DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: On how reflecting about a photograph led to reflecting about factories that supposedly no longer exist.

I used to love working on vintage scooters. I had several old and new scooters before moving to Korea. It’s something I always wanted to do and, when I was done with school, and so could afford it, I began making good on the desire. I ‘d buy an old scooter and try to fix it, work with it, make it better at the shops, ride around on it proudly; hang with other “vintage” scooterists. I loved riding in the foothills outside of Denver.

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Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)

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The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity—excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.

The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive ‘modernity’ as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well.

In this major new interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms—which can probably not be banished at this late date—helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.

I liked this book. I’m going to reread.

"Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a function of what he believes, it is because he does something else, which, still as a function of the same idealist scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his head as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts according to these other ideas, as a man who is either ‘inconsistent’ (‘no one is willingly evil’) or cynical, or perverse.

In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the ‘ideas’ of a human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends him other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does perform."

Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)

(Source: ghostdad-ebooks, via adornoble)

Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign (Quentin Meillassoux)

always too much to read.

"

The point of departure of my reflections is the following: every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

The documents available in literary works are few, for the reason that this purely physical contraction into oneself already bears the mark of a certain negativism. Also, in many respects, a corner that is “lived in” tends to reject and restrain, even to hide, life. The corner becomes a negation of the Universe. In one’s corner one does not talk. to oneself. When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners, we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts. This being the case, why describe the geometry of such indigent solitude? Psychologists and, above all, metaphysi­cians, will find these circuits of topo-analysis quite useless. They know how to observe “uncommunicative” natures directly. They do not need to have a sullen person in a corner described to them as “cornered.” But it is not easy to efface the factors of place. And every retreat on the part of the soul possesses, in my opinion, figures of havens. That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to be examined. To withdraw into one’s corner is undoubtedly a meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream.

To begin with, the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly—immobility. It is the sure place, the place next to my immobility. The cor­ner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door. It will serve as an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside, which I shall discuss in a later chapter.

Consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner produces a sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates immobility. An imaginary room rises up around our bodies, which think that they are well hidden when we take refuge in a corner. Already, the shadows are walls, a piece of furniture constitutes a barrier, hangings are a roof. But all of these images are over-imagined. So we have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space of our being. In L’etat d’ebauche, Noel Arnaud writes:

Je suis l’espace où je suis
(I am the space where I am.)

This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreci­ated than in a comer.

"

Gaston Bachelard from “Corners” Poetics of Space

"

The Need to Write

The need to write is linked to the approach toward this point at which nothing can be done with words. Hence the illusion that if one maintained contact with this point even as one came back from it to the world of possibility, “everything” could be done, “everything” could be said. This need must be suppressed and contained. If not, it becomes so vast that there is no more room or space for its realization. One only begins to write when, momentarily, through a ruse, through a propitious burst of energy, or through life’s distractions, one has succeeded in evading this impulse which remote control of the work must constantly awaken and subdue, protect and avert, master and experience in its unmasterable force. This operation is so difficult and dangerous that every writer and every artist is surprised each time he achieves it without disaster. And no one who has looked the risk in the face can doubt that many perished silently. It is not that creative resources are lacking — although they are in any event insufficient — but rather that the force of the writing impulse makes the world disappear. Then time loses its power of decision; nothing can really begin.

The work is the pure circle where, even as he writes the work, the author dangerously exposes himself to, but also protects himself against, the pressure which demands that he write. Hence — in part at least — the prodigious, the immense joy which, as Goethe says, is that of a deliverance: a tête-à-tête with the solitary omnipotence of fascination which one has faced resolutely, without betraying or fleeing it, but without renouncing one’s own mastery either. This deliverance, it is true, will have consisted of enclosing oneself outside oneself.

It is regularly said of the artist that he finds in his work a convenient way of living while withdrawing from life’s responsibilities. He is said to protect himself from the world where action is difficult by establishing himself in an unreal world over which he reigns supreme. This is, in fact, one of the risks of artistic activity: to exile oneself from the difficulties of time and of active pursuits in time without, however, renouncing the comfort of the world or the apparent easiness of pursuits outside of time. The artist often seems a weak being who cringes within the closed sphere of his work where, speaking as master and acting without any obstacles, he can take revenge for his failures in society.

"

Maurice Blanchot from The Space of Literature

dagNotes: On Literary Theory and Application

Literary theory is often treated as but should not be a thing one studies and then applies to literary texts like a sticker to a car’s rear bumper. Theory does not adhere to literary text as some sort of useful appendage or locating device that permits readers-in-the-know to get something inexperienced readers will overlook.

Literary theory is something that works to assemble a text for a specific use in culture, politics, society, discourse, simple conversation.

I always took theory much more seriously than many of my literature-student colleagues who seemed most apt at reading blurbs about theorists than they did at reading theoretical texts. Literary conferences are always stocked with panels where authors of papers apply fragments of theoretical work to favorite texts as if the theory were a fashionable band-aid, as if paragraphs within theoretical works were existent outside of the unified work. The papers act to distinguish their authors rather than to implement the text in a useful manner within wider discourse.

Here, application does not mean applying to theory something with my name on it. Application should help me understand relevance, as I wrote above, help me assemble a text for a specific purpose.

Deleuze, like Nietzsche and Derrida, is often abused by literary theorists who carelessly littler their papers with out-of-context quotes that appear to relate to often common interpretations of literary texts. How easily this one that I posted earlier and was thinking about when writing this note is misused:

“Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle the assemblages. The two are the same thing.”—Deleuze and Guattari. “Immanence and Desire” Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature

"Why is … power … so readily accepted? In a society such as ours … devices of power are … numerous … visible … reliable … more imaginative … devious and supple …

[P]ower …
[P]ower …
[T]he [L]aw of [I]nterdiction[.]

Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self-evident: power … power … abuse … power … those whom it dominates … the latter … desire … freedom … Power … a pure limit … form …."

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (via emptylight)

(Source: seraphmachine, via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)

gramscitendency:

Gramsci: Everything that Concerns People (1987), made for Channel4 (Scotland) by Mike Alexander and Douglas Eadie, with Tom Nairn as script consultant.

(via e-schatology)

"I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of this particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social infor­mation have had, in one way or another, to preserve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy, are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents for our historical amnesia."

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

I never was comfortable with Jameson’s formulation of experience in capitalist society; never could articulate my discomfort, though. I made an attempt in one of my doctoral comp essays after reading his Singular Modernity. I almost got it out, then, but our department Modernist and Jameson scholar was not at all happy that I made what amounted to not much more than an accusation in passing within my answer to a different question. I only have a draft to that answer handy, so I can’t really go back to that exam. I can see how Jameson is answering Fukuyama’s argument about the end of history here, but my problem is with the plural possessive our:

I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social infor­mation have had, in one way or another, to preserve.

I don’t like the way much theory assumes a unified theory of representing history exists that fairly represents our society, our culture, our experiences. There’s no excuse for this kind a master narrative in theoretical discourse, especially about late capitalism and the postmodern. Who does Jameson think he’s addressing with this OUR anyway?

"Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato’s cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach."

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

I’m rereading four Jameson books this week. Join in. Have to get away from the parodies of authentic personal experience on my dashboard. Back to theory. Poetry, too.

(via dagseoul)

"Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject: it can no longer look directly out of its eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato’s cave, trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ which springs from the shock of grasping that confinement and of realizing that, for whatever peculiar reasons, we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach."

Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

I’m rereading four Jameson books this week. Join in. Have to get away from the parodies of authentic personal experience on my dashboard. Back to theory. Poetry, too.

Pritch, if you’re lurking, what do you think Jameson meant by referring to the poetry of the 1960s, by which I believe he means Creeley’s generation, post high modernism, as “talky”. I first read this esay in 1992, only four years after it first appeared. I forgot about the small comment and am not at all clear about whether it’s a slight or not. Should add: I believe it is a slight. I’d like to know what he’s getting at. This is why I’m revisiting his early and later work.

"There is in fact no event which is not in one sense anecdotal. Except in idealist historiography, even the appearance of a Spinoza or a Marx has ‘historical scope’ only through and for the (more or less distant) time which will heed their thoughts. Otherwise, it may even be the repression of their thought which constitutes history.

Furthermore, have ‘structural relations’ ever been modified by ‘a fact’? The most conscious of revolutions have so far modified them only very imperfectly. Not to speak of techniques. Papin ‘sees’ the power of steam, and Watt tames it, but his ‘innovation’ must be ‘implanted’ in order to become a true ‘force of production’. Amongst other factors, in one limited world. Where is the ‘break’?

Professional sensationalists like to multiply ‘events’. ‘Historic facts’ are all the rage on a day of lunar landings or barricades. It may be objected: exactly, the theorist has to choose. But choose what? The housewife who cannot or will not pay ten francs a kilo for beans, or the one who does buy, the conscript who joins his draft, or the one who refuses? They are all acting ‘historically’. Conjunctures depend on them, they are reinforcing or undermining structures. However imperfect its interpretation may still be, it is the objectification of the subjective through statistics which alone makes materialist history possible—the history of masses, that is both of massive, infrastructural facts, and of those human ‘masses’ which theory has to ‘penetrate’ if it is to become an effective force.

One is led to wonder if the theorist of the concept of history has not spent so much energy attacking a type of history that is now outmoded, that he has unwittingly become its prisoner. Having allowed history to be divided up among ‘specialists’ he then sets out in search of ‘historical facts’ and ‘events’. An event certainly has its importance, above all its place—fortuitous or integrable—within the series of which it forms a part. But although he will mistrust the excesses of the ‘anti-eventful’ historiography which has transformed historical practice in the last forty years, the Marxist historian remains loyal to its central principle, which was that of Marx. He can have nothing to do, even verbally, with the myth of ‘the days which made France’ or even with ‘the days that shook the world’. Eisenstein’s October ends with the declaration: ‘The revolution is over’. We know very well that it was just beginning."

— “Marxist History, A History in the Making Towards a Dialogue With Althusser” by Pierre Vilar, from The New Left Review, July-August 1973.

"On the contrary what we must strive to think out historically (if we want to ‘understand the facts’ as Marx likes to say) is how a theory, because it is partial (the theory of one level of one mode of production) yet claims universality, may serve simultaneously as a practical and as an ideological tool, in the hands of one class, and for one period of time. This time has to be ‘constructed’, it is true, since it consists of alternating defeats and successes, movements of pessimism and optimism, moments when even appearances (profits) have to be camouflaged, and moments when the reality itself (surplus value) can be exalted, if only when it is rediscovered during phases of expansion, as investment, as the basis of enlarged reproduction. But what matters most is the perception of what is invariably disguised, because it is given the status of an untouchable hypothesis—the equivalent of landed property for the physiocrats,which for the capitalist mode of production is: (i) the private appropriation of the means of production; (ii) the determination of value by the market.

Once these ‘relations of production’ are taken for granted, there is of course no reason why one may not theorize effectively on the economic level or elucidate the ‘economic history’ of the lands and epochs where such relations have prevailed. But this is just why the historian who wants to be a Marxist will refuse to confine himself within ‘economic history’ (except to study this or that case empirically). I have said on other occasions and I will maintain that so-called ‘quantitative histories’ are nothing but retrospective econometrics, and that the ‘New Economic History’ cannot measure the realm of Clio. As Colin Clark has stated, history stands ‘higher up’ in the hierarchy of the sciences than economics, because it contains the latter. Fidelity to Marx demands that one add: and because it cannot be divided."

“Marxist History, A History in the Making Towards a Dialogue With Althusser” by Pierre Vilar, from The New Left Review, July-August 1973.

"The trade of history has something in common with the detergent industry: in both, novelty is frequently passed off as real innovation. But there is also adifference: in the former business, brand-names are very poorly protected. Any-body can call himself a historian. Anybody can add ‘Marxist’ to the title if he sees fit. Anybody can call anything he likes ‘Marxist’. Nevertheless, if there is one thing more difficult and rare than to become a historian, it is to be a Marxist historian. For the term ought to imply the strict application of an elaborate theoretical mode of analysis to the most complex of all scientific subject-matters: the social relationships among men and their modalities of change. One may even wonder if the high standards of this definition have ever been met."

“Marxist History, A History in the Making Towards a Dialogue With Althusser” by Pierre Vilar, from The New Left Review, July-August 1973.