Thanks to a friend of mine, I recently discovered this invaluable series of videos of Raymond Williams, filmed at a conference in Strathclyde back in 1986. The totally unexpected highlight, and one that has about it that disorienting aura of the uncanny, is a video of Derrida in conversation with Raymond Williams. Moreover, in the audio section, one has access to the complete recording of Williams’s very important lecture on language and the avant-garde.
For anyone who’s interested in the work of György Lukács or Fredric Jameson, I’ve just uploaded a draft version of a paper I gave 18 months ago at the Historical Materialism conference in London. Here’s the abstract:
This paper sets out the implicit and explicit theories of “totality” in the work of György Lukács and Fredric Jameson. It begins by asking to which problem the proletariat is a solution in the work of the early Lukács. It suggests that this problem is not only historical, but also literary in nature. In the second section, I offer a brief explanation of Lukács’ theory of realism, as found in the Marxist aesthetic debates of the 1930s, and as it relates to his concept of totality. Finally, I outline Fredric Jameson’s problematisation of Lukács’ theory of totality and spell out two key innovations in his use of the term.
Thinking Blue Guitars now has its own Facebook Page. If you don’t want the hassle of following the blog via Google Reader or RSS feed, then simply “like” the page and you’ll receive all blog updates directly to your Facebook news feed. You’ll also receive links to literary, political and theological articles which I find of interest (and which I wouldn’t bother to publish on the blog itself).
Frank Kermode interviewing Iris Murdoch in 1965 on the relation between form and freedom – part of ‘In Their Own Words: British Novelists,’ a great new literary audio-visual collection from the BBC Archive. This was originally targeted at Sixth Formers! Bit like Badiou’s Ethics being written for lycée students…(which it was, incidentally).
structuralisms/StructuralistMarxism/Eagleton/Eagleton2.jpg)
For Eagleton:
His throat intoned a plum:
you ripped it out,
studied the blood-blue flesh
and ate it up.
Inside there was a stone
on which was carved
a worker’s simple fist,
Walter’s farewell.
“Oh yes,” you laughed out loud,
“I could build my house on this!”
The Shitter
Embarrassingly, one of my first breakthroughs on the road to taking Marxism seriously was when, as a young boy, someone explained to me that the queen must piss and shit like anyone else. It came as quite a revelation to the embodiment of sheltered suburban decency that I then was (and, depressingly, still more or less am). That she was somehow ‘human’ like the rest of us was almost unthinkable, the discrepancy between regal appearance and faecal truth too much to grasp.
But the saddest thing is that most current political satire hasn’t really moved beyond this infantile act of revelation: in public, politicians are virtuous statesmen, whilst behind closed doors they’re fallible, vindictive, power-hungry maniacs. In public they are eloquent spokesman, in private they shit all over themselves and all over us. The problem is that everybody already knows this, and hence there is no revelatory or liberatory potential in such comedy. ‘Cameron’s a good, immigrant-loving man, nudge nudge, wink wink!’ is not exactly explosive stuff.
As Žižek, following Peter Sloterdijk, has long been telling us, we live in an age whereby ideology functions through cynicism. Everbody knows that politicians are corrupt, that capitalism is unjust, that the poor are being screwed over, but we act as if we didn’t know. Ideology used to be conceived as ‘false consciousness’, which could be remedied by revealing to someone the truth of his or her situation. In other words, it was an epistemological affair. And this, we might argue, was when traditional satire was politically progressive. But now ideology is no longer ‘false consciousness’; it is that which we do despite knowing that what we’re doing is perpetuating a system we know to be destructive of humanity.
It is in this age of cynicism that satire becomes a reactionary force. What do shows like Have I Got News For You? or The Daily Show effectively do? They make us laugh at what we already know. They constitute a sort of balm, soothing the daily pain of knowing that I’m acting in a way contrary to almost all reasonable evaluations of the state of the world. They create an atmosphere of entertaining resignation.
And here I’d like to move on to a related topic. Part of this whole age of cynicism, it seems to me, is that obsession with debunking the aura of greatness surrounding certain revered figures. If you want to make a film of Homer’s epics these days, you can’t present these figures as towering above their epoch; you have to drag them down into the nitty-gritty of the daily grind. If you want to make a TV program about Caesar, you have to show him shagging half the women of Ancient Rome. Even superheroes now have to have a ‘human’ side!
Back in the day, of course, this was progressive. If the Establishment told you that Dante was great, you went looking for the material historical circumstances that made Dante possible in the first place. But today I have the sneaking suspicion that this simply plays into the hands of the enemy.
And that is why I would like to suggest the benefits of the personality cult. Liberals shy away in horror from those massive icons of Stalin and Mao, symbols of dictatorial atrocity, but they forget their hidden powers. In Soviet or Chinese propaganda it was common to be told tales of superhuman heroics – Stalin takes on a whole battalion of the imperial army with his bare, crop-coarsened hands…and wins! – which no one could be expected to believe, and which no one did believe. The point, however, was that instead of dragging these figures down into the depths of bureaucratic mundanity, it swept gazes up and out, and into the impossible gyres of history! What we need now is not to engage in apathetic satire, posting re-runs of the ‘Ten Best Anti-Thatcher Gags’ so as to make us chuckle into our spreadsheets; we need to outsoar the easiness of cynicism and dare to be great, dare to be mocked, dare to be epic heroes in the age of Peep Show.
(The comic bathos of that last sentence should give you some idea of how difficult is our task).
This is an extract from the very end of an imaginary interview with a character called Javier Marías. The interviewer is a character called Daniel Hartley. The extract, all I could find of this long-forgotten interview that never took place in a Madrilenian café, begins at the point where interviewee transforms into interviewer.
***
JM: So what type of man do you think I am?
DH: I think you’re the type of man who finds it unbearable to sit in a café or a restaurant if there is someone sat behind him, because his eyes should always be the last pair in the room, unwatched, but all-watching. You’re the type of man who mistakes habitual introspection for profundity and precise prolixity for compassionate intelligence. You’re the type of man who takes upon his shoulders the pain and badly hidden neuroses of a room of strangers, who suffers on their behalf, but does so constantly with one eye on the hidden gloriousness of that suffering. You’re the type of man who knows it is pretentious to be photographed in black and white behind a typewriter with chin in hand in thoughtful equipoise, but who knows also that without the ironic indulgence of this bohemian cliché, he would fall to pieces, like a dead soul shorn of its ghostly carapace. You’re the type of man who is trapped in legends, and who can’t get out. And in every beautiful phrase you write, there is a lonely boy peering out, wondering how his father could be so genuine when the only thing that he can do is act. You are, in short, a man who longs to be a Hamlet, and therefore Hamlet shall ye never be.
***
Paper-clipped to this extract I found a scrap of notepaper in Daniel Hartley’s handwriting. It said: ‘Met JM today. Was like talking to a mirror.’
Originally published at The Night Shift
This is a very difficult chapter, so you’ll have to bear with me. The first section charts the transition that occurred in twentieth century radical thought from the Marxist critique of private property to the ‘phenomenology of bodies’. The young Marx focused on the relation between capital and law. Legal systems, he stated, are abstract representations of social reality, whilst capitalist property relations provide the concrete reality. In other words, the law says we’re all equal, but pop down to your local factory and you’ll see we’re not. Thinkers like Louis Althusser, an important French Marxist, and Theodor Adorno, a leading member of the Frankfurt School (a group of Marxist theorists), then extended this analysis beyond the law to demonstrate that the whole of social life has been ‘subsumed’, or saturated, by capital. Because of this shift away from an outlook which perceives only certain areas of social life as being ‘contaminated’ by capital to an outlook which claims that our entire lives are produced by capital, the type of societal analyses became less ‘transcendent’ and exterior, and more ‘immanent’, or interior. The body now becomes important.
There were two reasons for this shift. One was the militant activism that spread like wildfire across France, Italy and Germany in the 60s and 70s, thereby immersing analyses in the direct experience of militants. The other was a change in the object itself. Material production – making things in factories – gave way to immaterial production: labour was no longer simply physical, but also cognitive and intellectual. (In Britain we might say that this corresponds to the demise of primary industries like mining, ship-building, steel works etc. and the rise of service sector office jobs). When immaterial labour becomes predominant, so Hardt and Negri argue, the entire capitalist process has to be understood differently. Moreover, the scope of Marxist theory now expands. It is no longer acceptable simply to talk of class: feminist, antiracist and anticolonial struggles exploded and forced the Left to think the commodification of labouring bodies through the prisms of gender and race.
Ironically, this move from ‘transcendent’ critique of private property to ‘immanent’ experience had already been prefigured in various conservative philosophies in the early twentieth century. Vitalism and phenomenology, both of which attempt to cast off abstraction to root themselves in concrete life, offered to refuel the values of a system rendered hollow. If we imagine most philosophy up to this point as an overhead, panoramic shot, then the gaze now descends like a thunderbolt into the very bodies that just a moment ago looked like the tiniest of ants. As it does so, the view from inside the body looking out means that the individual to whom that body belongs can longer be seen; the move from the transcendent to the immanent coincides with openness to the other, to that which an individual is not: to the common. (Here, one might cite Husserl or Merleau-Ponty).
And here we arrive at Foucault and the concept of ‘biopolitics’. Negri and Hardt very briefly outline three axioms of Foucault’s research:
What can this possibly mean?! Well, being itself – the totality of that which is – is conceived as constituted by a series of bodies (our bodies), like a great patchwork quilt – but a quilt which we produce through our labour (we build the buildings, we make the laws, we educate the children, we write the books, we invent the aeroplanes…). It is ‘biopolitical’ because it consists of our live, biological bodies, but also of a whole network of material and immaterial political forces: law, education, language, labour, capital, etc. All of these are intertwined to form a continuous whole; if one part alters, its repercussions ripple through everything else. But it must not be imagined that the political forces completely dominate our minds and bodies; on the contrary, history is precisely the antagonism of our bodies resisting these attempts to discipline us. Indeed, in the process of resisting we constitute our very ‘subjectivity’ – i.e. what we mean when we say ‘I’, our selves. The ‘I’ is an interplay of a whole mind-boggling range of encounters, of ‘yeses’ and ‘nos’ to power, of being with others, of dominating and being dominated. These are very difficult ideas, but they should become much clearer throughout the rest of the book!
Hardt and Negri end the chapter with a section arguing that fundamentalisms (religious, nationalist, racist, and – oddly – economist) all have a double relation to the body: on the one hand they are obsessed by it – the Islamic fundamentalist enforces the veil to hide the flesh, the racist transfixes the being of another in his very skin etc. On the other hand, however, they make bodies vanish: it is not, at bottom, the bodies about which fundamentalists care, but rather the transcendent values or essences of which the body is a sign, as if it were ‘an x ray to grasp the soul’. Biopolitics, as a form of resistance, refuses to acknowledge this transcendental realm by insisting on the immanent, material dimension, on the very power of bodies themselves.
Dan Hartley
Originally published at The Night Shift
The first half of the book will focus on ‘the republic, modernity, and capital as three frameworks that obstruct and corrupt the development of the common’. There is a structural analogy here to the seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus which aims to investigate the limits of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy as political forms. (Spinoza died before writing the crucial section on democracy. It should be noted that his philosophy has been hugely influential for Negri). Hardt and Negri want to carry out an investigation which interrogates the very conditions of possibility of social life today. Capitalism is not an overt sovereign ruling over us; rather, it is invisible and functions as an impersonal form of domination, saturating our entire social field of vision – right down to our most personal experiences – without our even being aware of it.
But the first political form in which capitalism as we now know it really took root was republicanism. This is a form of government, instituted by the great bourgeois revolutions, based on the rule of property and the inviolability of the rights of private property, which excludes or subordinates those without property. In the French and American revolutionary Constitutions the position of property was sacred. And this continues right through to the constitutions of the present day. The only exception was the Haitian revolution: by freeing slaves it freed property, and hence was denied entry into the canon of republicanism.
In the final section of the chapter, the authors locate a split in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. On the one hand, there is the ‘major Kant’, the thinker who provides the theoretical foundations for a burgeoning capitalist class. On the other hand, there is the ‘minor Kant’ who not only dares to know, but knows how to dare: this is the Kant whose critical reason turns against itself and threatens to explode at any second the very philosophical foundations of the republic of property which he had just laid down. The major Kant continues today in social democratic traditions across Europe (Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Beck), but the minor Kant is we, the multitude: overthrowers of the republic, brothers and sisters of the Haitian emancipators, builders of the common.
Dan Hartley
And so it begins…
