rather than a break with it. Indeed, earlier in the chapter, Jameson brackets Althusserian Marxism as a type of local law, presumably the local laws of modernism, and therefore cannot be abandoned or washed away in the critique of modern literature.

Jameson goes on to dismantle the “alternate” side of the debate, which is the Lukacian analysis of modern literature, which the author says is reductive of the modernist problematic and completely ignores the Utopian vocation of reification. So, while Lukacs is not wrong in his historical identification of reification as an oppressive ideological force, his essentially un-dialectical mode of interpretation is not useful in conducting a genuine literary analysis of modernism. Althusserian structuralism in the highly qualified and historically corrected sense, is still applicable on a level of modern history, though structuralist Marxism as a master-code approach must be limited or qualified within a properly dialectical hermeneutic that is trans-historically valid. So, the first chapter of The Political Unconscious introduces the dialectical relations as embodied in the form of the novel as the mediatory force between modern structural levels of reality in late capitalism (late modifying the recentness of events, not a suggestion of impending capital failure).

Jameson also engages with other allegorical lexicons of interpretation, namely Freud’s schematic. Here, he works to qualify the structure of Freud’s interpretive apparatus by freeing it from the essentially private sphere of individualized libidinal desire. Freud maps the unconscious impulses of desire, which relates to wish-fulfillment, not as a personal libidinization of private desires, but a filtering of history and Utopian impulse along axes in order to free dialectical bearing to an otherwise ideologically bound system of individual impulse. (Jameson also validates Freud’s lexicon from the Freudians as its own mode of interpretation in exposing that the only group who is invested in making sense of the Freudian lexicon within its own context are themselves, and that symbolism in its direct/contextual sense has long been outmoded approach to the unconscious, specifically because it does not gesture towards the political without extensive qualification.) This moment in the text is a direct pre-cursor to his analysis of Conrad, whose literature contains a dialectical relationship to (desired) value as it was discussed in terms of that author’s contemporaries, Nietzsche and Weber. Jameson completes this lexical liberation by transferring the Freudian interpretative mode from the individual onto the allegorical organization of modeling society as presented by Northrop Frye. Frye’s mythical allegory of social relations, while imbued in religious imagery, is useful with the infused terminology of Freud’s lexicon, a mode of interpretation for social relationships as a unifying ideological process that provides surface cohesion for an otherwise conflicting formation (i.e. ideology as religion). Freud’s interpretive code is explicitly useful in terms of Frye’s allegorical level of the Myth/Archetypal, but when this interpretive function is expressed, it passes into the anagogical mode of “meaning” that always re-invests itself as a contained ideological impulse.

In this sense, the reader can quickly branch out the book’s Conclusion, wherein the dialectical mode of ideology is also clearly Utopian, but forever re-invested in its own ideological code (in late capitalism, the dream of eternal life or bliss is always folded into an insistence of consumption). Returning to Frye’s allegorical mode of social interpretation, Jameson is in fact drawing out a doubled critique of the Lukacian critique—while the Anagogic impulse does contain the Utopian content within ideology, it is always reinvested in ideology because it does not explicitly realize the imminence and necessity of the Utopian; that is to say, Frye’s conception resolves the dialect by functionally leaving it within the unconscious of the Anagogical desire, itself.

Understanding Jameson’s Preface to “Marxism and Form”

The preface begins with a note on the status of the changing historical importance/perspective of history. This note is not the simple kind of “well, not then, but now” approach to writing or thinking about Marxism. In fact, it doesn’t even degrade the European Marxist milieu of the 30s. What it does do is lay out the relationship between history and the context of history, and those two things with this current moment…

But that’s not really all there is to it, either, because if all Jameson really meant to do was “bring it up to speed” with his moment, he would essentially degrade his own moment; he would essentially also degrade (in his words, relegate) history to the barracks of the night-school. (But with the uncertain status of grad-school education, this should be understood as a memory of factoids.) This factoid-like conceptualization is also something that we come in contact with frequently in today’s (anti) liberal arts rhetoric “what does this [english department] mean?” is the essentially vacant (not-wanting-to-be-answered) question in non-Marxist learning traditions…

What Jameson prefaces this book with is an example of the late/post 60s mis-remembrance of history (especially Marxist history) as a linear graph into the “present.” Jameson shows that the present, without some sort of ontological (i.e. form) the whole praxis of Marxism will fall flat in the next moment of the present, like chivalry or faith have through the eyes of 20th century capital. What this starts is something that Jameson argues all along: that Marxism is not one deciphering code among many inter-changeable and comparable with all of the others, but that Marxism can only be viewed as such from within capital’s already-formulated idea that appears to be invisible in factoid-history.

This form is the historical dialectic; the mode of social discernment through the rigorous use of a Marxist approach to history that stops and rests nowhere, not even in the “present.”

And so, Jameson’s book title really denotes that Marxism can only be used as a mode of social and historical understanding without falling into a linear time-trap like the bourgeois mode of analysis, through its form, which is the process of dialectical re-appraisal that never ceases. Jameson proceeds to put this concept into effect with a “relatively modest and straightforward” task of accounting for six of the 20th century’s greatest thinker for their contributions to literary criticism.

Each one of the chapters (so far; I haven’t finished the chapter on Sartre) is more than a Jamesonian re conception of the original thinker’s work, but a historical unfolding and explanation of their work that even their works did not realize fully because they were in some ways blinded by the moment in which they were written. Jameson seems committed to the notion to write historically and not according to ‘his own’ standards for another reason: it seems that so far in the book he has conceded and included the necessity for an eventual re-reading and historical adjustment to his own writing. [At this point, I don't want to do much more than pose this to myself.]

Jameson is also clear to note in the preface that this is not an exercise in philosophy, but a preparation for literary criticism. This is a tricky kind of claim, for if we follow it through his already stated necessity towards the idea of contemplating literature as well as previous Marxist theorists in a properly dialectic way, that demands the intensive task of philosophically rigorous writing.

In order to reach literary criticism, one must first reach through the past, reach through the theorist’s contemporary ideological blockages (not to mention the original author’s, either) and confront the text without snapping one’s hand through the sharded glass window of “present” ideology. That is to say, the project of Jameson’s book may well be understood as a work against the factoid/linear conception of philosophy and writing and time and criticism (i.e. everything) in an attempt to access truth (i.e. to fulfill the otherwise rhetorical void of meaning) which can

a. only occur in the Marxist Historical context that

b. is not a specific application (or a transitory ‘best-of’ application like in bourgeois analysis) but that elevates the otherwise factoid-like content of history into a Marxist [dare I say Utopian?] possibility.

Left Forum: student as student, student as reader, writer, one-day intellectual

So also in Sartre, for whom it must be said, in spite of his emphasis on our pro-jection forward in time, that the future remains imaginary in the most morbid sense: nothing, indeed, draws down the whole corrosive force of Sartean irony more surely than the mere wish to change in the future, or, what amounts to the same thing, the wish to have changed in the past: idle daydreams, or remorse. Such wishes in reality have their function in the present alone: one wants to change (think of the horror of Electra when her bloody daydreams are–as though through some terrible misunderstanding–actually realized) in order to feel oneself superior to an intolerable present, only to dissociate oneself mentally from a present reality one does not care to see. (Marxism and Form, page 139. Fredric Jameson.)

Left Forum is officially over. So it’s Sunday night. We started out at six AM yesterday. My last moments on the top floor of Pace University after staring out the window to the Brooklyn Bridge, the old buildings of New Amsterdam, and the reappearance of warm-weather haze, I stared out the window. This is the left of 2010.

Being young during a financial, social, educational crisis is lonely. The left is lonely for a student who wrote for the Idea and maybe only for the intended reader. I wrote because I read The Coming Insurrection, I wrote because I read about California, Rachel Smith. Today, I was around some people who were stuck in “orthodoxy” and people who were in full engagement with the Communist Hypothesis.

Bruno Bosteels opened up the Badiou panel (quoting with the highest attempts to faithfulness from my notes:

Should we have confidence in the old masters? … What is it like to be a young communist? … Shouldn’t we start with active forgetfulness? Can we really ignore the longer history? … What do we do in search of the “everyday” communism; what happens in a communism that is everywhere and no where? Badiou displaces the possible to the impossible. … Politics as Idea… Idea with a capital I and History with a capital H.

and Boris Groys (not directly quoting b/c of scattered notes):

What does it mean to be faithful to the communist idea? It is possible to be faithful the communist idea by faithfully returning to point zero, and there is faithfulness in following communism to the letter. In the former, there is a constant returning and erasure. To be faithful, one must be willing to break with the project. … How can we be faithful to Marxism? the Revolution? … [Being committed to the communist] Spirit means going further and further. … The withering of the state is a problematic program.

[I heard the last sentence many times and in many different groups.]

Groys also said that he is ambiguous to Badiou’s writing; it touches on the main impulses of society but his selection of arguments and facts are problematic. [Badiou] always looks at the bright side of things, nothing bad ever really happens…

But I am thinking that perhaps there is a reason why Badiou might be so hopelessly bright; in a very bad version of a similar Badiou panel I responded to Revolution Books or who-the-fuck-ever they were that you couldn’t “apply” Badiou’s conception of the “event” onto (what have become) stogy examples of second-wave Maoist examples and 1917 directions. In his speech “Thinking the Event” it is most clear that the event is precisely at a distance from political power because it is a philosophical project of incommensurabilty that can’t be translated or quantified onto older movements, or any political formation, directly.

the Idea; the idea is everywhere–the possibility and the Idea and a few writers who don’t even know my name, a few mentors, and even fewer friends. And me–and books and me. And the man on the corner that I can see looking up at the sky-scraper in construction. Lonely work for students, these days. Lonely work because I’ve already broken with the rhetoric of Revolution Books but the thinkers who I most look up to are in company with each other. It is getting better: maybe just because I’m here now and that makes a difference. But labor panels still talk about Greek labor unions and “flexible,” “irregular” labor forces without mentioning students. Without mentioning Communique or The Coming Insurrection or immigration or social security…

And at lunch today during a good conversation I realized that writing is the act that allows the reader (well, the reader and the writer who’s like me) to follow the tradition of other pieces that influence it. The pieces speak to each other from time to time–the beginning of epochs and the ends of them and the beginnings, again. There was a good chunk of time that I thought the handing-out of writings, the immediate and “responding” audience should care the way I was invested in writing as a thought-process. I mean… this might be old news to you, but writing might have just changed my life again. The Idea is bright, such is the nature of beginning again.

Marxism and Form: T.W. Adorno

Reading this was not difficult in the sense of “understanding” the content; in many ways, I think that my independent study last semester had already digested the core message of the essay. But of course there is no core of dialectical writing; especially not with Jameson–especially not with Jameson contemplating the method and form of T.W. Adorno.

What was amazing to me was the textured folds of the text: it was never just Adorno, it was never just Jameson: remastering through the essay. At the end of the essay, there is a long and tremendous swelling up around Adorno’s dialectical writing style as a means to embed the content into poetic (J’s terminology) and negative form. But Jameson, unlike Adorno who employs the shifting fragment/equal footnote formation, formulates his writings in a dramatically different way. It holds with both authors that dialectical writing should be reflected at the level of the sentence. There is still a very large presence of the fragmentation: and this leads me to one of the brilliant passages that refer to both the form and content of the essay.

Jameson’s note on the footnote–

The footnote as such, therefore, designates a moment in which systematic philosophizing and the empirical study of concrete phenomena are both false in themselves; in which living thought, squeezed out from between them, pursues its fitful existence in the small print at the bottom of the page.

This was the footnote that connected all of Adorno’s other footnotes; that makes sense of dialectical writing and Jameson’s approach in Marxism and Form. At each moment in Jameson’s essay, I wanted to refer constantly back to Adorno’s text, but then I saw that I didn’t have to do that at all because they are so integrated into J’s writing that they are presented and interwoven with each other. Not as if they had been steam-pressed and pancaked together, but as if they have been unfolded like  delicately flitting petals of neighboring universes, set up on display and only viewable one paper star-petal at a time. Every sentence considered as a galaxy, taken in en masse with nothing short of the overwhelming dream clusters through thousands upon thousands of years in time. Adorno’s method of writing is more than remembered in Jameson’s essay; I have made the provisional note that perhaps Jameson provides a positive recasting (a dialectical digestion) of Adorno’s writings in such a way that actually carry the writing further into the dialectic  of history because it moves from one epoch to the other and therefore minimizes the unconscious and undialectical moments in isolated history.

The title of this section, “Historical Tropes” is brilliant:

So it is now that we hear not the notes themselves, but only their atmosphere, which becomes itself symbollic for us: the soothing or piquant character of the music, its blueness or sweetness, is felt as a signal for the release of appropriate conventionalized reactions. (23)

The trope in the standard (in the modern) sense is at the heart of the banal trope–what is this blueness? What is that digital and super-imposed aura that we paste onto music is very much like the “ready-made” idea that linear writings only usher-in. Only that the trope (if I could mash the musical example into an example for writing, itself) in music is something that signals a trope in culture regardless of the work. That is to say, what we search for in music, in reading, is a single and uniformed “point.” In writing, we are most fully aware of the point in the form of a thesis statement: in music there does not exist such a statement; in order to combat the inherently dialectic nature of the song there is a ready-made mood that we can experience in spite of the real of the notes.

It’s hard not to have these kinds of generalizations, even in this essay. What Jameson really acheives in this portion is an apreciation for the notes against the crushing immediacy to convey only the surface of things; only the surface of Adorno and of writing, of listening, of reading of existence.

As I wrote the above paragraph, my best friend  grumbled in a simmering rage that her friend had joined a facebook group that said “support the cutting of core liberal arts at UNLV: would you like a doctor/nurse to stick that needle in your arm, or be able to quote dead poets?” It seems that the dialectic of the trope is more present than ever (haha, of course that’s not really true or even viable). Existence is quickly whithered into the kinds of totalitarianism that has already-installed the ready made idea into the fabric of social necessity, to the point that we no longer even need to read the book or listen to the song to feel what we have created to be blue, to be sweet. If I can’t hear the notes, why bother sticking my arm if it’s not to euthanize me?

If you leave me alone for long enough I start writing in my notebook

And then when I come on here there’s no choice but to call it blargh-ing. I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Agamben, et al book Democracy in What State?. I think that there were parts written in French and new bits added in English (trans by William McCuaig). I rifled through CUP’s computer and printed it out weeks ago. I want that hard copy so I can write forever about it. Also waiting for Marxism and Form to come in the mail to I can start reading that.

I’m turning 21 tomorrow.

and then spring break next week. I sincerely promise to read and do real work on here, less blarg-ing. And less poetry–it’s getting to me.

What to write, what to write

The thing is, I do love to read. If we take the real percentages of my time, I spend most of it reading, followed by writing. But for all my posting, for everything I find myself most concerned about, the majority of it has nothing to do with literature. Isn’t that a bit odd for an English major? Maybe it isn’t… I’m thinking that I need to read contemporary literature (not that I don’t love other kinds, of course) but it doesn’t fit all with what I spend most of my time thinking about (if it’s not current). But this might be sort of bullshit, and a lame excuse for not trying hard enough to avoid the most obvious types of reading, problem-raising, and cultural exposure.

The thing is, although I do like reading, I agree with Jameson when he points out that we (and here I am *generously* clustering myself with real thinkers) spend most of our time exposed to the base, crude churnings-out of the cultural apparatus. Instead of calling it whatever it might be called, or purposefully avoiding its presence (its unavoidable presence) even in the most elevated of intellectual lives, maybe that is what should really be confronted. I don’t think it’s enough to just think about the media or literature or “politics” (in its function as culture and entertainment) as anything bracketed off from each other, or from the realm of philosophy. Do I want to read more contemporary novels? Definitely.

I just don’t feel guilty that I’m not, right now. I’d rather read theory, “philosophy” as they call it. And I couldn’t tell you why.