On vitalism as a mistaken dialectic? Adorno is my sounding board and I don’t care what you think about it.

vitalism: that new topic that mechanically but also rigorously posits itself into my train of thought, right on time at the start of a new semester. (don’t worry, I am more than sufficiently distanced from the idea that it “answers” anything.)

I should preface this entry by saying that this is based on a class that I am taking in lit. theory. But in the conversation in class so far (and here I should parenthetically note that “conversation” usually means undergraduate comments) there has been more “debate” that wishes to side-step the idea of vitalism and live the same old ignorances again and again. [i.e. dictatorship is not a valid vitalist force because it blocks the free flow of energy while libertarianism is the freest flowing kind of vitalism, blah blah.] Which, still ultimately brings me to where I’d like to begin.

Vitalism as a dynamic mapping of powers doesn’t seem to leave much room “in the middle,” which might be better restated as refied vitalism versus truth as vitalism. Maybe I will scan in a drawing later, because this does end up being a visual description–

In simple terms, we have the vitalism of the economy (better understood as “culture” since it is more than obvious that we live under some complex merger of the terms): this vitalism not only fuels its own growth and continual destruction, but perhaps fosters an immense “simulacra” of quasi-vitalist narratives that bridge the gap between individual (quasi organic) and this larger system of capitalist (mechanistic) force. [The zen CEO, the "enlightened" individual who never checks to see if his co-worker or wife or spouse is also enlightened, people who have "coping" mechanisms, love as a means to block oneself off from the struggle of humanity, art that is both functional and aesthetic, etc, etc.] All of these currents that *can only function in a capitalist setting* function as an unbridled vitalist force so long as it does not challenge the over-arching stipulations of whole shebang.

And then, to talk about quite another kind of vitalism (the “real” vitalism) that centers its power on something like philosophy which might also be examined as a function or position that the left might take up. A loose connection of energy towards truth, the question of philosophy as a vitalist structure doesn’t seem to hold up well under the pressure of reification that easily and obviously provides individual narratives and “ethics” to its larger practice. So philosophy as vitalism might fare better with a type of ethic, or structure that can compute the individual as more than a fraction of the “spontaneously imagined common” (I am referring to a Nergian formation that really seems like an inverted a priori Locke situation….). So it seems that even truth needs a structure of ethics if it truly wishes to recover its lost population and realize its power.

Wondering

In writing fiction, should the author present concepts or problems in a way that is as overtly thought-out as in theoretical essays? That is to say something a little different than what I wrote: while a book like Ziziek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce unwinds the implications of the real-life narratives in politics, economics, and television, should a work of fictive narration strive to structure its own future debates? I tend to answer these questions too simply (right now I am afraid that I would say something like “well even if one tried to do that, inevitably there are always other kinds of processes available in any text…”

But still, I wonder if writing fiction demands less of  a stance. Now that I’m thinking of it, this question might be stupid, because it doesn’t really matter what the intention of an author is. In other words, literature as fiction seems to be  symptomatic and maybe requires a positive, theoretical (no, no a realistic!) tether (from either within the book or via an outside writer) to move it into meaning. Yes? No?

What does Zizek mean when he says “philosophy is not a conversation?”

Philosophy might not be a conversation in the sense that it is not up for discussion; better yet, that the philosophy as truth is not up for discussion. I hate to use terms that I’m not sure of, but here I think of philosophy (or a philosophical moment) as a moment that is more than individual that speaks of the universal (as B/Z remember as something like “god”). Philosophy, or truth, is not up for debate in the conventional means. Philosophy as “god” characterizes exactly the foreignness that proves it to be always applicable and always apart from the event.

But then, in the middle of Zizek’s portion of the book, foreignness becomes a matter of human rights, or reclaiming an aspect of “the human” without being confined to the silly limits of cultural relativism (I am thinking here of his essay “Against Human Rights” that appeared in the New Left Review, though I forget the specific publication date.)

Because what I think Zizek is saying when he writes “Against Human Rights” is that the liberal notion of the term in the United States depends on the fundamental division of people into hierarchies, and the people at the bottom (and it is a very big bottom) are actually so far from the normal ideals of first world dignity (that is always immediately protected) that it must be remembered and forcefully cloaked onto the second and third worlds.

We must condescend to remind them of their origins as human (of the rights that we grant them but do not protect) in order to play-out the primitive Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau rigmarole of before civilization.

Here is an example from the History Channel: on a program called “Strange Rituals,” the episode transitioned from the ancient Celtic agrarian sacrifices to revenge killings. During the revenge killing segment, there were two plots, one narrative, and the first enveloped the second.  The first plot-indigenous group (Yanomami Tribe) in the Amazon that practices stringent “reciprocity” tactics in warfare, followed by the Danny Greene story in 1976 Cleveland. The Amazon tribe is treated as the “before civilization” anchor for the Danny Greene bit, which is to say “the Danny Greene story speaks of some pre-historic urge for reciprocal living as demonstrated by our pre-historic contemporaries, the barbaric, the most basic kind of human beings, the Yanomami.”

The narrative was “human nature” and the first plot defined the precondition of barbarism and the second made sure to invoke this pre-historic barbarism as more than an isolated incident in post-war America. The parallel insinuates that organized crime and its effects are not products of real economic and social disparity, but that one man’s isolated actions depicted an eruption of primal violence that break through the otherwise benign processes of society. This is a negative example of human rights– here there is no discussion of the rights of the Yanomami, only of the individuals in Cleveland. But it exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of the liberal notion of human rights.

It exposes the assumption that people other than first world people must be reminded of their status as human, and we must be reminded, ourselves (although we would never admit this). Human rights, in the liberal sense, are granted on the basis of potential-being-human (we grant them humanity before they figure out what it is and how to get it,  just as we eventually figured it all out) and this status absolutely undermines any possibility that they ever really were humans. [Along with this comes pity and the all too obvious solution that we must each found/support NGO's to help the others transition and cross over into humanity. Their human rights are placeholders for what will become a private life and their "choice" to make money, develop, etc.]

When Zizek says that philosophy is not a conversation, I think he means that philosophy is not up for debate. Truth is not up for debate or refutation. One can tap into it, follow its legacy and its challenges without refuting its existence.

I might not know the truth, but that certainly doesn’t change that it exists.