Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The triumph of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"
Though in some ways political, and in part a corrective to Wordsworth, Shelley's sublime Ode demands of us a Gnostic-metaphysical interpretation: the seer asks the wind to be made an instrument of prophecy, itself delivering to the poet a revolutionary vision beyond the external world (as catastrophic, primordial Creation/Fall). In Prometheus Unbound, Jupiter is the Demiurge, Joyce's 'hangman God', opposed by Prometheus as Gnostic redeemer, whose fire is the divine spark (or pneuma), the oldest and best part of consciousness alienated by the strangeness of nature.
It is, of course, Earth Day. And it feels, in our native Vermont, as if (nearly) spring. Today at the University of Vermont a wide range of Green-minded people are outside doing Green-minded things. Their telos in many cases is to become the ecological conscience that their society so sorely lacks. And as it has been for years now, the clearest clarion call is over 'recycling awareness'. To that one might say, as the Jacobins once said to the Girondists, enjoy your 'revolution without a revolution!'
It should be no wonder that many large businesses and corporations are getting in on the Earth Day and recycling program game: paradoxically, it works for capitalism, not against it. American capitalism, for all its dynamic wealth generation and commodity movement, generates an astounding amount of trash as its excrement - not just the sheer amount of material stuff that we throw away, but the figurative garbage, the outdated technology and appliances, that piles up in our closets or basements. Though usually distasteful, the trash has its own poetic dignity (perhaps in the same way that billboards and neon lights can be the stuff of urban, futurist poetry), like the defunct attack aircraft used as a canvas for concept art in DeLillo's Underworld.
But the trash remains a powerful allegory: it is a qualitative heap of unmovable matter, the ambivalent Real of late capitalism, which is closed off from our everyday consciousness of economic process. Psychologically, we have as difficult a time imagining garbage still existing in the world (once it's collected at least) as we do imagining our shit, semen and urine surviving once they're out of sight. Here, then, resides the dark truth of our efforts to change the world by recycling: the utopian dream of the seamless recovery of our garbage, which will be reinserted into products without remainder, is the ultimate capitalist dream. The free circulation of garbage is the free circulation of capital. And the Greens tirelessly work to deprive us even of a useful, and potentially revealing, metaphor.
Now, one can trace a line from Shelley, undoubtedly a man of the Left in his day, and his Romantic contemporaries back through Milton to Spenser, and forward through Whitman to Crane, Stevens and Ashbery. Each remarkably original and New, they nevertheless contain within their work (at least) one important epistemological similarity: that Gnostic animosity towards nature. Of course, this is an ontological difference, not an ecological one. But if the predominant liberal community is going to revolutionize our approach to the environment without a revolution, then Prometheus, humanity's first subversive agent, is destined to meet his ironic end at least once more.
22 April 2011
19 April 2011
From Paul Krugman to Political Serialism
So Paul Krugman disparages bipartisanship and civility: Democrats and Republicans, he says, should "have a frank discussion of their differences" over the budget instead of a respectful, consensus-building exchange. There is an old joke about a newly married man who's asked by his friend how beautiful his wife looks: 'I don't care for her,' he replies, 'but that's just a matter of taste.' The embedded lesson is that if I must agree with Mr. Krugman, let the marriage still lack something in the way of taste!
Krugman's point is that the 'civility police,' who have been quite ascendant in the media's mainstream as of late, are undemocratic, to which I disagree: they are, instead, democratic to the extreme. That is, it is a maddening principle of democratic government to create an empty, floating space of power to which competing values and interests must vie, the end result of which is an unusual, contracted program accepted by all who chose to compete but loved by almost none. Krugman further suggests, however, that the term 'bipartisan' is actually code for a conservative compromise, which is a far more interesting point to consider.
Bipartisan solutions are paradoxically ideological, and even if right now they theoretically hedge toward the right, our 'post-ideological' era finds everyone with a public agenda battling for the label. It typically works like this: an ideological issue is resolved by the group or persons forward-thinking enough to let the constituency know that now, after all the squabbling, it is finally time 'put our petty partisanship aside and do what's best for the country'. Of course, the resolving act itself is ideological; that is, it is an ideological move in the first instance to suggest that legislative, executive or administrative closure is unarguably in the best interests of everyone involved.
What Krugman should have said was that the cult of civility is dishonest, delusional. Levi-Strauss discusses a set of primitive Pacific Islanders who, when asked to diagram their tribe's social structure, essentially split into two camps: one camp draws a symmetrical relation between the two, and the other represents the division as a series of concentric circles. This account does not merely suggest that there is an unbridgeable, relative gap between the collective consciousness of each group, but that there is an irreducible antagonism, recognized equally across the social (class) division, which spills onto the diagrams as instantiations of the partial perspectives.
The suggestion is not a pure relativism but a move toward an actively engaged ideology, which does not sweep antagonism under the rug. This is, I will suggest, a move somewhat akin to the one between Stravinsky's middle and late periods (or, more accurately, as the Hegelian synthesis of his early and middle periods). Stravinsky once 'escaped' from the experimental phase of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird) to found a movement of precise, somewhat more stolid neoclassical works, only to embrace late in life the twelve tone system of his rival Schoenberg. This serialism, essentially a loose systematization of dissonances and chromaticisms arranged in rows, is the musical-theoretical version of a politics that takes ideology seriously. Now, to shudder at the thought that Paul Krugman is to be our Wagner.
Krugman's point is that the 'civility police,' who have been quite ascendant in the media's mainstream as of late, are undemocratic, to which I disagree: they are, instead, democratic to the extreme. That is, it is a maddening principle of democratic government to create an empty, floating space of power to which competing values and interests must vie, the end result of which is an unusual, contracted program accepted by all who chose to compete but loved by almost none. Krugman further suggests, however, that the term 'bipartisan' is actually code for a conservative compromise, which is a far more interesting point to consider.
Bipartisan solutions are paradoxically ideological, and even if right now they theoretically hedge toward the right, our 'post-ideological' era finds everyone with a public agenda battling for the label. It typically works like this: an ideological issue is resolved by the group or persons forward-thinking enough to let the constituency know that now, after all the squabbling, it is finally time 'put our petty partisanship aside and do what's best for the country'. Of course, the resolving act itself is ideological; that is, it is an ideological move in the first instance to suggest that legislative, executive or administrative closure is unarguably in the best interests of everyone involved.
What Krugman should have said was that the cult of civility is dishonest, delusional. Levi-Strauss discusses a set of primitive Pacific Islanders who, when asked to diagram their tribe's social structure, essentially split into two camps: one camp draws a symmetrical relation between the two, and the other represents the division as a series of concentric circles. This account does not merely suggest that there is an unbridgeable, relative gap between the collective consciousness of each group, but that there is an irreducible antagonism, recognized equally across the social (class) division, which spills onto the diagrams as instantiations of the partial perspectives.
The suggestion is not a pure relativism but a move toward an actively engaged ideology, which does not sweep antagonism under the rug. This is, I will suggest, a move somewhat akin to the one between Stravinsky's middle and late periods (or, more accurately, as the Hegelian synthesis of his early and middle periods). Stravinsky once 'escaped' from the experimental phase of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird) to found a movement of precise, somewhat more stolid neoclassical works, only to embrace late in life the twelve tone system of his rival Schoenberg. This serialism, essentially a loose systematization of dissonances and chromaticisms arranged in rows, is the musical-theoretical version of a politics that takes ideology seriously. Now, to shudder at the thought that Paul Krugman is to be our Wagner.
06 April 2011
Pushing Paper
Humanistic film critics, who as a rule control the contours of mainstream cinematic 'analysis', locate the depth of contemporary cinema in the pure visibility of characters' psychic complexity. Two-dimensionality has always been an insult in criticism, though the prevalent discourse now takes three-dimensionality to refer solely to the ability of a character to undergo change in an outwardly obvious way - was Tobey Maguire's bathetic version of Spider-man not a horrific banalization of the Shakespearean mode of overhearing*, where the personality is not grasping (through crisis) at the unspeakable void but merely feeling the 'right' feelings in the 'right' order so that the narrative can close and the coupling can be consummated?
What is lost in this pop-humanism is the metonymy of the surface: the formal structure of the film's social space that opens onto a circulation of language and objects. In short, this is the Lacanian minimal distance between background and foreground (consider first, perhaps, the relationship established in a Rothko painting): one aspect of the frame's field centered on a traditional character development/movement and another on a quasi-social, excremental circulation of material. Thus, Strangers on a Train is ultimately the story of a man who lost his lighter, got it back, lost it again and got it back. Or Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de..., which follows the eponymous jewelry set and its assumption of various contextual roles (not that they exhibit as much self-doubt as Tobey Maguire, obviously, but they exist at a distance from all other objects as the stain in the field or objet petit a).
The social-symbolic field of differential relations which finds its body in the irrational objective correlative of a lighter or a pair of earrings has found its body in a different location in American politics: on paper. Paul Ryan, the messiah of conservative policy wonks eager for reduced spending, is like the (theoretical) consciousness at the origin of the quantum wave function's collapse, issuing a budget out of the virtual abyss preceding materialization (which are, in other words, those conservative Ideas suspended in the primordial think tank). Those genuinely interested in politics now know nothing unless they follow the esoteric Rules of committee and chamber; that is, inevitably, where (nearly all) the action is in a representative democracy.
The Rules guarantee the orderly circulation of paper. That is, bills and riders and co-signatures. Of course, paper is an instrument of contraction: its function is to reduce a territory of thought into language by providing a canvas, which is itself a materialization somewhat akin to the action of Schelling's God (who broke out of the rotary motion of pre-cosmic drive through the pronunciation of the Word). Its sterile movement, which the good citizen watches, as a passive spectator, is the humiliating result of a non-radical system of democracy; it is the price we pay when we vote and, incidentally, sign our political power over to the Budgeteers.
It is quite hilarious that elections take on the social importance that they do, since participation is a sign not of activism but of its disavowed opposite: de-activism. Not everyone realizes that the 'Door Close' button in elevators is useless: pushing it (whether once or five times) never speeds up the process of the door's actual closure. It exists for a reason though, as a placebo, to assuage our fears of helplessness, to provide another pointless lever to push. And so the lever of the ballot box, pulled once in November, too provides little comfort when the only game in town is the tediousness of the budget process: first a conservative dream, then a clever compromise, then a hard-won victory, never anything new.
---
*I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself? (Hamlet, 1.4)
What is lost in this pop-humanism is the metonymy of the surface: the formal structure of the film's social space that opens onto a circulation of language and objects. In short, this is the Lacanian minimal distance between background and foreground (consider first, perhaps, the relationship established in a Rothko painting): one aspect of the frame's field centered on a traditional character development/movement and another on a quasi-social, excremental circulation of material. Thus, Strangers on a Train is ultimately the story of a man who lost his lighter, got it back, lost it again and got it back. Or Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de..., which follows the eponymous jewelry set and its assumption of various contextual roles (not that they exhibit as much self-doubt as Tobey Maguire, obviously, but they exist at a distance from all other objects as the stain in the field or objet petit a).
The social-symbolic field of differential relations which finds its body in the irrational objective correlative of a lighter or a pair of earrings has found its body in a different location in American politics: on paper. Paul Ryan, the messiah of conservative policy wonks eager for reduced spending, is like the (theoretical) consciousness at the origin of the quantum wave function's collapse, issuing a budget out of the virtual abyss preceding materialization (which are, in other words, those conservative Ideas suspended in the primordial think tank). Those genuinely interested in politics now know nothing unless they follow the esoteric Rules of committee and chamber; that is, inevitably, where (nearly all) the action is in a representative democracy.
The Rules guarantee the orderly circulation of paper. That is, bills and riders and co-signatures. Of course, paper is an instrument of contraction: its function is to reduce a territory of thought into language by providing a canvas, which is itself a materialization somewhat akin to the action of Schelling's God (who broke out of the rotary motion of pre-cosmic drive through the pronunciation of the Word). Its sterile movement, which the good citizen watches, as a passive spectator, is the humiliating result of a non-radical system of democracy; it is the price we pay when we vote and, incidentally, sign our political power over to the Budgeteers.
It is quite hilarious that elections take on the social importance that they do, since participation is a sign not of activism but of its disavowed opposite: de-activism. Not everyone realizes that the 'Door Close' button in elevators is useless: pushing it (whether once or five times) never speeds up the process of the door's actual closure. It exists for a reason though, as a placebo, to assuage our fears of helplessness, to provide another pointless lever to push. And so the lever of the ballot box, pulled once in November, too provides little comfort when the only game in town is the tediousness of the budget process: first a conservative dream, then a clever compromise, then a hard-won victory, never anything new.
---
*I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself? (Hamlet, 1.4)
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