So I went to see Rois et Reine at the cinema last night. I had no idea what to expect of the film, except that, since it was French, it would probably include lots of tedious dialogue, some female nudity, and a completely arbitrary use of jump cuts at the most inappropriate moments as if that makes a director automatically an auteur or something. And be overlong.
And whaddaya know? It met my expectations, and with flying colours. It's not that I hate French film, you understand. I still love Les 400 coups with an undying passion. And I can stand a bit of Godard or Renoir, too. But, for crying out loud, is this really the state of French film today?
Okay, the film was, I admit, quite a watchable thing, and its near-enough-three-hours seemed more like one and a half. The male lead (Mathieu Amalric) was actually very good, and his scenes made the whole thing worthwhile. But the main actress (Emmanuelle Devos, it seems) was unutterably terrible. And the revelation? All French families secretly hate each other? Well fuck me!
Sorry, I ought t'have put a spoiler warning in the previous paragraph for the mentally challenged. The whole film I found very uneven, as if the director had vetoed every edit suggested in the cutting room and mashed the whole lot together without much regard for craft.
However, I am willing to concede that my low opinion of the film might just be down to my own blockheadedness. It seems I just lack the cultural capital to buy into this stock. My companion last night (who is *something* in film studies) loved the film, and informed me that it's making a big splash (and she's been writing official press releases for the Cambridge film festival for the last coupla weeks, so she knows her stuff). I don't know. At what point in your life can you decide, in all good faith, to reject something out of hand, and all the paraphernalia that goes with it?
And Moon River? Moon Fucking River? Why does every film I see these days have that godforsaken song in it? (if you saw the last Almodovar you'll know what I mean.)
July 28, 2005
July 27, 2005
You're innocent when you dream
I've decided to give this 'blogging' thing a shot. I am reliably informed that a 'blog' is generally agreed to be an online journal that documents the life experiences, thoughts and opinions of its author on a regular, often daily, basis. This here weblog only conforms to that description in the loosest possible terms. So let's give this thing a try.
This is doomed to failure, I can see it now.
Long-term readers of this thing (all the both of you) will have noticed that I am as a rule reluctant to reveal personal information online. I don't talk much about my day-to-day life. That was a conscious decision at the start, partly to do with a conviction that I had plenty to say that was sufficiently intellectual without having to seek refuge in the banalities of everyday life (yeah, right!), and partly to do with a paranoia about web-based communication which has I suppose mostly dissipated (please take note, whichever ECHELON agent is reading this), and third-partly to do with a fascination with the idea of being able to communicate completely anonymously and unselfconsciously.
This last aim was the most illusory. Internet communication is by its very nature highly rhetorical. Any kind of written communication demands the construction or performance of an identity, of the 'subject of the enunciation' in language. Where communication takes place between subjects each possessed of a 'differentiated anonymity' (for want of a better term), this demand is all the more dominant. A persona is a mask, as we all know. There is no anonymity in web communication, any more than there is anonymity in the workplace. Wiki-based things are slightly different. But, despite the success of Wikipedia, the wiki philosophy has yet to take off in any major way as far as I can tell.
Is the advent of internet communication about to usher in a new Age of Rhetoric?
In my own experience of internet message boards, I’ve noticed that in web communities of a certain type, specious arguments often meet with all but unanimous approval without having the slightest shred of substance to them. I sense my readership bristling at this, so let me say: this is not an attack on anyone in particular, but an observation about the predominance of suasive rhetoric over rational, empirical argument. I'm not quite decided on whether this is a good or a bad thing.
It has recently become a scholarly commonplace to note the parallels between the 'communications revolution' of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the 'print revolution' of early modern Europe.
The 'rhetorical revolution' of the Renaissance took place in a climate of great unrest, civil and religious. The great truths on which theology and the hierarchies of society had been based were brought into question. This was really a linguistic revolution, a new understanding of how communicative language works, and how the way we say something is often more important than what we say. In some ways it was the birth of irony. Irony was to have its golden age in the Enlightenment with the likes of Voltaire and Swift, but it was the Renaissance that laid the groundwork. It was in the Renaissance that writers were first able to use language in this way, to weave in the subtext that gives form to the text, that shapes the flow of discourse.
Rhetoric is deception. How else could Montaigne undertake to write an apology for the natural theology of Raymond Sebond, proposing to defend the argument that reason is the surest path to God, while denying the pre-eminence of human reason with every flourish of his pen, and intimating that the only route to heaven, if it existed at all, was by God’s grace? How else could Berni write a poem in praise of the plague, Du Bellay in praise of deafness, Passerat in praise of nothing, Erasmus in praise of folly? These paradoxical encomia were very much in vogue in the sixteenth century, and the ludic spirit that permeates them makes their intentions no less serious.
Renaissance interpreters, armed with their newly-discovered Quintilian, liked giving names to these textual procedures: ironia, antiphrasis, praeteritio, so many ways to deceive the reader, to say something without saying it.
Irony, for Renaissance theorists, was often just another variety of trope. Fouquelin lists four kinds of trope in his Rhétorique française: metonymy, irony, metaphor (a category which includes catachresis, allegory, enigma and hyperbole) and synecdoche. All ways of 'turning' words away from their proper meaning. Judging by the first example he gives, Fouquelin considered irony to be nothing other than what we would today call sarcasm; and you'd be hard pushed to find any wit at all in the examples he gives, even in its lowest form: it's simply a matter of saying one thing and meaning the opposite. In the case of continued use of irony, Fouquelin denies that we should call it a 'figure': rather, it is a 'multiplied trope'. This impulse to categorize, to define, to make accessible the basics of linguistic communication and, more importantly, persuasion, was the greatest revolution in human thought the world has known.
The rise of rhetoric brought with it a suspicion of rhetoric. Just as it had the first time around with the Sophists and then the likes of Gorgias, and the second time around with the anti-Ciceronians. The Jesuits came in for a beating this time around. And nowadays, 'rhetorical' is used almost exclusively as a pejorative term, a term thrown at the sort of person who attends to form over content, the letter over the law. I believe that it survives in the most attenuated form in US schools in the guise of the 'debate team', which has, as far as I can tell, about as much to do with oratory as the 'spelling bee' has to do with the progymnasmata.
Erm, how did we get here? Oh yes, blogging. Still to come: shocking revelations about my personal private life, so stay tuned.
This is doomed to failure, I can see it now.
Long-term readers of this thing (all the both of you) will have noticed that I am as a rule reluctant to reveal personal information online. I don't talk much about my day-to-day life. That was a conscious decision at the start, partly to do with a conviction that I had plenty to say that was sufficiently intellectual without having to seek refuge in the banalities of everyday life (yeah, right!), and partly to do with a paranoia about web-based communication which has I suppose mostly dissipated (please take note, whichever ECHELON agent is reading this), and third-partly to do with a fascination with the idea of being able to communicate completely anonymously and unselfconsciously.
This last aim was the most illusory. Internet communication is by its very nature highly rhetorical. Any kind of written communication demands the construction or performance of an identity, of the 'subject of the enunciation' in language. Where communication takes place between subjects each possessed of a 'differentiated anonymity' (for want of a better term), this demand is all the more dominant. A persona is a mask, as we all know. There is no anonymity in web communication, any more than there is anonymity in the workplace. Wiki-based things are slightly different. But, despite the success of Wikipedia, the wiki philosophy has yet to take off in any major way as far as I can tell.
Is the advent of internet communication about to usher in a new Age of Rhetoric?
In my own experience of internet message boards, I’ve noticed that in web communities of a certain type, specious arguments often meet with all but unanimous approval without having the slightest shred of substance to them. I sense my readership bristling at this, so let me say: this is not an attack on anyone in particular, but an observation about the predominance of suasive rhetoric over rational, empirical argument. I'm not quite decided on whether this is a good or a bad thing.
It has recently become a scholarly commonplace to note the parallels between the 'communications revolution' of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the 'print revolution' of early modern Europe.
The 'rhetorical revolution' of the Renaissance took place in a climate of great unrest, civil and religious. The great truths on which theology and the hierarchies of society had been based were brought into question. This was really a linguistic revolution, a new understanding of how communicative language works, and how the way we say something is often more important than what we say. In some ways it was the birth of irony. Irony was to have its golden age in the Enlightenment with the likes of Voltaire and Swift, but it was the Renaissance that laid the groundwork. It was in the Renaissance that writers were first able to use language in this way, to weave in the subtext that gives form to the text, that shapes the flow of discourse.
Rhetoric is deception. How else could Montaigne undertake to write an apology for the natural theology of Raymond Sebond, proposing to defend the argument that reason is the surest path to God, while denying the pre-eminence of human reason with every flourish of his pen, and intimating that the only route to heaven, if it existed at all, was by God’s grace? How else could Berni write a poem in praise of the plague, Du Bellay in praise of deafness, Passerat in praise of nothing, Erasmus in praise of folly? These paradoxical encomia were very much in vogue in the sixteenth century, and the ludic spirit that permeates them makes their intentions no less serious.
Renaissance interpreters, armed with their newly-discovered Quintilian, liked giving names to these textual procedures: ironia, antiphrasis, praeteritio, so many ways to deceive the reader, to say something without saying it.
Irony, for Renaissance theorists, was often just another variety of trope. Fouquelin lists four kinds of trope in his Rhétorique française: metonymy, irony, metaphor (a category which includes catachresis, allegory, enigma and hyperbole) and synecdoche. All ways of 'turning' words away from their proper meaning. Judging by the first example he gives, Fouquelin considered irony to be nothing other than what we would today call sarcasm; and you'd be hard pushed to find any wit at all in the examples he gives, even in its lowest form: it's simply a matter of saying one thing and meaning the opposite. In the case of continued use of irony, Fouquelin denies that we should call it a 'figure': rather, it is a 'multiplied trope'. This impulse to categorize, to define, to make accessible the basics of linguistic communication and, more importantly, persuasion, was the greatest revolution in human thought the world has known.
The rise of rhetoric brought with it a suspicion of rhetoric. Just as it had the first time around with the Sophists and then the likes of Gorgias, and the second time around with the anti-Ciceronians. The Jesuits came in for a beating this time around. And nowadays, 'rhetorical' is used almost exclusively as a pejorative term, a term thrown at the sort of person who attends to form over content, the letter over the law. I believe that it survives in the most attenuated form in US schools in the guise of the 'debate team', which has, as far as I can tell, about as much to do with oratory as the 'spelling bee' has to do with the progymnasmata.
Erm, how did we get here? Oh yes, blogging. Still to come: shocking revelations about my personal private life, so stay tuned.
July 25, 2005
Gainful unemployment here I come!
Well, that's it. Thesis completed, printed, bound and submitted. Done and done. Viva to come in September, but that's none of my concern right now. After that...
Anyway, I have some free time on my hands. The coming days and weeks stretch before me in serried ranks as the plains of Mesopotamia and the frosty wastes of the Black Sea stretched before Xenophon's troops after the defeat of Artaxerxes at the battle of Cunaxa. So, I've been meaning to catch up on some reading. My haul from the bookstore:
The Stories of English - David Crystal
History of the English language in its myriad manifestations; written for a popular audience, but just academic enough to convince you you're not wasting your time. One of the best histories of the English language I've read. Did that last sentence make you think I've read a whole load of 'em? If so, good.
Speak, Memory - Nabokov
I'm fresh out of superlatives, so come to your own conclusions.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Slightly disappointing. Had high hopes for this; it came highly recommended. Well-written enough, but nothing much there.
Blood Meridian - Cormack McCarthy
I'm about a hundred pages in; suspending judgement for the moment.
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
Next up. What are you looking at me like that for? I have read this before (well, I got about 3 chapters in the first time around), but I'm taking a long run up this time. Should polish it off by the end of the week. Ahem.
Extinction - Thomas Bernhard
Unknown quantity.
The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
This too. My knowledge of German literature is woefully poor, so I'm doing my best to remedy that. That doesn't extend to reading these in German, you understand.
In recent weeks, I've taken to lying flat on my back on the floor to read. I've found this technique allows me to read for five or six hours straight without discomfort (unlike say, lying on the bed or sitting in an armchair). I'm happy with it.
I also bought a handful of CDs the other day. It was only when I got them home that I noticed their cover art of all four CDs was the same colour (plain white). What can it mean?
For reference, the CDs were:
Mogwai- Government Commissions
Smog - A River Ain't Too Much To Love
Autechre - Confield
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Perhaps a more substantial post soon.
Comments or recommendations welcome.
Anyway, I have some free time on my hands. The coming days and weeks stretch before me in serried ranks as the plains of Mesopotamia and the frosty wastes of the Black Sea stretched before Xenophon's troops after the defeat of Artaxerxes at the battle of Cunaxa. So, I've been meaning to catch up on some reading. My haul from the bookstore:
The Stories of English - David Crystal
History of the English language in its myriad manifestations; written for a popular audience, but just academic enough to convince you you're not wasting your time. One of the best histories of the English language I've read. Did that last sentence make you think I've read a whole load of 'em? If so, good.
Speak, Memory - Nabokov
I'm fresh out of superlatives, so come to your own conclusions.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Slightly disappointing. Had high hopes for this; it came highly recommended. Well-written enough, but nothing much there.
Blood Meridian - Cormack McCarthy
I'm about a hundred pages in; suspending judgement for the moment.
Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
Next up. What are you looking at me like that for? I have read this before (well, I got about 3 chapters in the first time around), but I'm taking a long run up this time. Should polish it off by the end of the week. Ahem.
Extinction - Thomas Bernhard
Unknown quantity.
The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch
This too. My knowledge of German literature is woefully poor, so I'm doing my best to remedy that. That doesn't extend to reading these in German, you understand.
In recent weeks, I've taken to lying flat on my back on the floor to read. I've found this technique allows me to read for five or six hours straight without discomfort (unlike say, lying on the bed or sitting in an armchair). I'm happy with it.
I also bought a handful of CDs the other day. It was only when I got them home that I noticed their cover art of all four CDs was the same colour (plain white). What can it mean?
For reference, the CDs were:
Mogwai- Government Commissions
Smog - A River Ain't Too Much To Love
Autechre - Confield
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Perhaps a more substantial post soon.
Comments or recommendations welcome.
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