I have not been reading much lately, what with personal chaos and moving and training for my summer job, but I did manage to finish Madame Bovary and Plato's Phaedrus. Both were completely brilliant in completely different ways. I also hacked my way through the preface and introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and am actually ready to begin reading the book itself.
Sense-certainty, here I come.
So Bovary was a beautiful book. The aspects of it that struck me most powerfully were first, Flaubert's incredible mastery of pacing and transitions, the limpidity of the prose as it traced daily life then contrasted with moments of intense and striking lyricism, and most of all Flaubert's distant, even cold, yet wholly empathetic drawing of the characters. I'm not sure if empathetic is the right word. What Flaubert is doing is amazing, in that the characters are fully present in the felt intensity of their decisions, even while Flaubert makes clear their foolishness, hypocrisy, knavery, and pettiness. It is all equally just and unjust, and all of it equally justified. Strange, that. Would I argue that Bovary is a bourgeois tragedy? I think so. The last few pages are so completely cruel, I shudder to think what a fucking asshole Flaubert must have been. Wow.
The Phaedrus was a different fish entirely, also beautiful. Socrates' speeches against love (when hidden behind a veil) and for love (when inspired by the spirits of the place) were great, and very interesting in terms of the discussion of rhetoric and writing which followed. I went to the Phaedrus because I was reading a book by the brilliant Anne Carson, whose work I've just been introduced to, called Eros, which discusses ancient Greek ideas of love and eros in terms of changes in identitiy-formation and ideas of the self brought about by the introduction of writing, in which Carson discusses the Phaedrus at length. There's much that's wonderful in the Phaedrus, but what I come away with (and also from reading Plato's 7th letter, which came with the edition I read), is yet more skepticism about Plato and his ambiguities. Much as he writes beautiful dramatic poetry against poetry, in the Phaedrus and in the 7th letter, he writes complex, interesting, beautiful texts about how texts are essentially false, second-rate, and not to be trusted. There is also a line in the 7th letter about "how we must hold to the truth of the immortality of the soul," which sets me thinking. He does not say, "it is true that the soul is immortal," but that "we must hold" to that idea.
This all very much sets me thinking in a Straussian mode about Plato, which, if we keep in mind Plato's dour views of the world, of the incapacity of most people for ever acheiving wisdom, and of the near-impossibility of ever reconciling justice and the good with governance, seems to suggest quite strongly that Plato has little reason ever to say (write) what he means, and that true wisdom for Plato is more esoteric than democratic. That is, philosophical pedagogy in Platonic terms is for the select few who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The rest must be left to pass uncomprehending. This is very different not only from our American standard sort of Deweyan notions of education and any kind of Hegelian-Enlightenment progressivism, but even from the social responsibility inherent in Socrates' "gadfly" relationship to Athens.
I love Plato the writer, dramatist, and poet, but Plato the thinker--the philosopher--is a dark and shifty cynic, a man of ressentiment par excellence, a no-saying pessimist who finds his joy in the ideality of the mind.
18 June 2009
29 May 2009
You Can Never Hold Back Spring
So I haven't been posting. Whatever. I actually haven't finished any new whole books since John Law's disappointing Aircraft Stories. I've read bits of lots of things, including Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, which was interesting but troublesome, and Derrida's Specters of Marx, which is exactly what you think it would be: Derrida on Marx, but things have honestly been quite crazy.
The end of the semester, personal madness, and a fair bit of poetry. So that's my excuse. Revisiting Rilke and Stevens. My goals for the summer are Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Milton's Paradise Lost, and if I can manage, Augustine's Confessions. While also getting back to poetry, poetry, poetry. We'll see what I can manage.
More soon.
The end of the semester, personal madness, and a fair bit of poetry. So that's my excuse. Revisiting Rilke and Stevens. My goals for the summer are Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Milton's Paradise Lost, and if I can manage, Augustine's Confessions. While also getting back to poetry, poetry, poetry. We'll see what I can manage.
More soon.
06 May 2009
Pinboard Narrative
Which story should we tell about John Law and his thorough deconstruction of the development of the TSR2, Aircraft Stories? Or should we even tell a story? Why not rather make a pinboard?
The thing is, pinboards are stories too. Just like Taussig asserted, that not-fetishizing is not yet within our capacity, not-storytelling isn't yet possible. As soon as we begin to think in words and concepts, I would argue, we have begun the simplifying, systematizing, homogenizing, etc., that Law works against. The logos is built into our grammar. A pinboard is not noncoherent, but merely a looser form of coherence than a tree. Any framing, bounding, or hermeneutic circling begins to shape the manifold heterogeneity of existence. We are always homogenizing, because absolute flux would be absolutely incomprehensible. On the other hand, we have never been homogeneous, because the "modern" ordering is multiplicity itself, many projects with many agents in many times and places interacting with "pre" and "post" and "other" etc. The question is, why is John Law forging this particular intervention, that not only argues for multiplicity, but assumes (and thereby helps create) a singular "big other" to be overthrown? I'm all for complexity; I thought that was the way things were.
The thing is, pinboards are stories too. Just like Taussig asserted, that not-fetishizing is not yet within our capacity, not-storytelling isn't yet possible. As soon as we begin to think in words and concepts, I would argue, we have begun the simplifying, systematizing, homogenizing, etc., that Law works against. The logos is built into our grammar. A pinboard is not noncoherent, but merely a looser form of coherence than a tree. Any framing, bounding, or hermeneutic circling begins to shape the manifold heterogeneity of existence. We are always homogenizing, because absolute flux would be absolutely incomprehensible. On the other hand, we have never been homogeneous, because the "modern" ordering is multiplicity itself, many projects with many agents in many times and places interacting with "pre" and "post" and "other" etc. The question is, why is John Law forging this particular intervention, that not only argues for multiplicity, but assumes (and thereby helps create) a singular "big other" to be overthrown? I'm all for complexity; I thought that was the way things were.
21 April 2009
"It sounds like magic but we call it technology."
In the author's note to My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig says that he wants his book to speak as a fetish. "This is the language I want, a substantial language, aroused through prolonged engagement with gold and cocaine, reeking in its stammering intensity of delirium and failure. Why failure? Because unwinding the fetish is not yet given on the horizon of human possibility" (xviii). I'm sure we can speak in various complex ways about fetishism, but going from Marx at least it seems we (or rather, perhaps Taussig, definitely me) mean some thing in which we believe value or power itself inheres, independent of the social web of signification by which we actually assign it value and power. So perhaps Taussig wants us to think his book is magical? Or perhaps he wants us to read it "as if"... By the time we get to the end, after Gorgona, and Taussig talks about mimesis and storytelling, his desire to work within the relationship between language and things, we've crossed rivers, pirates, narcotraffickers, Genet, snowflakes, heat, Benjamin, murderers, children, spirits, golddiggers, drunkards, canoes, and much else in a sometimes dreamlike, always erudite, and frequently beautiful journey. As wonderful as it was to read, though, it is harder to know how to talk about it...
Language is a virus, said William S. Burroughs, so perhaps we can think of My Cocaine Museum as a kind of medicine, a medicine fetish, something that purges and sweats. It's not diagnostic, it doesn't tell us what's wrong--we already know, with the gold and cocaine, with the rapacity of global development and the transgressiveness of punishing greed, that we've met the disease and he is us--but perhaps as a language-fetish, as a bit of mimetic shamanism, My Cocaine Museum can illuminate, or clarify, or some other light-based metaphor of activity, or perhaps it is more visionary, or sensual, or perhaps it is more like a fever. Taussig writes "There is a real sense in which Benjamin is advocating above all a 'shamanic take' on the artificial modern world of capitalism. This is why Adorno gets it so right when he sums up Benjamin's method as 'the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things' " (258). This seems to speak to what the book works toward and does, the magic it works: not casting a spell, but breaking one.
Language is a virus, said William S. Burroughs, so perhaps we can think of My Cocaine Museum as a kind of medicine, a medicine fetish, something that purges and sweats. It's not diagnostic, it doesn't tell us what's wrong--we already know, with the gold and cocaine, with the rapacity of global development and the transgressiveness of punishing greed, that we've met the disease and he is us--but perhaps as a language-fetish, as a bit of mimetic shamanism, My Cocaine Museum can illuminate, or clarify, or some other light-based metaphor of activity, or perhaps it is more visionary, or sensual, or perhaps it is more like a fever. Taussig writes "There is a real sense in which Benjamin is advocating above all a 'shamanic take' on the artificial modern world of capitalism. This is why Adorno gets it so right when he sums up Benjamin's method as 'the need to become a thing in order to break the catastrophic spell of things' " (258). This seems to speak to what the book works toward and does, the magic it works: not casting a spell, but breaking one.
19 April 2009
Capital and the Beasts of Nietzsche
The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.I finished Capital yesterday. Of course, like any great big classic, like Being and Time or Hamlet or Middlemarch or Ulysses, you never really “finish” reading it, but the first time is always the most memorable. And while it is indubitably beyond me to offer here any worthwhile summation, analysis, or even considered reflection of the eight-hundred-some pages of Volume I (excluding the Preface and Introduction, which I did read, and the Appendix, which I have not (yet)), I can say this: Capital is fucking awesome. The book is, whether you agree with it or not and putting aside any political humbuggery or partisanship, simply a masterpiece, a sui generis phenomenon that amazes in its range of philosophical, political, economic, and historical insights, in its literary construction and rhetorical power, and in its audacity of scope and powerful, complex thought. Wow.
I also read Roger Caillois’s book The Writing of Stones, which was a beautiful, lyrical meditation on idiosyncratic rocks and the aesthetic responses they provoke. Caillois was apparently a surrealist and associated with Bataille’s Acephalous group, but broke with Breton over Mexican jumping beans (Caillois wanted to cut the beans open and investigate the mystery within the mystery, while Breton preferred the mystique of ignorance) and mostly kept to his own path. I hope to read more Caillois, and recommend this book if you can find it, which is full of beautiful images of rocks and taut and tender writing.
Also some Grundrisse, Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (which in typically Heideggerian fashion is alternately stunningly brilliant and frustratingly mystic), etc. I read enough of Vanessa Lamm’s new book Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy to realize she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. She constructs a shallow emancipatory dichotomy where Nietzsche comes in as the herald of the liberating animal “truth” of humanity and the power of “culture” against Big Bad Western “civilization.” While Nietzsche is definitely a critic of “civilization,” what Lamm wildly misreads and mind-bogglingly elides is the profoundly individualistic grounding of Nietzsche’s whole project. She writes:
The promise of the sovereign individual has been traditionally understood as either antipolitical, with Nietzsche figuring as a precursor to totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies, or as nonpolitical, with Nietzsche figuring as a precursor to individual perfectionism. In contrast to these views, I argue that through the figure of the sovereign individual, Nietzsche puts forward an ideal of freedom as responsibility that inherently concerns the political life of human animals…. When humankind defines itself against its animality or denies its animality a productive role, forms of political life emerge based on domination and exploitation of humans by humans. Contrariwise, when humankind engages with its animality, it gives rise to forms of political life rooted in the sovereign individual’s instinct of responsibility (5).The patent absurdity of this view and its radical blindness to Nietzsche’s contempt for the herd and its politics, revolutionary or otherwise, is frankly staggering. Lamm seems to have read her way through Nietzsche’s entire corpus while wearing some kind of utopian happy-Foucault glasses, believing in the transgressive power of the “care of the self” and monstrously warping the complexity of Nietzsche’s analysis of the human’s physical being in relation to its justifications and truths into a simplistic enactment of ressentiment: we knowers know better than the “evil” dominators. Nietzsche will liberate our repressed selves! Woo!
While Nietzsche’s work certainly has political implications, and, before his break with Wagner at least, he did seemed to adhere fitfully to some sort of notion of cultural revolution, it seems to me that no serious reading of Nietzsche can argue that his aims were in any way political. The difference between Nietzsche’s real struggle with the will-to-power and some watery liberational priest-talk is as wide as the difference between lions and Lamms…
15 April 2009
Letter to the Editors at New School Free Press and the New School Community
In 1999, I was in the streets of Seattle protesting the WTO, shoulder to shoulder with anarchists and longshoremen. In 2004, I was in the streets of Baghdad, holding back an angry crowd with a loaded M-16. I’ve been on both sides of a riot shield; I’ve seen what violence and anarchy look like up close. When I came here to the New School, I thought I'd put that violence behind me.
The New School was founded in 1919 by John Dewey and others in an explicit rejection of the nationalism, militarism, and repression they saw on other New York campuses, specifically Columbia University, from which Charles Beard resigned to protest that university’s demand for loyalty oaths. As everyone knows, the University in Exile was founded in 1933 to offer refuge to intellectuals fleeing fascist violence. The tradition of the New School is one of public discourse, critical thought, and progressive education. What happened on Friday, April 10, flew directly in the face of that tradition, and the blame lies both with the self-aggrandizing so-called “anarchists” who decided to “force” Bob Kerrey’s hand, and with the at-times excessive response on the part of the police.
I was ashamed to see my school, once an affirming flame in a darkened world, taken hostage by a minority of “infinitely demanding” thugs who thought their symbolic violence was a substitute for the hard work of organizing, educating, and struggling for better conditions. I was disappointed and angry that the deepest reaction these students could muster to the dangerously anarchic forces of capitalism was nothing more than the unreflective acting out of capitalism’s core values: infinite demands, immediate gratification, individualism, and ending discussion in favor of action, seizure, occupation, and destruction. I was also disturbed and disappointed by the heavy-handed reaction of the police cut loose by President Kerrey. The problem is violence itself: once we resort to force as an answer, the only way out is more force.
We are here because we value scholarship, thought, and the New School’s proud tradition. This is a university. It is neither a business to be run for profit nor the repressive authoritarian “Big Other” that some people think they should overthrow. As a student here, a member of the New School community, and a former activist and soldier, I condemn those who advocated, supported, and wrought violence on our school last week.
Sincerely,
Roy Scranton, NSSR, Liberal Studies
The New School was founded in 1919 by John Dewey and others in an explicit rejection of the nationalism, militarism, and repression they saw on other New York campuses, specifically Columbia University, from which Charles Beard resigned to protest that university’s demand for loyalty oaths. As everyone knows, the University in Exile was founded in 1933 to offer refuge to intellectuals fleeing fascist violence. The tradition of the New School is one of public discourse, critical thought, and progressive education. What happened on Friday, April 10, flew directly in the face of that tradition, and the blame lies both with the self-aggrandizing so-called “anarchists” who decided to “force” Bob Kerrey’s hand, and with the at-times excessive response on the part of the police.
I was ashamed to see my school, once an affirming flame in a darkened world, taken hostage by a minority of “infinitely demanding” thugs who thought their symbolic violence was a substitute for the hard work of organizing, educating, and struggling for better conditions. I was disappointed and angry that the deepest reaction these students could muster to the dangerously anarchic forces of capitalism was nothing more than the unreflective acting out of capitalism’s core values: infinite demands, immediate gratification, individualism, and ending discussion in favor of action, seizure, occupation, and destruction. I was also disturbed and disappointed by the heavy-handed reaction of the police cut loose by President Kerrey. The problem is violence itself: once we resort to force as an answer, the only way out is more force.
We are here because we value scholarship, thought, and the New School’s proud tradition. This is a university. It is neither a business to be run for profit nor the repressive authoritarian “Big Other” that some people think they should overthrow. As a student here, a member of the New School community, and a former activist and soldier, I condemn those who advocated, supported, and wrought violence on our school last week.
Sincerely,
Roy Scranton, NSSR, Liberal Studies
Almost there... Almost there...
So I'm not posting very much because I've been busy with school and assorted other craziness, including two important upcoming events at which I am speaking: a symposium on J. Glenn Gray's book The Warriors, 
being held at CUNY's Center for Workers' Education on April 24, and a reading for my Veteran's Writing Workshop being held at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on April 25,
featuring guest poet Bruce Weigl. We'll also be launching an anthology featuring some of our work from this year, titled Nine Lines.
So I have been reading and partaking in cultural events, but don't have much time to write about it. Here are some summary judgments:
* Returns, a play by Iraq Veteran Joshua Casteel, in a dramatic reading at CUNY on March 30: Crap. Stale, unreflective trauma dialogue hashed up and mixed with heavy-handed theological thought-turds. Sorry, Josh. As a fellow vet, I have to say you dropped the ball. Also, David Gothard should shut up. On the plus side, actor Nikhil Vaid brought a presence and intensity to his acting that almost saved moments from the flat, self-important script.
* MATA Festival, Tuesday, March 31. The Knights performing work by Ted Hearne, Sarah Snider, Francesco Antonioni, Justin Messina, Mike Block, Joseph Pereira, and Andrew Hamilton. The Knights played with verve, craft, intensity and straight faces--much to their credit. Also, Hamilton's piece "Product No. 1," which finished out the evening, was a cruel, tensely beautiful, and frankly amazing piece of angry minimalism. Cheers to him. The rest of the ticket was banal-sounding pap, as fresh as a diaper and sweet like rotten fruit. Particularly galling was "Echi Dromi," by Joe Pereira, a duet for flute and drum that called to mind Will Farrell and earnest hippies. Nearly impossible to sit through without crying--from laughter.
* Reread Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is still awesome. Also read selections from the Grundrisse, various articles etc., and reread The Communist Manifesto, which is also still awesome.
* Read Hugh Raffle's new book The Illustrated Insectopedia in manuscript, and it was great. Moving, informative, surprising, very smart, and generally delightful. Read it!
* The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Easter Service: Awesome. Especially the insane stained glass windows, for example this:
a guy watching TV.
* Occupation of 65 5th Avenue New School building by self-styled anarchists and subsequent smack-down by thuggish NYPD called in by the one-man freak show Bob Kerrey: lame.
* Violence, by Slavoj Zizek: provocative, insightful, whip-smart, and wide-ranging. Unlike this stupid review by the New School's resident bullshit-artist-in-chief, Simon Critchley.
* On Violence, by Hannah Arendt: at first a bit facile and somewhat clunkily of a moment, Arendt's book turned surprisingly subtle and offered some really interesting thoughts.
* A "collective quartet composed of the guitarist Chris Forsyth, the multireedist Chris Heenan, the sound collagist Aki Onda and the trumpeter Nate Wooley," at Abron's Art Center, 21 March 2009, which was superb. The performers were totally on, their touch was light but deeply felt, and I came away giddy with the joy of their sustained improvisation.
And I must have done or read or thought or seen some other shit too, but it's all water under the bridge now and I need to go to the gym and get up in the morning and write a paper about cyborgs and war and shit. Peace.
being held at CUNY's Center for Workers' Education on April 24, and a reading for my Veteran's Writing Workshop being held at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on April 25,
featuring guest poet Bruce Weigl. We'll also be launching an anthology featuring some of our work from this year, titled Nine Lines.So I have been reading and partaking in cultural events, but don't have much time to write about it. Here are some summary judgments:
* Returns, a play by Iraq Veteran Joshua Casteel, in a dramatic reading at CUNY on March 30: Crap. Stale, unreflective trauma dialogue hashed up and mixed with heavy-handed theological thought-turds. Sorry, Josh. As a fellow vet, I have to say you dropped the ball. Also, David Gothard should shut up. On the plus side, actor Nikhil Vaid brought a presence and intensity to his acting that almost saved moments from the flat, self-important script.
* MATA Festival, Tuesday, March 31. The Knights performing work by Ted Hearne, Sarah Snider, Francesco Antonioni, Justin Messina, Mike Block, Joseph Pereira, and Andrew Hamilton. The Knights played with verve, craft, intensity and straight faces--much to their credit. Also, Hamilton's piece "Product No. 1," which finished out the evening, was a cruel, tensely beautiful, and frankly amazing piece of angry minimalism. Cheers to him. The rest of the ticket was banal-sounding pap, as fresh as a diaper and sweet like rotten fruit. Particularly galling was "Echi Dromi," by Joe Pereira, a duet for flute and drum that called to mind Will Farrell and earnest hippies. Nearly impossible to sit through without crying--from laughter.
* Reread Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is still awesome. Also read selections from the Grundrisse, various articles etc., and reread The Communist Manifesto, which is also still awesome.
* Read Hugh Raffle's new book The Illustrated Insectopedia in manuscript, and it was great. Moving, informative, surprising, very smart, and generally delightful. Read it!
* The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Easter Service: Awesome. Especially the insane stained glass windows, for example this:
a guy watching TV.* Occupation of 65 5th Avenue New School building by self-styled anarchists and subsequent smack-down by thuggish NYPD called in by the one-man freak show Bob Kerrey: lame.
* Violence, by Slavoj Zizek: provocative, insightful, whip-smart, and wide-ranging. Unlike this stupid review by the New School's resident bullshit-artist-in-chief, Simon Critchley.
* On Violence, by Hannah Arendt: at first a bit facile and somewhat clunkily of a moment, Arendt's book turned surprisingly subtle and offered some really interesting thoughts.
* A "collective quartet composed of the guitarist Chris Forsyth, the multireedist Chris Heenan, the sound collagist Aki Onda and the trumpeter Nate Wooley," at Abron's Art Center, 21 March 2009, which was superb. The performers were totally on, their touch was light but deeply felt, and I came away giddy with the joy of their sustained improvisation.
And I must have done or read or thought or seen some other shit too, but it's all water under the bridge now and I need to go to the gym and get up in the morning and write a paper about cyborgs and war and shit. Peace.
01 April 2009
Michael Serres' The Parasite
It seems best perhaps to take Serres at his word, such as when he says “Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous” (46); “Henceforth, my book is rigorously fuzzy” (56); “I don’t want to play any more. Neither at the game of who is smarter nor that of the truth. For you can die of hunger, of cold, of drowning, while playing” (75); “We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked. This one here speaks learnedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave; he doesn’t care if people hear him” (121); and “The host does not speak much and is not understood; his logic is paradoxal. It is fuzzy; it is our own. His parasites are eating him up, and their noise covers his voice” (216).
Taking up the metaphor and pun of the parasite in the threefold way of meaning biological parasite, social parasite, and static or noise (as it does, apparently, in French), Serres posits a unidirectional relationship where the parasite feeds on a host like noise “feeds on” information, and universalizes his metaphor into a concept of social relations—that is, human relations are not “like” parasite relations, but rather they are parasite relations. Embodying his “argument” in his text, Serres makes The Parasite a parasite, a noisesome bloodsucker that feeds on culture and produces nothing (or only waste… or W.A.S.T.E. (see below)). As Serres writes: “The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return… For parasitism is an elementary relation; it is, in fact, the elements of the relation” (182).
It seems more interesting to me to consider Serres ethnographically, or even merely historically, than it does to consider his work philosophically. Like Derrida and Foucault he seems to write in a tradition of anti-humanist post-structural French thought that, after Nietzsche, works to find the irrational in the rational, after Heidegger, works to turn from philosophy to poetry, after Kojeve, struggles with the idea of the end of history, and against Sartre turns from existential political engagement to an individualist ethics of transgression and play. Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes. For Serres, writing in the dark aspect of the Romantic tradition as it comes through Nietzsche, Artaud, the Dadaists, and the Situationists, the creativity of the irrational, unconscious, or incoherent is valued over the “systemization” of rationality.
Piercing the foggy banks of nonsense that (deliberately) cloud the pages of The Parasite are occasional insights that seem interesting, provocative, or worth following up. On the question of order and disorder, though, on noise and social relations, I found Serres’ regular references to Maxwell’s Demon to call to mind a much more beautiful and arresting work, which addresses some of the same themes, and Maxwell’s Demon, and even W.A.S.T.E…. namely Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
Taking up the metaphor and pun of the parasite in the threefold way of meaning biological parasite, social parasite, and static or noise (as it does, apparently, in French), Serres posits a unidirectional relationship where the parasite feeds on a host like noise “feeds on” information, and universalizes his metaphor into a concept of social relations—that is, human relations are not “like” parasite relations, but rather they are parasite relations. Embodying his “argument” in his text, Serres makes The Parasite a parasite, a noisesome bloodsucker that feeds on culture and produces nothing (or only waste… or W.A.S.T.E. (see below)). As Serres writes: “The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return… For parasitism is an elementary relation; it is, in fact, the elements of the relation” (182).
It seems more interesting to me to consider Serres ethnographically, or even merely historically, than it does to consider his work philosophically. Like Derrida and Foucault he seems to write in a tradition of anti-humanist post-structural French thought that, after Nietzsche, works to find the irrational in the rational, after Heidegger, works to turn from philosophy to poetry, after Kojeve, struggles with the idea of the end of history, and against Sartre turns from existential political engagement to an individualist ethics of transgression and play. Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes. For Serres, writing in the dark aspect of the Romantic tradition as it comes through Nietzsche, Artaud, the Dadaists, and the Situationists, the creativity of the irrational, unconscious, or incoherent is valued over the “systemization” of rationality.
Piercing the foggy banks of nonsense that (deliberately) cloud the pages of The Parasite are occasional insights that seem interesting, provocative, or worth following up. On the question of order and disorder, though, on noise and social relations, I found Serres’ regular references to Maxwell’s Demon to call to mind a much more beautiful and arresting work, which addresses some of the same themes, and Maxwell’s Demon, and even W.A.S.T.E…. namely Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
25 March 2009
Nietzsche, Kant’s Holocaust, and My Cat’s Face
Of course, I don’t have a cat. I wish I had a cat. I wish I had a cat that would (or at least could), like Derrida’s, remind me daily of the strangeness of being a human animal, a strangeness Derrida thinks through and with in The Animal That Therefore I Am.
I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of an Anthropology seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.
When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.
This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”
This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.
I don’t quite know what to make of his rich, complex, playful, and deadly serious book, especially within the context of an Anthropology seminar. It aligns to some extent with the critique of Cartesian epistemology in Barad and Jullien, it engages with the phenomenology that seemed to undergird the work of Mol and Lingis, and in fact the three theses that structure this course come in to Derrida’s final hurried chapter on Heidegger; the problem is not one of disconnection between the text and the seminar. Rather, my problem is that I find it here nearly impossible to get outside of philosophy, or more specifically Derrida, or even more specifically Derrida’s “animalism” and Nietzschean perspectivalism.
When Derrida admits on pages 91-92 that his motivation in attempting to grapple with “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, as a single living body” is perhaps an attempt to “gain… a sufficiently expert or knowledgeable purchase on what might touch the nervous system of a single animal body,” like trying to grab a cuttlefish without either hurting it or being covered in its ink (which I just now realize is a typically Derridean metaphor-pun), and that he admits this in order to confide “I have a particularly animalist perception and interpretation of what I do, think, write, live, but, in fact, of everything, of the whole history, culture, and so-called human society, at every level, macro- or microscopic,” which recalls his indirect quotation of Nietzsche on page 3 that man “was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself,” I can’t help but agree, yes, the human is an animal, even while I have to wonder about what it means not only to grasp a cuttlefish but to devour one. One thing I always admire about Derrida is his lightness of touch.
This question of devouring, which resurfaces here and there in terms of vegetarianism, animal suffering, instrumental reason, and even the Holocaust, comes up again in the end when Derrida contrasts Nietzsche to Heidegger in order to favor both Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and his (here unnamed) will-to-power—when Derrida says “everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the ‘truest,’ the most ‘objective,’ that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an ‘animal’ relation,” he leaves unspoken the violence in Nietzsche’s animal relations, the cruelty of the “blond beast” to the slave and the disdain of the “higher man” for the “herd,” the difference expressed in hierarchy—he leaves out specifically, precisely, the “will-to-power” in all its aspects (160). Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is no mere relativism, but an issue of power and force. Derrida is right to point out that the stakes are “radical.”
This was something that struck me with Barad, as well, and her marvelous image of the creature that was an eye: intersubjective agential realism is great, but some animal has to eat. And at this point, thinking about the anthropos in philosophy and the theoria of anthropology, I don’t know what is being devoured by whom. As for me, I wish I had a cat.
24 March 2009
Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature
This is from the official website of the cultural services of the French Embassy.
Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature
The Oulipo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, is a collective of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. Since its creation, the Oulipo group explores alternative ways of writing fiction and poetry, by using patterns and constraints often inspired from mathematical models, but always in a playful spirit. Its members include Marcel Bénabou, Anne Garréta, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Jacques Roubaud, and American author Harry Mathews, all of whom will be in New York for three days of readings, lectures, writing workshops and book signings. Jacques Roubaud will be presenting the recently published English translation of his book La boucle (The Loop).
Apr. 1, 7-8:30pm
Oulipo reading followed by book signings, in English
The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 W 12th Street, NYC | T 212 229 5488 | More Info
Apr. 2, 12-2pm
Oulipo, Nouveaux Sentiers, Nouveaux Chantiers*, a roundtable discussion in French
Maison française of Columbia University, Broadway at West 116th Street | T 212 854 4482 | More Info
Apr. 2 , 7pm
Book launch and reading of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, in English
Idlewild Bookstore,12 West 19th Street, NYC | T 212 414 8888 | More Info | Please RSVP
Apr. 3, 2-5pm
Creative writing workshop with Marcel Bénabou, in French (limited to 12 participants)
French Institute Alliance Française | 22 East 60th Street, NYC | T: 212 355 6612 | More Info
Apr. 3, 7-9pm
Poetry readings followed by book signings, in English
The Pierogi Gallery, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn | T 718 599 2144 | More Info
Apr. 4, 1-3pm
Buffet-brunch followed by Oulipo reading, in French and English (invitations only)
Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, New York | T 212 439 1400
Oulipo in New York: a Workshop of Experimental Literature
The Oulipo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, is a collective of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. Since its creation, the Oulipo group explores alternative ways of writing fiction and poetry, by using patterns and constraints often inspired from mathematical models, but always in a playful spirit. Its members include Marcel Bénabou, Anne Garréta, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Jacques Roubaud, and American author Harry Mathews, all of whom will be in New York for three days of readings, lectures, writing workshops and book signings. Jacques Roubaud will be presenting the recently published English translation of his book La boucle (The Loop).
Apr. 1, 7-8:30pm
Oulipo reading followed by book signings, in English
The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 W 12th Street, NYC | T 212 229 5488 | More Info
Apr. 2, 12-2pm
Oulipo, Nouveaux Sentiers, Nouveaux Chantiers*, a roundtable discussion in French
Maison française of Columbia University, Broadway at West 116th Street | T 212 854 4482 | More Info
Apr. 2 , 7pm
Book launch and reading of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, in English
Idlewild Bookstore,12 West 19th Street, NYC | T 212 414 8888 | More Info | Please RSVP
Apr. 3, 2-5pm
Creative writing workshop with Marcel Bénabou, in French (limited to 12 participants)
French Institute Alliance Française | 22 East 60th Street, NYC | T: 212 355 6612 | More Info
Apr. 3, 7-9pm
Poetry readings followed by book signings, in English
The Pierogi Gallery, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn | T 718 599 2144 | More Info
Apr. 4, 1-3pm
Buffet-brunch followed by Oulipo reading, in French and English (invitations only)
Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, New York | T 212 439 1400
19 March 2009
SPRING BREAK MUTHAFUCKAS!!!! WOOO!!!
Of course this means nothing, except that I slept in till 10 this morning like I'm Marcel Proust or some shit.
What I spent most of my spring break doing was writing a book review of an awful, awful book called Paradoxes of Peace, by the waffling, rich old codger Nicholas Mosley, son of the founder of the British Fascist party, Oswald Mosley. It was an awful book, and my review will probably not get published because no matter how elegantly I might have dropped the hatchet, people often get squeamish about all the blood.
I also read my Marx chapters and worked on a talk I have to give on Glenn Gray's great book The Warriors. It was interesting working on Paradoxes of Peace and The Warriors at the same time, because the fact of the matter is that it takes a great deal more work to do justice to a good book than it does to a bad one. The work can be much more enjoyable and rewarding, no doubt, but good books must be struggled with in a way that bad ones don't require.
I also went to a cultural event last night, the MATA Interval 2.4 Play! Music for Toys, which was enjoyable. Overall the music was palatable and well-played but too pretty and too much watered-down minimalism for my tastes, although I was blown away by the standout Judy Dunaway (and that girl who did vocals with her), who can rock a balloon like a motherfucker. I also liked Margaret Leng Tan, who performed pieces that in themselves were not that interesting with such verve and charisma that they really stood out.
Uhm, that's about all I got. I'm reading a fantastic article by Richard Wrangham on "The Evolution of Coalitionary Killing," which argues for the "Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis" to explain aggressive group attacks through natural selection. I knew it all along...
One last thing, everyone should go see I Love You, Man, because mi amiga Sarah Burns is in it and she's fucking awesome and the movie needs to do well so she can get a cushy hollywood job and fly me out to visit her in a private jet. Okay? Also it's supposed to be funny, and Sarah is super funny.
What I spent most of my spring break doing was writing a book review of an awful, awful book called Paradoxes of Peace, by the waffling, rich old codger Nicholas Mosley, son of the founder of the British Fascist party, Oswald Mosley. It was an awful book, and my review will probably not get published because no matter how elegantly I might have dropped the hatchet, people often get squeamish about all the blood.
I also read my Marx chapters and worked on a talk I have to give on Glenn Gray's great book The Warriors. It was interesting working on Paradoxes of Peace and The Warriors at the same time, because the fact of the matter is that it takes a great deal more work to do justice to a good book than it does to a bad one. The work can be much more enjoyable and rewarding, no doubt, but good books must be struggled with in a way that bad ones don't require.
I also went to a cultural event last night, the MATA Interval 2.4 Play! Music for Toys, which was enjoyable. Overall the music was palatable and well-played but too pretty and too much watered-down minimalism for my tastes, although I was blown away by the standout Judy Dunaway (and that girl who did vocals with her), who can rock a balloon like a motherfucker. I also liked Margaret Leng Tan, who performed pieces that in themselves were not that interesting with such verve and charisma that they really stood out.
Uhm, that's about all I got. I'm reading a fantastic article by Richard Wrangham on "The Evolution of Coalitionary Killing," which argues for the "Chimpanzee Violence Hypothesis" to explain aggressive group attacks through natural selection. I knew it all along...
One last thing, everyone should go see I Love You, Man, because mi amiga Sarah Burns is in it and she's fucking awesome and the movie needs to do well so she can get a cushy hollywood job and fly me out to visit her in a private jet. Okay? Also it's supposed to be funny, and Sarah is super funny.
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