The Mourning Cloak

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • Lifework: That Zone of Indetermination

    Works Reviewed: David Kishik. The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.

    “I was not entirely surprised to discover that Wittgenstein and Agamben, my “philosophical parents” to whom I have dedicated my first two books, happened to be born on the same day as my actual mother and father. This book is dedicated to my parents who gave me what philosophy cannot.” – David Kishik.

    It is a rare thing when a book’s dedication can serve as a guide to its deployment. In The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics, however, David Kishik makes just such a gesture. Through the combination of biographical research and textual analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s work a picture emerges of a life infused and transformed by philosophy. It is not a biographical work in the sense that it presents an image of “the great man in his study,” but instead a working out of Agamben’s philosophy of life through the lens of the events which gave that philosophy its shape and its trajectory. Life is made in speech, says Agamben; “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” (7) Kishik argues that the success or failure of his own book, dedicated as it is to Agamben’s philosophy of life, should be measured through “its ability to lead the reader to imagine a form of life, by its capacity to clarify how his way of thinking points toward a way of living.” (3)

    At the heart of Kishik’s work lies the expressed desire to rework the genre of philosophical biography so that the philosophical subject becomes the subject of philosophy, or, put differently so that the thought of the thinker becomes an illumination of their life. Perhaps what Kishik sets out to do could be described as a secularized hagiography, not in the pejorative sense that it is unduly adulating, but in the sense that the lives of saints were meant as windows or icons which pointed towards a form or way of life. It must, of course, be admitted that for Kishik, as for Agamben, indeterminacy seems to play a far greater role than it does for the saints, yet perhaps this is only a reflection of the idioms of our time.

    Despite the frequent use of concepts like indeterminacy and emergent, Kishik’s begins his narrative at a very specific time inn Agamben’s life; 1968. In 1968 Agamben had the opportunity to tell Henry Kissinger off – a small victory, no doubt, but one which we may smile at anyway – and to study with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s influence on Agamben hangs like a heavy cloud throughout the book; indeed Kishik’s endeavour to weave life and philosophy together is in large part a riposte to Heidegger’s famous contempt for the historical and personal context of a philosophy, summed up in his comment that “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.” Kishik reads this statement as a somewhat ironic rebuttal of the opposition between reason and spirit, and finds some truth in it. It is clear, however, that Kishik finds the ethical impulse in Heidegger to be unbalanced or missing, or perhaps too wedded to a determinate form of power over life, rather than the more indeterminate power of life.

    The focus on indeterminacy leads Kishik to produce a rather vague political outline, in which Benjamin’s concept of divine violence – that is a violence completely outside the law, is somewhat astoundingly connected to the city of New York under the perverse title of The Manhattan Project. Kishik, apparently intends to connect this with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and is intent on making a statement about an iconoclastic anti-state human politics. Is he simply unaware that he is referencing an appalling, and state-sanctioned, violence against life? The superficial dichotomy between state and humanity, which is in Agamben, though treated with considerable more depth, is a blemish on this work.

    Another weakness lies in Kishik’s assesment of religion. He writes: “The rise in modernity of forms of life that are not necessarily grounded in religious convictions is still probably one of the most momentous political events in human history.” A careful reader of Agamben, who has analyzed modern secular concepts as precisely displaced  theological ones, should offer a more historically and philosophically nuanced presentation of the intersection of religion and politics. In the end, perhaps, Kishik does not fully escape the temptations of biography or hagiography, the temptation to allow the reference to an actual human presence to substitute for rigorous conceptual analysis. Despite its flaws, however, Kishik’s work is an insightful and engaging companion to Agamben’s lifework.

  • From the Museum of Abandoned Ideals to Utopia.

    Works Reviewed: Slavoj Zizek & Srecko Horvat. What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

    In the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done, published in 1902, Vladimir Lenin presciently draws a link between “Economism” and terrorism. He chastises those who are fixated on the spontaneity of mass-movements and action, even to the point of advocating terror as a means of “exciting the working-class movement and giving it a strong impetus.” “Are there not,” he asks sardonically, “enough outrages committed in Russian life without special ‘excitants’ having to be invented?” The “Economists”, on the other hand, recommend the apparently more gentle, if less exciting, approach of “lending the economic struggle itself a political character.” What both groups studiously avoid is the organisation of comprehensive political agitation and analysis of their own activity in “political agitation and the organisation of political exposure.” One group goes off searching for artificial ‘excitants’ while the other insists upon talking about “demands.”

    “Concrete demands,” of course, is a euphemism for the types of demands which the economic elite is willing to accommodate. The two tracks identified by Lenin, that of the adventurer and that of the bureaucrat, are precisely what we have seen develop in the days and years following movements around the world, movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. The use of terrorist tactics are not limited to those who are granted the label; the American use of drone strikes is itself a significant act of terrorism. At this point we would be justified in speaking not of a “war on terror,” but of terrorist warfare, practiced by jihadists and corporatists alike. What is largely missing is the practice of sustained political agitation and truth-telling.

    It is to this dearth of political organization that Srecko Horvat and Slavoj Zizek turn to in What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. In the preface Horvat analyses the Hollywood treatment of the Occupy Wall Street movement as told through Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan, who had taken a plane to New York to film the Occupy protestors while his new Batman movie was under production, presents the choice as one between the existing order of power concentrated in the hands of the financial elite, represented by Batman, or in the brutal violence of Bane. It does not represent, notes Horvat, the conflict between the 1% and the 99%, but rather between one terror and another. It is the false choice between economism and terrorism; as though the huge global mobilization of 2011 could only end in the confirmation of the neoliberal order under Obama in America, the return of military rule to Egypt, or the instigation of Salafist terrorism. The problem, says Horvat, is that structures and organizations that can channel mass political energy and seriously challenge different power relations still need to be built.

    What Does Europe Want? offers itself as manifesto for the building of such structures and organizations. It is a manifesto of the political legacy of social democracy inn Europe, and a rallying cry to the active participation of the masses in politics. Composed not long before Syriza rose to power in Greece the book also contains two essays by Alexis Tsipras. Tsipras calls for a new vision of the real economy in which the public good, environmental protection, and decent work conditions are held as the main criterion. “The future,” writes Tsipras, “does not belong to neoliberalism, bankers, and a few powerful multinational companies. The future belongs to the nation and society. It’s time to open the way for a democratic, socially cohesive and free Europe. Because this is the viable, realistic, and feasible solution to exit the current crisis.” (xiv)

    Tsipras has no illusions about the difficulties that face this political undertaking. Nor do Horvat and Zizek. The generalized European model, says Tsipras, was created not to save Greece but to destroy it. “Europe’s future is already planned and it envisages happy bankers and unhappy societies.” (xi) Save us from the saviours, writes Zizek, noting that it is a mistake to view the Greek crisis as a humanitarian crisis. “The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle because it is our struggle too.” (89)

    Depictions in the media of Greece’s current situation studiously avoid any indications of solidarity across national lines. Greece, and the beleaguered Syriza, must face the European Union, but really the banks of Europe, alone. The future had already been decided, before Alexis Tsipras took power; it was and is a Europe where “monetarism, harsh austerity, and the demolition of the society will be the answer, no matter what the question might be.” (150) This set of ideals, however, will in the long-run mean the dissolution of European society and its political and moral degradation. Tsipras is right to say that Europe will either be democractic and social or it will no longer exist. There is a need, not only in Europe, for the revival of mass political movement, and of a utopian vision in politics which can challenge the life-threatening neoliberal idealism which currently holds sway in Europe, the U.S. and Canada. For this reason this is a book which deserves to be read.

     

     

  • Poisonous words.

    “Scripture is poison, so to the holy one. Only when it is translated back into oral use, the spoken word, can my stomach tolerate it.” – Franz Rosenzweig

    The ancient proscription of knowledge, of the knowledge especially of good and evil, falls heavy in our enlightened hears. Knowledge is our unqualified good, education the panacea by which the masses will become civilized. Civilized for what? Even the most unreflective of us knows that knowledge is bought at a terribly alienating price. The absolute moral standard, the unwavering law of good and evil snatches us inexorably from the naivety of our existence. Now, I cannot exist together with you in the simplicity of speech. Now, I must reflect, I have become a self, our unity has been torn asunder. You, and I, and between us this mediation – these Scriptures, this writing.

    Writing makes speech more difficult. Now I must translate back, from the deposits of history, from the vast stores of the dreams of others. Translate back into an idiom which can be understood, not by some absent other, but by the one to whom I speak. I must learn to speak again, not as one writes, but as I am. Already, in the silent spaces of my mind, I can hear the crafty serpents hissing, “you’re just practicing a metaphysics of presence; outdated, idolatrous.” It isn’t so. This desire for proximity, for closeness, for the physicality of the word is my deep desire as a man, a human being. Writing is lonely, infinite loneliness. It reveals already the loneliness of speech; in the delicate dialectics of presence and absence, of yearning and seeing. So, we will not condemn writing or disparage of education. But it must be made palpable. To constantly take medicine won’t do. The Scriptures are overwhelming. Holiness is overwhelming, my mere mortality cannot stand up under its sheer weight. Yet what use is all the knowledge in the world if my own soul becomes a paralyzed deadweight and I cannot speak to you.

    You will not surely die. The words of the serpent work their crafty magic. Immortality is promised, and indeed delivered, but only in a certain way; a disembodied way.

    The codex, unalterable and terrible, devastates me, creature that I am. Its permanence makes possible the diabolical evils of which I previously would be incapable of even imagining. The longevity of my sins, of my errors, must now outlast me. The weight of the risk I take in communicating of myself now increases, but it is increasingly unclear how the words of my heart and my mouth can go out to become productive and to live on in the hearts and minds of others. Without a community, without a friend, I would surely have no stake in language itself. The seriousness of this loss is easily perceived in contemporary discussions on “free speech.” What is typically meant is a speech that is free, not in the sense of freedom and authenticity, but free in that it is not carefully considered responsive and responsible speech. The permanence and anonymity of writing, of a disembodied textuality, whose repercussions in the world of flesh and blood are all too real and usually violent. The immortality that is offered in the textual fabric of civilization, and the end of life.

    The dream of redemption is ever-present. Even in the face of the terrors, and the horrors of history. In the face of the evolution of the craft of death there are signs of life. The poison of Scripture can, indeed must, be translated back into orality. We will learn, because we must, how to speak to one another. To do this we must ask difficult questions, ask them, especially, of each other. Thought cannot be the monologic stasis of a single self thinking itself into the world. The world; the community of human language, is already out there, and the thoughts and words that fill it take their place with respect to the complex ecology in which they abide and within the conversation of those living humans who populate this earth. The weight of words is a heavy burden, and if there is no certainty that they will not prove poisonous and vain then it would, perhaps, be better to be silent. But if our words are intimidating and oppressive, how much more terrifying our silences. After all, a complete refusal to engage in the compromised human world would not heal our deep and desperate need for communion.

    And healing is what we need.

  • War is war.

    Earlier today I suffered the weird experience of being drawn into the narrative drama of a newspaper article. The article was about Canadian military action against the Islamic State, and the pathos of Canada’s leaders struck me as viscerally believable. Citing the horrors of the Islamic State, one leader was quoted saying something like – “it’s not even about politics, it’s about humanitarian aid.” Humanitarian war was offered, and like a sap I fell for it. Only for an instant, and as I set the newspaper down I wondered how a visceral horror could so instantly be transformed into a full-fledged political agenda – one I could accept so easily and unquestioningly. The usual response to growing stupidity is to say that one is getting older and becoming a realist. That won’t cut the mustard with me, but I will say that my mind is weaker than I’d like it to be.

    The lesson, that we should all be learning, is that war is war. Humanitarian war is not a thing. If our nation goes to war this means we are sending our young men and women to kill people and to be killed. This is a serious matter, and if the leadership of this country is preparing to send young people into the line of fire they need to be very clear about what they are doing. To say that war is not political is to grossly misrepresent what is going on. War, as the saying goes, is politics by other means. To represent it as heroism is dishonest and manipulative. If Canada is going to war, then we should go to war with clear objectives and an exit strategy. Steps need to be taken with the goal of long-term stability in the region. Finally, beyond the military objectives, we need to be damned sure that we understand that war is about killing people. That killing is hard, and should be hard. Even when we think it may be necessary, we should never think that it is right.

  • Lacan against the 21st Century.

    Works Reviewed: Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue. Translated by Jason E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 82 pages.

    One does not necessarily expect a book about Jacques Lacan to be compulsively readable. Lacan was an enigmatic thinker; his use of language is alluring, though extremely difficult to follow. The appeal Lacan holds for, at least some, contemporary thinkers is also a cause for reflection, and occasional concern. Accusations of charlatanism hang heavy around Lacan, and, at the very least, an understanding of the relation the French psychoanalyst bears to that body of discourse marked Lacanian would be helpful in understanding its impact and importance. Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue presents a multifaceted portrait of Lacan’s life and thought. It traces two distinct encounters with Lacan and his thought and point to the importance of his thought for the problems of our age. And it is compulsively readable.

    Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco detail their own very different introductions to Lacan, and in these encounters a picture of the master emerges. Lacan is, indeed, a masterful figure for both Badiou and Roudinesco, but the mastery lies in the very tenacity of his thought and his refusal of ideology. That he is a master, moreover, means that his thought inspires enmity as well as discipleship and, perhaps, a certain creativity. This creativity is materialist, in its orientation to science, yet without foreclosing on the real of impossible discovery. The tension between philosophy and psychoanalysis is very much at play in Lacan’s thought; he struggles against philosophy precisely as he seeks to incorporate it into the field of psychoanalysis. There is an openness in his thought which Badiou and Roudinesco find important and compelling. Roudinesco writes that he “opposed every form of identitarian closure that denies the alterity that constitutes us and he opposed the behaviourism and cognitivism that have reduced man to his naturality..”(29) Lacan, and here Badiou echoes her sentiments, would have stood against the stupidity that overwhelms us; the apolitical fetishization of security, the extreme medicalization of the symptoms of human subjects, and the mediatization of communication to the detriment of knowledge.

    It is in their commitment to the open character of Lacan’s thought, much more than any position of mastery he might occupy, that brings the intensity that makes this little book so readable. Badiou and Roudinesco are convinced that the fate of Lacan is bound up with the fate of psychoanalysis, which is itself bound up with the fate of civilization itself. “Wanting to eradicate Freud or Lacan”, writes Badiou, “is to go after the very concept of the modern subject. And if that is abolished, the door is open to reactionary ideologies of the worst sort.” (67) Lacan, as the thinker who synthesizes the formula “never compromise your desire” with “do your duty” seems poised as one the few thinkers who might help us think the meaning of authority in the spirit of a free and open inquiry.

    Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue is part history and part manifesto. It is both biography and apologetics, and makes a powerful case for the continued importance of the Lacanian legacy as a powerful antidote to the foreclosure of thought and the end of science.

  • These Neurobiological Times and Our Freudian Future

    Works Reviewed: Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 276 pages.

    The age of neurobiology has, apparently, arrived. Bookshelves groan, figuratively for the most part, under titles such as The Brain that Changes Itself, Brain Rules, and Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple. The authority of neuroscience has been harnessed into such a diverse range of causes as the fervent opposition to religion (a la Sam Harris), the proof of life after death in Eben Alexander’s The Proof of Heaven, and the critique of internet technology in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Neuroscience also provides a conceptual framework for more colourful titles, including Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Literature, too, is well within the province of neurobiology since, after all, Proust was a Neuroscientist. In the television series Alphas the language of neuroscience, rather than genetics, is used to account for the superhuman abilities of its protagonists. The denizens of the self-help genre now frequently include references to neurology or fMRI images in a trend which one reviewer of popular neuroscience books scathingly labelled “brain porn.”(Steven Poole, New Statesman)

    There have surely been many legitimate advances in our understanding of the human brain over the past years. To sort out the pseudo-scientific from the legitimate claims, and thereby to assess what neuroscience can actually say about human existence, requires thoughtful reflection. It is this task that Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou set for themselves in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. As they draw from the critical wellsprings of the Continental tradition of European philosophy and psychoanalysis they argue that the scope and method of these disciplines are themselves radically challenged, though not necessarily undone, by the findings of contemporary neuroscience. Critical engagement is imperative, particularly given the lack of attention typically paid to the sciences of the mind within the discourses of psychoanalyis and Continental philosophy. Johnston writes:

    Nowadays, it simply isn’t true that one has to sell one’s philosophical or pscyhoanalytic soul in its entirety in order to dance with the neurobiological devil…In fact, over the past half century, scientific matters concerning neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, epigenetics, and newly proposed revisions to Darwinian depictions of evolution, among other topics, have destroyed the caricature of biological approaches to subjectivity upon which the ever more-hollow excuses of a tired old antinaturalism rely, caricatures depicting such approaches as essentially deterministic and reductive.

    Johnston and Malabou contend that developments in the neurosciences do change the way we conceptualize the human subject, that is, the self. This changed understanding relates to a redefinition of affective or emotional life. The brain is increasingly understood, not as a logical processing machine, but as the centre of a dynamic, plastic, and inherently emotional life. Malabou identifies it as the center of “a new libidinal economy‘ and argues that a new conception of affects is emerging. The issue, for Malabou, is whether this new conception will lead to a genuinely different approach to emotions, passions, and feelings. She stages this as a problematic between of knowing whether emotions and affects are to be considered, in the traditional way, as rooted in the “process of auto-affection of the subject” or whether the idea of the emotional brain actually challenges this notion in favour of “an originary deserted subject?” Noting that Continental philosophy, particularly deconstruction, and psychoanalysis have already posed significant challenges to the notion of a subject that is fully present to itself Malabou goes on to ponder whether the findings of neuroscience confirm this conviction or shift it to entirely new ground. Her conviction is quite clearly that a radical change has occurred, although she does not for that reason jettison the work and intuition of her own philosophical tradition and training.

    Both Malabou and Johnston seek to triangulate philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, and to encourage their readers to reconsider their sense of each of these fields and the possible connections and alliances between them. It is an interdisciplinary work, and one that is clearly regarded by the authors as a preliminary gesture towards reconciliation of fields of study that have typically been characterized by isolation and polemic. Seizing on current interest in a dynamic emotional conception of the brain Malabou and Johnston reconsider the limitations and potential of psychoanalytic work and philosophical wisdom to speak about the emotional life of human subjects.

    For Malabou this journey centres around the affect of wonder, and the possibility of its loss. Wonder is first among the passions of the soul, for, “without wonder the subject wouldn’t be able to have a feeling of itself.” What then, questions Malabou, are we to make of the claim of neurobiologists that brain damage can cause the subject to become completely detached from their own affective life; to lose their sense of wonder while continuing to be biologically alive? The destructive potential of trauma leads Malabou to form her conception of hetero-heteroaffection, that is, a notion of the subject as radically absent to itself.

    She does this through a philosophical genealogy that traces through Rene Descartes and Jacques Derrida to the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, then loops back around through Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Damasio again. Descartes and Spinoza are thinkers whom Damasio has himself written on extensively, with Descartes playing the role of the “metaphysician of presence” and Spinoza the “protoneurobiologist.” Derrida and Deleuze are brought in to add some depth to the philosophical history, as well as to avoid a too neat and easy packaging of Descartes and Spinoza. Malabou also contends that although both Derrida and Deleuze, in very different ways, challenged the notion of a subject that is present to itself, they did not envisage the possibility of a complete emotional deprivation that leaves the first-person perspective intact. It is this destructive plasticity, the potential loss of an absolute destruction and loss of a certain part of our psychic and emotional life that drives Malabou’s work and her challenge to traditional philosophic concepts and the limitations of psychoanalytic practice. At the same time, she is hopeful that the time has come in which a new materialist philosophy can be constructed, and bridges built between the humanities and biological sciences.

    Johnston, for his part, focuses on the affect of guilt and its relation to the unconscious. Through a close reading of Freud and Jacques Lacan, he contends that, although muted and ambiguous, there are indications in both of these thinkers towards a construction of unconscious feelings or misfelt feelings. Johnston contends that guilt is a good candidate for being to practical philosophy what wonder is to theoretical philosophy, that is, “a foundational effect that is a catalyst for the deliberations, decisions, and deeds of concern to philosophy’s prescriptions in addition to its wonder-driven descriptions.”(77)

    It is not, however, for reasons of practical philosophy that Johnston pays attention to the phenomenon of guilt, but rather because it is the one affect which Freud refers to when speculating about the possibility of unconscious affects. Still, the distance between theoretical and practical philosophy is suggestive of the distance between Malabou’s challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalysis and Johnston’s endeavours to show the therapeutic viability of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly as interpreted by Lacan. While both Freud and Lacan appear to categorically rule out the notion of unconscious affects there remains a certain ambiguity around the feeling of guilt, particularly in Freud’s work. Through this ambiguity Johnston works to develop a conception of “misfelt feelings”, that is, that the emotions lie, and not only by attaching themselves to inappropriate signifiers. It seems that the subtle inextricability of the emotions, language, and biological being is at stake here, and Johnston makes a powerful case that an encounter between current findings in neuroscience and the theoretical discoveries of psychoanalysis can provide a basis for a rich and dialectically nuanced account of emotional life.

    Self and Emotional Life stakes, in fairly bold tones, a provisional encounter between disciplines which often meet under fairly antagonistic terms. They manage to avoid sectarian posturing, for the most part, although the book is clearly written for a readership with at least some background in Continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and developments in neuroscience.  Finally beyond the general difficulty of learning the concepts the work is plagued by an irregular syntax, particularly in the section by Johnston, which makes reading rather more difficult than necessary. Overall, however, it remains an important work in providing resources and a framework wherein the findings of neuroscience can be reasonably assessed and interpreted.

  • End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca

    End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca.

  • Jerusalem; Fictional and Comparative Geography

    I shall not cease from Mental Fight  

    Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, 

    Till we have built Jerusalem 

    In England’s green & pleasant land. – William Blake 

    The first time I heard the anthem Jerusalem, in an Anglican church in Canada, I was struck and somewhat embarrassed by the incongruity of these words. What resonance could such imagery have in a country where the violent constructions of the colonial past were all too well known. This was Canada, not England. At the same time the resolute defiance of progress seemed to offer something else, clearly this was not a simple narrative of nationalism. What intrigued me most of all was the sense of a thrice-displaced geography. The industrial vision of England had been exported wholesale to North America, the theme of a land ravaged by the onslaught of progress, those Satanic Mills, fit us well. We could echo, too, the ancient dreams, outside the annals of history, in which the blessed feet caressed our shores. Unbound from time and place a memory beyond memory visits us in the midst of our squalour. We become aware that our geography, the places we inhabit, has an existence that vastly extends the narrow partisan and nationalist metaphors to which we subject it and ourselves. 

    The triple displacement is important because it means that the attachment to a particular patch of ground, say England, is imbued with dignity and yet prevented from the seat of full honour and authority. It is Jerusalem, the city of Peace, which is upheld. Jerusalem is not exactly the city in imagination; it cannot simply be constructed on the basis of our wills or the power of our dreams. Yet, in a way it is a city whose contours are open; a city made real in mind and action. 

    Ben Okri evokes Blake’s poem in his own poem Mental Fight to the end of a release from the powerful enchantments of destruction to which we have been subject so long. Our beginnings, our rituals, our stories are there to illuminate and guide us through the brevity of our being. Yet within these stories, these placings of ourselves, the temptation is always to territorialize. The beauty of special piece of earth,  the one in which we dwell, is torn from its reality and set up against us as a metaphor for destruction. To protect these ideas we lash out in real violence. Can this violence be unlearned through the practices wherein we learn our displaced and multiform geographies? Learn to love our place in the world without fear or condescension? 

  • Practicing Emotion: Breakfast with William James.

    Works Reviewed: William James The Heart of William James. Edited by Robert Richardson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. 334 pages.

    Pragmatism. Conceived as a political option it could suggest a callous cynicism. In the spiritual register an agnosticism. An agnosticism, in fact, of many kinds that weds the uncertainties of experience to a thoughtless optimism. The latter is certainly one of the legacies of pragmatism, whose capitalization, in the form of the self-help industry, is well-known. The former consists in the deployment of a vague and nebulous hope whose paradoxical achievement is the perpetuity of an unchanging horizon. Hope, as Francis Bacon said, is a good breakfast but a poor supper. If we live now in the twilight of the world what can be said for hope as a bedtime snack? To pragmatically strive towards an indifferent or disappearing future seems a right fool’s errand.

    Why publish a collection of William James’ essays now? And why read it? The Heart of William James whose very title smells of emotionalism, commemorates the hundredth anniversary of James’ death. A hundred years of being dead is no lively cause for celebration unless, of course, the dead can speak to us. Not necromancy, but an enlivening communion of ideas and voices. James can still speak, quite powerfully, and reveal to us that spirited acquiescence, lacking in practice and thoughtfulness if not effort, is not pragmatism at all. At the very least it is not the best face of pragmatism. Despair is an ugly mug, but false hope is a thin mask. We can see right through it if we are looking. What James can teach us, today, is how to look.

    We live in an age of dangerous sentimentality. The fact that a word like hope can be used to feed spurious nationalist dreams or the vacuous fantasy of an achieved globality is a testament to that. A good question for us is “What is an Emotion?” The book begins with James’ essay of that name. Our preparedness to act in the world demands a certain level of understanding. If are actions are fuelled by our emotions, or arise out of them, we should be clear about what that means. James’ novel suggestion is that the body is itself emotional. Our bodies respond to perceived changes in our environment, and our feelings respond to those changes. James here draws heavily on the language of Darwinism and neurology to make an ancient point about emotion as mental state integrally connected to the discipline of the body. Standard emotional responses can be challenged, not from an abstract set of categories, but through a mindful practice of disciplining our responses to external stimuli.

    This, of course, raises the possibility of determinism, of a genetic, neurological, or some other order. James’ counter to this in “The Dilemma of Determinism” is to champion chance, as liberty, and, as Richardson suggests in his introduction to the chapter, as a gift more like grace than anything else. A pragmatists’s answer this affirmation of freedom even if it might not be so. Unsatisfying, perhaps, and altogether too cheerful. James makes much of the willed perception of reality. Belief is what holds our attention. We attend to those things we believe in, and because we attend to them we believe in them. “Belief and attention are the same fact”, writes James. Thus belief is tied to feeling, though it is important to note that James does some serious work on emotional life that does prevent sentimentalism. Though James does make reference to belief as the emotion of conviction we could still argue that rather more is going on than simple enthusiasm. How much more, of course, is questionable. At the end of the day the focus on the individual will seems rather overplayed. Perhaps this effortfullness is the true legacy of pragmatism.

    Yet, just at the point where we might be inclined to think of James as a self-help guru we are served up with a delicious side of proto-Freudian thought. In “The Hidden Self” James explores dissociative personality disorder and makes it abundantly clear that the self is a rather larger reality than the “ordinary” experience of consciousness suggests. In “Habit” we are brought back to a line of psychosomatic argumentation present in the first essay, this time with a more practical aim. Habit is, for James, the basic structural unit of mental life. However madly our consciousness may extend there are physical linkages to our daily practices. Habit is the “great fly-wheel of society” and the aim, for education, is to make the nervous system an ally instead of an enemy.

    To do this requires the assistance of “The Will.” In this essay James provides a pedagogical framework for the disciplining of the will without the breaking of the spirit. The will is a delicate instrument and force cannot harness it productively. Focussing on the positive is the reductionist version of the insight here, but James was dealing with a society wherein many where the connoisseurs of guilt. Not so different, perhaps, from our own day. In “The Gospel of Relaxation” James calls to attention the work of the monk Brother Lawrence who, though he had a strong aversion to kitchen work, came to love it through a steady practice of mindfulness.

    “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant” turn our attention towards more existential questions. The former urges a practice of reserve in pronouncing judgement, forbidding us to pronounce on “the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own” while the latter provides a general rubric for the meaning of life. “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing – the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however o live with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”(164) Here, in the phrase unhabitual ideal, we find a saving grace. The possibility to live for an idea makes of James a philosopher and not a peddler of stale ethics. This philosophical bent is further expounded in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” where James outlines pragmatism as a philosophy of action. The political lessons of this philosophy are driven home in “The Phillipine Tangle”, an  anti-imperialist letter that appeared in the Boston Evening News on March 1,1899, and in the final essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” This last takes James lessons on habit to their extreme, arguing that the warlike spirit is best undone not through repression but through a redirection of its aim. In between these essays James in “The Sick Soul” speaks of religion as a cry for help. Here James acknowledges the darker, more tortured side of human psychology and the need for confession and deliverance. In “The Ph.D. Octopus” he bemoans the academic isolation in America in which honorifics are valued above learning. We are then brought to several ruminations on the nature of Consciousness.

    Throughout the work we are led through discussions occurring at once in the speculative and practical registers. There is a playfulness and openness in James’ thought that holds great promise. Philosophy is to be useful, not so as to be harnessed to certain material ends, but in order to live a fuller life. To live, however, is not merely to exist, but to reflect in a way that changes us and contributes to our well-being. We can see, in James’ writings, a trajectory that leads towards a narrow individualism, for example, in the focus he places on individual will and practice. It is important, however, that James was still engaged in a practice of at least a somewhat egalitarian education, and that the fact that emotion degenerated into sentiment can hardly be attributed to his practice of philosophy. Written at a time when hope still seemed real James offers real lessons in perspicuity and the practice of emotional thinking.

  • Refiguring Thought: Aesthetic Reflections.

    Works reviewed: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,2012.pp 593.

    This is the inaugural essay for this site of, hopefully, Useful Illusions. The rest of what is gathered here is the detritus of a previous project. That project was poetically characterized by a phrase, “closing time in the gardens of the West.” A hint of nostalgia too timorous to sustain an encounter, whether public or personal, aesthetic or political, beyond the most fleeting of glances. Oscillating between excuse and accusation, I could not claim, for myself, any but the simplest of failures. Nostalgia and regret simply do not offer a political vision. What they do offer, a paltry solace for the timid heart, is in the end rather poisonous. This sort of knowledge tree won’t feed anybody.

    I refuse,however, to regard what I have written as a simple useless wreckage. After all, I cannot pretend now to possess a clarity of thought or fixity of purpose which I had previously not known. Past missteps may be retrod, even after careful consideration, and newer journeys prove equally fruitless. The task of learning to regard the past, especially the past of the European Enlightenment, whose shadow is felt not only in the West, is a constant discipline. Mistakes are a part of learning, particularly if learning is to extend beyond canned repetition. Repetition, to be sure, but with palpable difference. Not necessarily an endless deferral of meaning, for why should the carrot that leads us into madness be privileged as meaning? The difficulty of this discipline lies precisely in the need for a maturity that knows both its boundaries and their fluidity. Maturity is not reached in a single bound and precious isolation is seldom conducive to robust growth. Withholding judgement can occasionally be strategic, but one’s hand is always forced one way or another. The question that remains is with what kind of clarity and conviction we proceed, and what ways we can discern wherein to cultivate an aptitude for the clarity and conviction that will carry us forward into freedom. Old idols don’t have to be resurrected; the perpetual hold they have on us is familiar enough. Familiar because unexamined, perpetual because unchallenged. The abstract mathematical spirit coolly considering the world is one attempt to circumvent the problem of being beings in thought. The pragmatism of desires is an equally unsatisfactory answer to the thinking person. What claim do desires lay to the foundation or direction of existence? The question of desire has to be raised, in all its various guises, not only to have done with the spectre of essentialism, but more pointedly to keep the pathways of knowing legitimately active. Desire is a question not an answer. If we are driven to do all that we do we certainly cannot know it, but pragmatic acquiescence is emphatically not produced here. Limitation is not intimate with itself at a metaphysical level, if it were we would know what we do not know. In any case there is a way forward; we can question our desires and learn to read them more skilfully.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is a preliminary lesson in such reading; a handbook of sorts.This impressive text gathers some useful formulations for navigating the debris of globality. “Globalization,” says Spivak, “takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.Information command has ruined knowing and reading.Therefore we don’t really know what to do with information.”(1) The inability to seriously read and know, not only texts but also ourselves and others, is bound up in a bi-fold legacy of the Enlightenment; doubt and the aesthetic. The top-down approach of knowledge management, implicit in the idea of a total globalization, offers little in the way of navigating the uneven, volatile, and “only apparently accessible contemporaneity” of the actual world.(2) The catchphrase of the day, as Spivak points out, is sustainability.Desire is left unquestioned, even though global contemporaneity requires an “epistemological change that will rearrange desires.”(2)

    Spivak traces the intellectual heritage of the propensity to manage and balance as a displaced version of Schiller’s transformation of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. There is still something in Kant’s thought that, if not exactly hopeful, can be of use. The goal, however, is not to repeat the temptation to resolve the contradictions left open in his thought, but to cultivate an openness towards making other, perhaps more fruitful, mistakes. A double bind, rather than a polarity or resolution, is the guiding heuristic of this text.

    Learning to live with contradictory instructions is the double bind that grounds the introduction of the book, which proceeds by way of tracing the trajectory of proper names Kant-Schiller-Marx-de Man. These names are metonyms of epochal changes, for Spivak, and the lesson she wishes to draw from each of these names and the changes they signal is how to productively undo the aesthetic legacy of the Enlightenment “without accusation, without excuse, with a view to use.”(1) The language of double bind is drawn from Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind wherein Bateson attempted to use the concept to understand childhood schizophrenia qualitatively. Spivak brings this concept into a briefly outlined model with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an instrumentalized intellectual. The aesthetic education that can still be of some use is precisely an instrumentalized one, that is, an education that offers not the eloquence of abstract comprehension, but is worked out as a learned skill. A skill that requires careful listening and constantly questions deeply ingrained habits and the desires that produce them.

    The introduction of An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is intentionally dispirited. The body of the book is comprised of essays gathered over the past 23 years. Those essays narrate a variety of subjects, from tertiary education in India and issues of translation to Marxism and the works of Rabindrath Tagore. The theory of a double bind is read back into these essays as an ongoing conversation and reflection. The essays themselves often portray a certain sense of hopefulness which, Spivak suggests, is out of step with where we are at today. A false hope, perhaps overconfident, but also in some sense necessary. Spivak enjoins her reader not to despair but once again to learning to live with contradictory instructions. Not bi-polar, but at least uneven. An aesthetic education that has a geography, that abounds in mother-tongues.

    Spivak is rightly hesitant about what effect a book from an academic press could really make on such an educational endeavour. I echo those concerns, greatly compounded, about the directions of a blog, written in English. In what sense does this effort participate in the deep language learning necessary for reflexive awareness of the way we collectively organize our desires? How do I rather not fall into the purview of an unmediated cyber literacy as the greatest good. If the point is not guilt, however, but the cultivation of the aesthetic and ethical reflexes needed to teach subjects not only to play but to discover their own habits on the way to undoing them. Steps can be taken, not towards sustainability, but to a fuller understanding of being human that does not shy away from the wealth of language and misunderstanding. The Tower of Babel, says Spivak, is our refuge, though of course it is not the tower but the rich fallout of being that refuses to be marshalled to a narrow purposefulness. There is, at any rate, a kind of prayer that cuts far beyond the mantra of hope offered by those already in comfortable positions. The hope is not for a salvation from on high, not even a technological angel. Instead it is near at hand, a kingdom that is dreamt and built by the action and love of lost people in a wasted world. Yet, there is a learning that has to happen, an aesthetic education that trains people to live differently and for a different world. “What Marx left uncalculated,” writes Spivak,”was the epistemological burden of training the socialist subject.”(185) If the world is indeed to change for the better, then it must be seen differently.

    So we are led to a form of prayer that is also a work, and often, an apparent waste of time. “That any reader will waste their time to learn to parse the desires (not the needs) of collective examples of subalternity is my false hope,” Spivak writes at the end of her introduction. The book is littered with phrases like these -to waste time, productively undo, to make intended mistakes. Against the privileged flow of information as data, of capital unbound from labour, the faltering steps we must take to really learn to know is powerful medicine indeed.