"For my part I am one of the number, nos numerus sumus, (we are mere ciphers): I do not deny it, I have only this of Macrobius to say for myself, Omne meum, nihil meum, 'tis all mine, and none mine. As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, I have laboriously collected this cento out of divers writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own.
[...]
I solve it thus. And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. 'Tis not worth the reading, I yield it, I desire thee not to lose time in perusing so vain a subject, I should be peradventure loath myself to read him or thee so writing; 'tis not operae, pretium. All I say is this, that I have precedents for it, which Isocrates calls perfugium iis qui peccant, others as absurd, vain, idle, illiterate, &c. Nonnulli alii idem fecerunt; others have done as much, it may be more, and perhaps thou thyself, Novimus et qui te, &c. We have all our faults; scimus, et hanc, veniaim, &c.; thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee, Cedimus inque vicem, &c., 'tis lex talionis, quid pro quo. Go now, censure, criticise, scoff, and rail."
--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy ('Democritus Junior to the Reader')
June 13, 2006
They Live By Night
The other night, towards the witching hour, as I sat in the drawing room idly leafing through a monograph on the naval engagements of the Second Peloponnesian War and sipping a postprandial sherry, I happened to glance up from the page to catch, out of the corner of my eye, a dark shadow moving in the area of the staircase. 'My word!' I exclaimed aloud, 'What an unusually large moth!'
I put down my pipe and took up my cane and quizzing glass, eager as I was to investigate further, and even perhaps to be able to present my findings at the next congress of the Royal Society of Lepidopterists.
I peered into the darkness of the stairwell. No moth nor winged insect of any cast could be seen to emerge from the gloom. I proceeded to mount the stair.
I barely evaded the attack. The creature swooped silently towards me with uncanny speed and manifest malevolence.
'That's no moth!' I could be heard to exclaim, 'It's a fucking bat!'
And it was: A. Fucking. Bat. I'm not making this up.
Cursing at the top of my voice, I looked around for my trusty bat-net. Remembering that I owned no such implement, I grabbed the laundry basket and made a series of flailing attempts to capture the evil thing. Bats can fly pretty fast, and they're not easy to catch when they don't want to be caught. So I ran upstairs and barricaded myself in the bedroom where I cowered in wait of the bat-banishing dawn.
Baudelaire in one of the Spleen poems compared Hope to a bat bumping her head against the ceiling and brushing against the walls with her wings. One wonders if Baudelaire had ever actually seen a bat, since in my experience they don't tend to bump into things much, having fairly well-developed spatial awareness.
The symbolism of bats relies heavily on their being nocturnal and demonic (and vampiric), of course, but another more interesting aspect of bats -- their perceived dual nature -- also comes up a lot in poetry. La Fontaine (after Aesop) uses this to amusing effect in his poem about the bat and the two weasels, in which the bat extricates herself from two sticky situations (one weasel hates mice, the other hates birds) by protesting her absolute allegiance to the one nature and her hatred of the other. The moral: wise men know to switch their allegiance when necessary.
There is, in Ovid, the association of bats with crimes against the cult of Dionysus, but also (strangely) with the spinning of wool and the spinning of stories (in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses the Minyeids get turned into bats as punishment for working on the feast day of the god). Dual nature comes into this too, since Alcithoë's story is about Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Bacchus, angered at the Minyeids' shunning of his feast day, transforms their woven cloths into vines and the storytellers into bats. Bacchus here seems to represent the forces of madness and indistinction and unreason (posing as lawful authority) against intellect and reason. The transformation of the cloths into vines on the one hand could be said to 'bring the artwork to life', but on the other it is surely the destruction of art, the transmutation of delicate artifice into brute nature. And the bat thing? Is the punishment based on the idea that as bats, the Minyeids will no longer be able to pursue the creative arts (bats, unlike spiders, are not renowned for their technical skill); or are bats somehow signifiers for the artistic impulse that escapes the rule of authority (even that of the dark god himself)?
I also find it interesting that there seem to be unusual discrepancies in the names for bats in different languages. Flutter-mouse, bald-mouse, blind-mouse, evening-thing, leather-wing, &c. The English word 'bat', perplexingly, seems to derive from 'bacon'. See here, for example. Generally, there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what bats mean, and why: they are, to say the least, flitting signifiers.
Anyway, for all I know, the bat is still in the house. I'm hoping that next time it chooses to attack, it'll go for the flat-mate and not me.
I put down my pipe and took up my cane and quizzing glass, eager as I was to investigate further, and even perhaps to be able to present my findings at the next congress of the Royal Society of Lepidopterists.
I peered into the darkness of the stairwell. No moth nor winged insect of any cast could be seen to emerge from the gloom. I proceeded to mount the stair.
I barely evaded the attack. The creature swooped silently towards me with uncanny speed and manifest malevolence.
'That's no moth!' I could be heard to exclaim, 'It's a fucking bat!'
And it was: A. Fucking. Bat. I'm not making this up.
Cursing at the top of my voice, I looked around for my trusty bat-net. Remembering that I owned no such implement, I grabbed the laundry basket and made a series of flailing attempts to capture the evil thing. Bats can fly pretty fast, and they're not easy to catch when they don't want to be caught. So I ran upstairs and barricaded myself in the bedroom where I cowered in wait of the bat-banishing dawn.
Baudelaire in one of the Spleen poems compared Hope to a bat bumping her head against the ceiling and brushing against the walls with her wings. One wonders if Baudelaire had ever actually seen a bat, since in my experience they don't tend to bump into things much, having fairly well-developed spatial awareness.
The symbolism of bats relies heavily on their being nocturnal and demonic (and vampiric), of course, but another more interesting aspect of bats -- their perceived dual nature -- also comes up a lot in poetry. La Fontaine (after Aesop) uses this to amusing effect in his poem about the bat and the two weasels, in which the bat extricates herself from two sticky situations (one weasel hates mice, the other hates birds) by protesting her absolute allegiance to the one nature and her hatred of the other. The moral: wise men know to switch their allegiance when necessary.
There is, in Ovid, the association of bats with crimes against the cult of Dionysus, but also (strangely) with the spinning of wool and the spinning of stories (in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses the Minyeids get turned into bats as punishment for working on the feast day of the god). Dual nature comes into this too, since Alcithoë's story is about Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Bacchus, angered at the Minyeids' shunning of his feast day, transforms their woven cloths into vines and the storytellers into bats. Bacchus here seems to represent the forces of madness and indistinction and unreason (posing as lawful authority) against intellect and reason. The transformation of the cloths into vines on the one hand could be said to 'bring the artwork to life', but on the other it is surely the destruction of art, the transmutation of delicate artifice into brute nature. And the bat thing? Is the punishment based on the idea that as bats, the Minyeids will no longer be able to pursue the creative arts (bats, unlike spiders, are not renowned for their technical skill); or are bats somehow signifiers for the artistic impulse that escapes the rule of authority (even that of the dark god himself)?
I also find it interesting that there seem to be unusual discrepancies in the names for bats in different languages. Flutter-mouse, bald-mouse, blind-mouse, evening-thing, leather-wing, &c. The English word 'bat', perplexingly, seems to derive from 'bacon'. See here, for example. Generally, there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what bats mean, and why: they are, to say the least, flitting signifiers.
Anyway, for all I know, the bat is still in the house. I'm hoping that next time it chooses to attack, it'll go for the flat-mate and not me.
June 03, 2006
The thingness of words and the wordness of things
As you may know, Slavoj Žižek is at Birkbeck at the moment, so I couldn't really miss the opportunity to attend the seminars he's heading there. I went to the first one last week (where do you think I lifted the Hegel quote for my last entry? You didn't imagine I'd actually been reading Hegel, did you?), missed the second, and just about scraped into the third on Thursday.
This last session saw Žižek getting to grips with Hegel and Deleuze via Lacanian ethics, in his characteristically exuberant repetitive-digressive and somewhat disorientating style. Almost everything this man says is a contradiction; in my all but complete ignorance of 'hard' philosophy, I quite often have no idea what it might be a contradiction of, but I'm pretty sure it is one nevertheless.
Anyway, a couple of things from his most recent lecture got me thinking, because they relate quite closely (closely but indirectly: the best kind of relation) to some of the ideas I've been grappling with lately, on words and things and the status of literature.
Firstly, Hegel. Now, I know just enough about Hegel to know that most of what I know about Hegel is wrong. Hegel's Idealism is numbingly abstract and suffocatingly absolutist, for example. That's almost definitely wrong. The language he uses is so detached from reality (being German) that his system ends up describing nothing but itself. That's probably wrong.
Žižek claims that for Hegel, language is always against thought, and in order to elaborate concepts, it is necessary to 'think against language'. This does not sit well with me. What can it possibly mean to 'think against language'? Anyone who says something like that usually ends up bandying about terms like 'aporia' and 'transgression' and 'reading against the grain', and that sort of thing does nobody's health any good. But this particular idea seems to be going somewhere else: Hegel recognises that the only way to thought is by operating within language, precisely by seizing upon the most contingent elements of language and setting them to work. So puns, wordplays, blends, und so weiter, all offer a way through language to thought. Thinking against language does not mean purifying it of the elements that confound reason; rather it means doing the opposite. Žižek cited a letter Hegel wrote to a friend of his as he was beginning to learn the Dutch language with a view to taking up a post there: the first thing he wanted was a list of Dutch puns and jokes, so that he would be able to get philosophizing in that language.
This all seems very counterintuitive and mildly incomprehensible (and so what is generally called 'interesting' or 'thought-provoking'). But it must be set in the context of the dialectic of the contingent and the necessary. Does the contingency of language mask a deeper underlying necessity in the development of thought (probably something Hegel would preface with the word 'Absolute')? Or is the idea a little more subtle than that?
A while ago on the House of Leaves messageboard I was involved in a discussion about the viability of the concept of intrinsic worth when talking about artworks. I was trying to argue, somewhat unsuccessfully, that it is not intellectually dishonest to define 'intrinsic worth' as something like the quality that emerges over time within the historical horizon to which we are bound. That quality can be said to have been there from the start, inherent in the work inasmuch as it is the product of the conditions delimited by a certain horizon of meaning; and it would be meaningless to argue, from a point outside our own frame of reference, that since cultural values are contingent and arbitrary, no work has any greater intrinsic worth that any other. Whatever quality emerges in the process of a work's reception was always going to be: every work gets the Nachleben it deserves.
Žižek, via T. S. Eliot on Tradition and Deleuze on virtuality, made the argument that Hegel's dialectic is not about the true necessity that was always fated to be, underlying the false appearance of contingency; it is all about the retroactive reinsertion of necessity into the contingent. An event, an act, a work actively reshapes the totality of the past, altering the past order of things which remains nevertheless complete and deterministic, just as Eliot's poet, in adding a new work to the totality of the dead poets' tradition, alters the past and is altered by it. The contingent is reversed into the necessary, because any engagement or intervention in language is in some way performative or declaratory: we cannot speak of the past without shaping the past and flipping the what-might-have-been immediately into the what-had-to-be. How the dynamics of virtual possibility fits with all this I'm not entirely sure, but I'll get back to you.
I happen to think a lot of this stuff fits very closely with the theory and practice of classical rhetoric. In fact, I think a lot of Žižek's ideas owe something to rhetorical theory (where is the constitutive gap in the big Other embodied if not in the deployment of irony and its attendant tropes in rhetoric?). The retroactive constitution of the past as necessity is surely the same as the retroactive constitution of determinate meaning in rhetorically aware writing. The layeredness of language and its performative or suasive dimension combine to furnish a model for the emergeance of thought, in all its bright precedingness, from the anteriority of the word. verborum prior, rerum potior: the meaning of things is retroactively constituted as the first that comes before the firstness of words. Meaning does not emerge by chance, as patterns accidentally formed when you play around with words, but as a contingency concretized as necessity in the practice of the language arts.
By the way: Žižek also had quite a few fascinating things to say about Vertigo, which will interest John B. if he's reading. I won't reproduce them here, except to say: in the scene immediately after Scottie rescues her from the bay, where is Madeleine's underwear?
This last session saw Žižek getting to grips with Hegel and Deleuze via Lacanian ethics, in his characteristically exuberant repetitive-digressive and somewhat disorientating style. Almost everything this man says is a contradiction; in my all but complete ignorance of 'hard' philosophy, I quite often have no idea what it might be a contradiction of, but I'm pretty sure it is one nevertheless.
Anyway, a couple of things from his most recent lecture got me thinking, because they relate quite closely (closely but indirectly: the best kind of relation) to some of the ideas I've been grappling with lately, on words and things and the status of literature.
Firstly, Hegel. Now, I know just enough about Hegel to know that most of what I know about Hegel is wrong. Hegel's Idealism is numbingly abstract and suffocatingly absolutist, for example. That's almost definitely wrong. The language he uses is so detached from reality (being German) that his system ends up describing nothing but itself. That's probably wrong.
Žižek claims that for Hegel, language is always against thought, and in order to elaborate concepts, it is necessary to 'think against language'. This does not sit well with me. What can it possibly mean to 'think against language'? Anyone who says something like that usually ends up bandying about terms like 'aporia' and 'transgression' and 'reading against the grain', and that sort of thing does nobody's health any good. But this particular idea seems to be going somewhere else: Hegel recognises that the only way to thought is by operating within language, precisely by seizing upon the most contingent elements of language and setting them to work. So puns, wordplays, blends, und so weiter, all offer a way through language to thought. Thinking against language does not mean purifying it of the elements that confound reason; rather it means doing the opposite. Žižek cited a letter Hegel wrote to a friend of his as he was beginning to learn the Dutch language with a view to taking up a post there: the first thing he wanted was a list of Dutch puns and jokes, so that he would be able to get philosophizing in that language.
This all seems very counterintuitive and mildly incomprehensible (and so what is generally called 'interesting' or 'thought-provoking'). But it must be set in the context of the dialectic of the contingent and the necessary. Does the contingency of language mask a deeper underlying necessity in the development of thought (probably something Hegel would preface with the word 'Absolute')? Or is the idea a little more subtle than that?
A while ago on the House of Leaves messageboard I was involved in a discussion about the viability of the concept of intrinsic worth when talking about artworks. I was trying to argue, somewhat unsuccessfully, that it is not intellectually dishonest to define 'intrinsic worth' as something like the quality that emerges over time within the historical horizon to which we are bound. That quality can be said to have been there from the start, inherent in the work inasmuch as it is the product of the conditions delimited by a certain horizon of meaning; and it would be meaningless to argue, from a point outside our own frame of reference, that since cultural values are contingent and arbitrary, no work has any greater intrinsic worth that any other. Whatever quality emerges in the process of a work's reception was always going to be: every work gets the Nachleben it deserves.
Žižek, via T. S. Eliot on Tradition and Deleuze on virtuality, made the argument that Hegel's dialectic is not about the true necessity that was always fated to be, underlying the false appearance of contingency; it is all about the retroactive reinsertion of necessity into the contingent. An event, an act, a work actively reshapes the totality of the past, altering the past order of things which remains nevertheless complete and deterministic, just as Eliot's poet, in adding a new work to the totality of the dead poets' tradition, alters the past and is altered by it. The contingent is reversed into the necessary, because any engagement or intervention in language is in some way performative or declaratory: we cannot speak of the past without shaping the past and flipping the what-might-have-been immediately into the what-had-to-be. How the dynamics of virtual possibility fits with all this I'm not entirely sure, but I'll get back to you.
I happen to think a lot of this stuff fits very closely with the theory and practice of classical rhetoric. In fact, I think a lot of Žižek's ideas owe something to rhetorical theory (where is the constitutive gap in the big Other embodied if not in the deployment of irony and its attendant tropes in rhetoric?). The retroactive constitution of the past as necessity is surely the same as the retroactive constitution of determinate meaning in rhetorically aware writing. The layeredness of language and its performative or suasive dimension combine to furnish a model for the emergeance of thought, in all its bright precedingness, from the anteriority of the word. verborum prior, rerum potior: the meaning of things is retroactively constituted as the first that comes before the firstness of words. Meaning does not emerge by chance, as patterns accidentally formed when you play around with words, but as a contingency concretized as necessity in the practice of the language arts.
By the way: Žižek also had quite a few fascinating things to say about Vertigo, which will interest John B. if he's reading. I won't reproduce them here, except to say: in the scene immediately after Scottie rescues her from the bay, where is Madeleine's underwear?
June 01, 2006
Illusio and cultural capital
"[...] Such [authenticity-] effects do not (as they pretend) reproduce an antecedent reality, but instead produce the illusion of its existence, retroactively. How they succeed in doing so is revealed occasionally by operatives of a comparable feat of legerdemain, the 'erudition-effect'. Amusingly illustrated in Michael Kerrigan's vade-mecum, Bluff Your Way in Literature (1987), the 'erudition-effect' has some distinguished practitioners, including the twentieth-century's most respected poet-critic, T. S. Eliot. While lecturing in adult education courses, Eliot learned how to appear 'a prodigy of information'; and as a London reviewer working to tight deadlines he developed what he describes as 'a certain cunning in avoiding direct bluff', principally by 'only hinting at [his] pretended knowledge'. Some of this is displayed in his notes to The Waste Land(1922), which in 1957 he was to dismiss as 'bogus scholarship', thus inviting speculation as to whether the same can be said of his essay on 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), which was to become the most influential account of seventeenth-century English poetry for the next forty years. If Lyotard is to be believed, an equally impressive gallery of erudition-effects is on display in his now classic study, La Condition postmoderne (1979), a 'report on knowledge' commissioned by the government of Quebec. Three years after the English translation of this book in 1984, Lyotard was quoted as saying that it was 'all a bit of parody', because in preparing it he had 'made up stories' and 'referred to a quantity of books [he]'d never read'. In the absence of such confessions, however, skilfully deployed erudition-effects may create a reputation for learnedness that lasts well beyond the lifetime of their perpetrator. In Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643), for instance, information garnered on a wide range of topics related directly or tangentially to religion is franked with the pronoun 'I' and then recirculated as Browne's own thoughts in what consequently is taken to be an intellectual autobiography. And another successful self-fashioner as a polymath was Browne's contemporary, the diarist John Evelyn, whom Guy de la Bédoyère describes as 'adept at making it appear that he was better-read than he actually was', instancing Evelyn's raids on St Augustine's Confessions, Montaigne's Essais (1580–88) and compendiums like Erasmus' Adagia (1500) for out-of-the-way references and quotable quotes."
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