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deconstructing criticism

4/3/2019

DECONSTRUCTING CRITICISM

According to Wikipedia, Gerard Manley Hopkins felt, that “everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape.” Inscape “is the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe ‘selves,’ that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness.” For Hopkins this instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it”
            I personally have a lot of problems with Hopkins’s ‘theologisation’ of what I think is otherwise a very interesting idea. I would also question – in the name of the Divine Jacques (Deridda of course!) – the stress on identity placed on the idea by Hopkins, although he does stress that this identity is dynamic rather than static.
            The idea of the individuality and inwardness implicit in the concepts of inscape and instress, is an important one, but it really has little to do with identity (Identities are always stable.) and all to do with the unstable play of differences which both underpin and at the same time subvert identities. (The mention of a ‘distinctive design’ is a giveaway surely.) Philosophically speaking, if you cannot integrate difference with identity you end up with something like a Platonic abstraction – which holds that everything in existence conforms to the idea of it and that idea is its ‘template’. I would suggest that the process whereby a thing arrives at its identity is more random and unstable than Hopkins – or Plato - gave it credit for. Identities depend on privileging the stability of The Logos at the expense of the unstable flux, which is its perpetual background. In truth, The Logos, arrives after the event, rather than before it; the ‘concept’ is secondary and a posteriori; what is primary – or a priori - is the flux which stimulates us to create all these logocentric categories in our somewhat futile attempts to render the flux intelligible.
            It goes without saying that some things have identities – not in themselves, but thanks to the words – or signs - we apply to things to distinguish them from other things. But the words themselves are simply conveniences and should not be confused with the things they refer to. Every single being in the universe is, of course, distinct from every other single being in the universe, irrespective of the class or category that we place them in to give them an identity, but these differences have little to do with identity as such, which is determined by imposing classes or categories onto them for our own linguistic convenience. Fido and Rover are both dogs, but that doesn’t mean they are the same dog. The word ‘dog’ or ‘canine’   flattens them out against a common background of other dogs and canines, robs them very much of their individuality and distinctive difference from one another and, indeed, from all other dogs and canines. We de-individuate things when we call them dogs - to which, of course, their identity is attached - and we do this because it would be very inconvenient for us not to.
            Without it, Fido and Rover would recede into the flux of unnamed Being itself and become part of the buzzing, blooming confusion of everything else, all those entities which merge into the background until we abracadabra them into the foreground of discourse with words such as “dog”, “Fido” or “Rover” – or other forms of signification - which confer an identity upon them. So you see, there is nothing primal about identity, however convenient it is to give entities identities and thereby distinquish them one from the other. Identity-conferring is a human process which has nothing to do with the Glory of God or Platonic Ideas or Forms which privilege ideas over unique things in themselves as they might emerge into view before we have given them a name or defined them, thereby isolating them from the flux in the background, which is a necessary but usually unacknowledged part of their being.
            Good criticism is concerned with the inscape of poetry and the process of instress, thanks to which the good critic encounters this inscape by isolating the poem from its background, while at the same time recognising the difference made by the flux which is always there in the background and integrating it into his or her critique of the poem. It pays attention to hidden aspects of the work in question which would certainly be missed by bad critics. Indeed I have known critics who slate a poem without saying anything at all about it. How they get away with it, of course, is something else entirely. More often than not, a bad critic has favourite hobby-horses or axes to grind, and that, more or less, implies that he or she is stranded in the realm of identity rather than difference and has no relation at all to the flux from which the poem itself might have emerged. (We see this a lot in criticism influenced by identity-politics of any kind. With such politics, we always seem to be in the realm of the same rather than different – the realm of stable identities rather than the unstable flux from which the energy of a work is invariably drawn.)
            All good criticism I feel has to pay attention to the flux, which is not simply part of the poem’s external background, but part of what Hopkins might call its inscape. The real challenge of poetry-criticism is to see the poem emerging from its own (unfamiliar) background in the process of taking its place in the more familiar landscape of actual poetry-criticism. In other words, criticism does not have all the answers, it is not a practice with rules of thumb which enable the critic to ‘discuss’ any poem he or she comes across without reference to the unfamiliar flux from which it might have emerged. Every original poet has had to deal with critics who know only their own familiar language and who believe their language is adequate to the task of any poem they might encounter. Such critics are invariably at sea when dealing with anything new and therefore are denied access to standby answers in their responses to original work. Nevertheless, they feel that they have to say something. To use Hopkins’ own term, instress is as important to criticism as it is to poetry. There can be no flunking its challenge, no lazy falling back on what the critic already knows. With any new poetry, the critic must reinvent him or herself in response to it or simply have nothing to say.
            In his first major book, Being And Time, Martin Heidegger summed up I believe the ethos which informs a great deal of criticism. “The “they” maintains itself...in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well-known. Everything gained by struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force.” In a way, the critic is there to police poetry in the manner Heidegger is suggesting, rather than enable its inner voice to be heard. Inscape is not its strong suite, any more than instress. Heidegger is not, I believe, ascribing a social role to the way “the they” maintains itself. I mean, most social interactions are pretty innocent in that regard and concern quite basic practical relations between people. But a society as a whole needs to hold itself together and impose what might be called third party plural values on the population in general and these values seep into the fabric of our social relations and institutions. They can be recognized quite easily in ‘neighbourly’ gossip whereby an ‘outsider’ is ostracised. In gossip, individuality gets, noisily – rather than noiselessly - suppressed. And that, of course, is what a lot of criticism is about as well. The uniqueness and individuality of original work, which IS primordial, here meets a blank because in such criticism the background flux of Being out of which the poem has arisen is not itself being engaged, but only values and ideas that have already been framed by society at large – including the critical establishment of course. This is what you might call reactive criticism as opposed to creative criticism. Someone once said that great criticism is even rarer than great poetry, which is probably due to the fact that criticism has a policing role to play in our society, which poetry doesn’t, and critics must find it difficult to step outside of that policing role.
            Criticism does, therefore, need to be deconstructed. Deconstruction does not imply destruction. The deconstruction of the idea of identity does not mean its rejection as an idea. It simply means opening identities up to the play of differences which both constitute and subvert them. The flus, in other words, that makes us and breaks us. Whether criticism can itself start deconstructing its own assumptions and values is perhaps undecidable. It is certainly to be hoped for, but whether it can be expected is another matter entirely.

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Way To Go

2/26/2019

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WAY TO GO

In 1965, when I was 21, a 25 yr. old American I had met showed me a copy of a book he had brought from America with him when he came to this country. It was called Our Lady Of The Flowers and the author was one, Jean Genet, a name I had never heard of till then. On the front cover, there was the Brassaï photo of Genet as he was in 1947, in which he looked like a rather sensitive pugilist with short cropped hair and flat broken nose. His thin arms were thrust into his trouser-pockets. He wore a slightly rumpled shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up, and a thick belt held up his trousers. His head looked enormous, with sunken expressive eyes and a full sensuous mouth. It has always been my favourite photo of Genet, and here it was fronting a book I’d never heard of by an author I knew nothing about. That photo itself persuaded me that this was a writer I wanted to read. “Skip the introduction by Sartre.” my new American friend advised me. So I went straight into Genet and have never looked back. In fact, I became obsessed with his writing and devoured all of his novels and, later, his poetry and plays. More than any other writer, more even than Proust, who I fell in love with a little bit later, he became some kind of icon for me. Indeed, if there was one writer I wanted to be, it was Genet. This obsession was with the man as well as the writing and it led me into reading several biographies, including Sartre’s monumental ‘existential psycho-analysis’, Saint Genet - Actor and Martyr, as well as the two very pedestrian English biographies which appeared in the 1960s. The fascination, if not the obsession, has stayed with me ever since; more recently, it induced me to read Edmund White’s much more definitive and exhaustive biography, Genet, which was the first to do real justice to Genet’s life and literary output. The great strength of White’s biography lies in its obvious sympathy with its subject, a sympathy which no doubt stems from the fact that he shares Genet’s sexual proclivities. However, there was no real attempt to enter Genet from the inside and really empathise with him. It was, in other words, a conventional ‘objective’ biography and one that needed to be supplemented by the far riskier ‘subjective’ approach of the poet. And it is such an approach which lies at the heart of Jeremy Reed’s biography entitled jean genet: born to lose - an illustrated critical history.
            Unlike White’s, Reed’s strategy is definitely inward. He not only attempts to present Genet from the inside, as it were, he clearly identifies with his subject and renders him passionately. In other words, he risks the investment of himself in his subject and it is this fact which makes jean genet: born to lose such an exceptional and singular work. There are of course, dangers in this approach, not least of which is that one is not always sure where Jeremy Reed ends and Jean Genet begins, but at least Reed has taken the risk and that outweighs, in my opinion, any negatives that might accrue from such an approach.
            Reed presents Genet thematically rather than chronologically. Such a method of presentation is certainly much more conducive to the approach he adopts than the ‘objective’ method of other biographers. The 28 short chapters have titles like two punks: rimbaud and genet, jaques guerin: the man who owned proust’s bedroom, a woman’s story: violette leduc and jean genet, drugs, genet’s photographs and death. Anything in fact which allows Reed to get an imaginative handle on his subject and render him from within. It is, in my opinion, a highly effective approach to Genet and allows Reed to present aspects of Genet which would be absent in a more conventional approach. What comes across in the most forceful way is the manner in which Reed’s own inner poetics is used to illuminate Genet’s inner poetics. This, as I’ve said, has its dangers, but it does give the book as a whole a consistency and aesthetic unity which a more ‘objective’ approach would have lacked. What Reed brings out very vividly is the extent to which the alienating brutality of Genet’s childhood and adolescence spent in reformatories such as Mettray drove him into himself in ways that made daydreaming become “his focal point”. Reed goes on: “Writing is neither a substitute for life, nor a therapy aimed at rehabilitation, but a pursuit in which inner and outer realities find reconciliation through imagination. What Genet filtered through his unconscious at Mettray became in time the reality of his fiction. To imagine is to suffer, and Genet’s courage in confronting his past was the precise quality which made him a poet.”
            Despite Reed’s passionate identification with his subject, his study does not gloss over the less salubrious aspects of Genet’s behaviour and writing, although it is refreshingly free from any taint of moralising or political correctness. It is always better, after all, to give writers who lived in a different age to ourselves, the benefit of the doubt concerning their particular outlooks. One of the things which most appealed to me about Genet when I first read him, was his very direct and unselfconscious treatment of homosexuality. Nowadays, with the advantage of post-feminist hindsight, it is easy to see that he expressed many attitudes - such as misogyny - which, when I first read him, I tended to take at face-value. Reed himself brings out the internalised homophobia that was always close to the surface in him and which was perhaps the source of his decline as a writer from the truly transgressive works of the 40s to the more anodyne political works of the 50s and 60s. I am in complete agreement with Reed in seeing in Genet’s later work a falling off of his creativity. This goes no less for Prisoner of Love than for plays like The Blacks and The Screens. (I still think The Balcony, however, is a play of extraordinary insight.) In his later work, the source of his original inspiration began to dry up. I do not believe that an identification with particular political causes can even begin to make up for that loss. In fact, I regard it as some kind of diversion, a way of not confronting the real issue of his own sexuality, especially after his links to his criminal past had become severed and criminals no longer became the subject of his writing. Had not Genet carried with him the baggage of internalised homophobia, Eros would have set him free to develop as a writer rather than wither. This internalised homophobia is partly why he fell in love with straight rather than gay men - in other words, as Reed says, he chose emotionally sterile bonds to ones which were not. But, of course, this pattern was set very early on in his life, so there was probably not very much he could do about it, even if he had wished. His internalised homophobia was undeniably connected to his identification with his earlier life in reformatories and among the (homophobic) criminal fraternities of his youth which he had strongly identified with. So in a sense, in being homophobic, you could say that he was still being true to himself and his past. We should not, after all, see everything in terms of an abstract post-gay liberationist or feminist political perspective, because that would entail the loss of imaginative focus which Reed has brought to his portrayal of Genet.
            As I have said, the approach has its dangers. To give one example, when Reed mentioned Cocteau’s refusal of the dedication of Funeral Rites out of fear for his own reputation and having his name linked to Genet’s “pro-Hitlerian sympathies with Aryan youth”, I couldn’t help thinking that these sympathies were more aesthetic and erotic than political, which the term “pro-Hitlerian” suggests. (Genet’s actual fantasised portrayal of Hitler in Funeral Rites would have hardly endeared him to the Nazi Party hierarchy I suspect!) His aim, in other words, was purely transgressive. He had a hatred of France - and probably quite rightly, given the way it had treated him. That would be reason enough to identify with an enemy - any enemy. And as a criminal whose whole Eros was soaked in the underworld he came of age in he probably identified with the purely criminal aspects of Nazi Germany as well, though whether that made him an ideological Nazi is another question entirely. Nor should we overlook the equation between homosexuality and betrayal in the relationship between Riton, the traitor, and Eric, the German soldier in the novel. Genet was very keen on that theme. Many 50s and 60s British spies for Russia - Burgess, Maclean and Vassall especially - were homosexual. After all, considering the post-war treatment of Alan Turing, who might be seen as something of a saviour for Britain during the 2nd. World War, there was not much incentive for gays not to betray their country. Also, not to be forgotten in this context is the fact that in The Thief’s Journal Genet said that he could not fulfil himself as a criminal in Nazi Germany because the whole country was dedicated to crime. It was the poetic and erotic element of criminality and transgression, along with the idea of betrayal, which appealed to Genet in Funeral Rites, not, I suspect, Nazism as an abstract political philosophy.
            Another aspect of Genet which deserves more attention - though this is no reflection on jean genet: born to lose - is the fact that he hailed from a Catholic country and his writing is saturated with Catholic imagery. I think it is only completely intelligible in that context. The same is also true of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, of course. I don’t think that a writer from a Protestant background would be quite so concerned with rituals such as the Mass and Holy Communion, which seem to have fascinated Genet. I mention this because I think it is as important in the overall critical equation as Genet’s androgyny and the transvestism of character’s like Divine in Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet’s peculiar kind of sainthood, seems to me to be an inverted Catholic sainthood, and it is one aspect of Genet which someone from a Protestant background such as myself would not find so easy to identify with. Then there’s the question of Genet’s pre-occupation with Evil. This also seems to me as religiously inspired as Baudelaire’s was in his Flowers Of Evil. Nietzsche, who wanted to go beyond these categories of Good and Evil, was the son of a Lutherian pastor and perhaps for that reason was able to shake free of these concepts. In Catholicism, the eschatology of Good and Evil, sin and redemption, seems much more intrinsic than in Protestantism, because it is much more institutional, permeating the religious and secular culture that Genet grew up in much more completely. Sartre, I believe, came from a Protestant background, which perhaps explains his pre-occupation with freedom and the idea of choosing one’s path in life-- echoes of the Protestant Kierkegaard?-- not to mention his bizarre Kantian belief that in choosing one’s path in life, ethically speaking, one chooses for everyone else. (Kant’s background was also a Protestant one.) Protestantism depends much more on the idea of individual conscience and choice, and is not so heavily invested in Good and Evil as metaphysical forces. I recall, when I was younger, and Genet’s work was first being discussed here, that he was invariably referred to as The Poet of Evil by his critics, but I could never quite relate to those concepts, and that was perhaps because I was not raised in a Catholic environment and had therefore never absorbed them. That, of course, didn’t prevent me responding to the power of his writing. After all, we still respond to the power of Homer without believing in the religious concepts which inform so much of his work. This is not a criticism of jean genet: born to lose, since Reed has his own individual focus to which a discussion of these particular questions would not have been relevant. However, I do believe Catholicism is an important variable in the overall critical equation of Genet and this is often lost sight of. (I recall a friend of mine saying, after he'd read some Genet, that Genet would return to the Church at the end of his life. But I think Genet, like Rimbaud, was far too intelligent for that.)
            All this aside, jean genet: born to lose is a unique biography based on an approach which risks a great deal, but is carried off with extraordinary panache. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the approach to lesser writers, but Reed pulls it off fantastically well. It provokes thoughts and feelings about its subject in ways that few biographies do.

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CHASING INFINITY

2/8/2019

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CHASING INFINITY

If there is one thing our basically empirical culture does not do well, it is the concept of Infinity. Mention it and you’ll probably encounter quite a few raised eyebrows. It is, after all, largely associated with religion – or at least with the idea of an infinite God. But it seems to me that the idea of God is something we human beings have given shape to, while the infinite is without any shape or form whatsoever. In other words, our collective imagination has domesticated the concept of infinity through its picture of God – the Loving Father, The Compassionate and Merciful Allah, the Vengeful Jahweh, or my own Divine Joker. Infinity itself has never been given a space of its own to expand in without being yoked to someone’s idea of an ‘infinite God’.
          I have suggested elsewhere that the number 5 – or any number you can name – implies a series that stretches from zero to infinity as its background. Yet that infinity is an impossibility, a paradox – a point which Kant made in the Antonomies section of his Critique Of Pure Reason. What is paradoxical about it is that from any empirical perspective, infinity cannot exist, because, however far you take your series of numbers, you can always go further and never reach the end and complete it. Empirical thought loves things with limits, and with infinity you encounter something without limits. On the other hand, Logic demands that infinity must exist for precisely that reason. Cannot and Must are therefore in conflict. What is scandalous about Infinity is that it constitutes an absence of closure – a negation, if you like, of everything finite and familiar. It does to thought, therefore, what Pi – or any irrational number - does to an algorithmic equation. In other words, it is the dark shadow of everything finite, like some kind of trace it will never get rid of. Imagine being shadowed by that which negates you by surpassing you towards an always receding horizon. It is bound to make you feel somewhat superfluous.
          But so far, we have only dealt with the Infinite as a mathematical concept, which is purely skeletal and lifeless as far as it goes. Surely, there must be more to the concept than this, something which gives flesh to it and also breathes life into it, filling it out, connecting it to ourselves as living beings and the whole of the cosmos of which we are a part – if by the term “cosmos” we imply something more than the physical universe(s) that scientists study. (I say nothing of String-Theory, Brane-Theory, ten, eleven or more dimensions, or the infinite number of parallel universes which split into two or come into being whenever decisions are made involving an either/or choice.)
          It is on this level of putting flesh onto our mathematical skeleton of infinity that we might be tempted to bring back the hypothetical notion of “God”. I have no objection to this, as long as it is the “God” of Spinoza (or the Spanish Sufi, Ibn al Arabi) – that is to say the “God” which equates with everything else that is normally considered not to be “God”. Spinoza put it this way. “God” and the universe – or, in our case, the cosmos – are one and the same, and they logically must be, because an infinite “God” could not co-exist with anything else. If a separate infinite “God” existed, the universe itself would be pushed out of existence – unless, of course, the universe was an integral part of that infinite “God” – another mode of ‘his’ being as it were. A very logical chap was Spinoza, not really cut out to believe in the mumbo-jumbo most religious people believe in – in fact he said as much himself,    “Religion is organized superstition. It is based on the fears of naive ordinary people in the face of unpredictable nature, and clever power-hungry leader-types use those fears to control people.” – and this fact has made him persona non grata to priests and rabbis ever since. (He was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue.)
          It is through “God”, by way of Spinoza, that we might come back to the idea of more a rounded infinity permeating every finite part of itself, myself included, along with the pen I hold in my hand. It makes sense to me to think of everything as part of a continuum which absorbs everything else. What I have never found convincing in the natural and physical sciences is the way everything seems to be neatly divided from everything else – dogs from cats, atoms from other atoms, plants from animals, rocks from water, water from air, me from you and ultimately what people tend to call ‘mind’ from something else they tend to call ‘matter’ and place them all in discrete categories, thereby putting them into neat little boxes. The only relations such discrete things can have with each other in such a cosmos could be ‘interactions’ with other discrete things – that is to say relations that come from outside. This paradigm appears to be breaking down in Quantum Mechanics with ideas like Quantum Entanglement, but it is still very entrenched elsewhere in science.
          But back to infinity. I am far from believing in any kind of God. Would ‘God’ not also be another discrete entity, separate from everything else? The point that it is important to establish is that if “the infinite permeates every finite part of itself,” the finite and the infinite must be of the same basic nature with the same characteristics. The only difference is that one has been raised to an infinite power, while the other’s powers are finite. We are assuming, of course, that the cosmos was not created by a creator ‘God’ who pre-existed ‘his’ creation and continues to exist outside of it, having framed its laws and set its co-ordinates to ‘his’ satisfaction and then, to quote Antonin Artaud, “gets the fuck out and leaves the cops to keep an eye on things.”
          We cannot, of course, reduce even the finite parts of this infinite whole to our own perspective. What we might perceive and what actually is can never be identical. We see through a glass darkly as it were. The thing-in-itself, to borrow from Kant, is inaccessible to us. Nevertheless, I believe that we can infer from the fact that the infinite permeates everything finite that the cosmos in both its finite and infinite modes remains the same cosmos and shares the same nature – one in a finite mode and the other in an infinite mode. Reality is everywhere the same, in other words, and this everywhere extends beyond finite horizons.
          If this is true, everything in the cosmos – including whatever it is that underlies our own consciousness – is shared by everything else. All ‘matter’ in other words has a ‘mental’ or ‘proto-mental’ dimension. The difference is only one of degree, not kind. For example, what organises matter on an atomic plane is of the same nature as what organises matter in the human brain, giving rise to human consciousness. Atoms are simple, though they may well be complex compared to the sub-atomic particles of which they are composed. The human brain, on the other hand, is much more complex – as befits the tasks it has to perform and functions it has to fulfil. However, brains and atoms share in the same underlying nature, and embody the same impulse towards self-organisation. And that is probably true throughout the whole infinite cosmos and not just our finite section of it. The whole of being, therefore, is, to use Sartrean-Hegelian terms, in some way being-for-itself when viewed from within and only being-in-itself when it is viewed from the outside.
          Hegel distinguished between Good Infinity and Bad Infinity. Good Infinity was apparently circular, doubling back on itself, while Bad Infinity was linear and just went on and on and on forever – as a kind of interminable extension of the finite. I am not sure, but in suggesting that the infinite permeates every finite part of itself, I basically agree with Hegel's Good Infinity rather than his Bad Infinity, and that’s certainly a turn up for the books because I never thought I’d ever agree with Hegel on anything.

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October 24th, 2018

10/24/2018

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FRODO’S UNFINISHED MISSION

“In sleep we dream of only two forms of government - anarchy and monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics & never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialist dream? Impossible.” Hakim Bey.

          Forget the horrendously sentimental movie made out of it. Like most movies which are ‘inspired’ by books, it hollows out the text it is supposedly based on completely. The Lord of the Rings is a quite extraordinary fable - and I use the word “fable” not in its strict but loose sense here. It is a huge river with many tributaries, and it is not possible to do justice to all its themes in this essay. Above all, it seems to be about power, and how it corrupts those who would wield it, even for the good. Perry De Havilland, writing in the anarchist magazine, Total Freedom, has argued that the Ring itself is an allegory of the modern state. I disagree that The Lord of the Rings is in any way allegorical, since that would presuppose that that was Tolkien’s intention, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was. Nevertheless, stories, like poems, take on a life of their own apart from their author’s intentions, and it does seem to me that De Havilland is on the right track. As I see it, the Ring offers the potential for absolute power. The only thing in ‘the real world’ that bears comparison with it is the modern state, and therefore this makes the Ring more or less synonymous with it. The possession of the Ring by a contemporary incarnation of The Dark Lord, Sauron, would mean his having untrammelled access to all the resources of the modern state to do what he will with. Of course, at the moment, this isn’t possible, since such an incarnation would be restricted by the existing institutional framework of power. In other words, in the mythical terms of The Lord of the Rings, the Ring would not yet be in his possession. But he would be working on it, stealthily eroding - to revert back to a non-mythical vocabulary - the existing institutional safeguards and patiently moving towards his objective. The only way the free peoples of Middle-Earth, in the vocabulary of The Lord of the Rings again, would be free from the threat posed by Sauron’s desire for the Ring is if the Ring itself was destroyed. In other words, if the modern state was destroyed. In that sense, De Havilland is right and The Lord of the Rings, if not allegorical, could certainly be construed in anarchist terms, even if its idealisation of life in the Shire does exude a rather petite-bourgeois odour at times.
            But hang on a minute. Isn’t it also about kingship? Certainly it is; but let’s not forget that The Lord of the Rings is a fable and, if the concept of kingship enters, it is primarily on a fabular level - according to form, as it were. We should not be too eager to translate its idea of kingship into political terms. A king, after all, is not just a dude who sits on a throne and bosses others around. A king is also a symbol, a symbol, among other things, of what Freud called His Majesty The Ego. If we look at kingship in this way, it’s obvious that we are dealing with psychological rather than political phenomena. The Lord of the Rings is a fable in which His Majesty The Ego is confronted with choices - either to behave like the Dark Lord Sauron, the Blairite control-freak, obsessed with consolidating his power, or Aragorn, the ranger, the free spirit, and abjure the trappings of powers which do not come from oneself and are not freely acknowledged by others. Like Wanadi, the chief of The Invisible People in John Boorman’s film-fable, The Emerald Forest, Aragorn ‘commands’ the devotion of others because he is completely free of the taint of wanting to control them and have them under his thumb. One can almost hear him saying with Wanadi “If I tell a man to do what he does not want to do, I am no longer chief.” - or King in Aragorn’s case. Aragorn’s strength lies in the fact that he is capable of inspiring others through his own inherent qualities of leadership; his authority is a moral one; it is not based on coercion. Therefore, it seems to me that the concept of kingship in The Lord of the Rings is perfectly compatible with anarchism, at least in the context of this particular fable.
            The Lord of the Rings, however, has a mystical aspect as well, which takes it beyond the 19th. century materialist perspective that most forms of anarchism seem to accept. At one point in the story one of the hobbits, Merry, says, “...there are things deeper and higher and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows it or not.” Tolkien’s tale is about the intersection between these “things deeper and higher” and everyday life.
            Take Frodo, the Ringbearer, as an example. What special attributes does he possess which qualify him for his onerous role? Well, to begin with he’s small, ordinary and to all appearances, quite insignificant - he’s Everyman in other words, as De Havilland says. Like most people who make a difference in life, his real qualities are not immediately obvious. This fact means that he is unlikely to draw attention to himself. Ironically, the only time he gets himself noticed by the agents of the Dark Lord is when he puts on the Ring to make himself invisible - when he’s seduced by its power in other words. He has no power or position by means of which he might draw attention to himself, and people with power or position always look over the heads of people without power or position and consider them of too little consequence to bother their heads about. That is their Achilles heel, of course, and it proved the undoing of Sauron in the end, one of the “things deeper and higher’’ that he had obviously never considered.
            That the Ring is destined to drive Frodo mad is not to the point. There are other actors in this story with almost as crucial a role in its outcome. There is the tragic figure of Gollum, for example, without whose intervention Frodo’s quest to destroy the Ring would have foundered. Even the devoted Sam was powerless to influence the course of events at the end when it looked as though the Ring had finally taken Frodo. It took the evil intentions of Gollum to bring about the final success of the quest. He alone is destined to destroy the Ring and fulfil Gandalf’s prophecy. “...he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end...” Gollum’s part in the success of the quest symbolises the tragic necessity of evil in the economy of an evolving universe. In this sense, he is like Goethe’s Mephistopheles in Faust, who says: “I am part of those forces who ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good.” Another of those “things deeper and higher” which Merry refers to, though perhaps only the shamanic figure of Gandalf is really in touch with.
            Gandalf, of course, is a wizard, and the word “wizard” has the same root as the word “wise”. Gandalf’s wisdom manifests itself in a number of ways. For instance, when Frodo says about Gollum, “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had the chance.” Gandalf replies, “Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand...” And when Frodo a little later says. “Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds. Now at any rate he’s as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.” Gandalf counters: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.” Gandalf’s willingness to give even Gollum - and, by extension, all human nature - the benefit of the doubt is part and parcel of his wisdom and insight.
            No picture of Gandalf would be complete, of course, without contrasting him with his ‘Shadow’, Saruman; for Saruman is, undoubtedly what Gandalf would become were he to possess the Ring. It is an aspect of Gandalf’s superior wisdom, however, that he fears the Ring and will have nothing to do with it, as he tells Frodo. “With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.”... “Do no tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself.” Saruman has no such scruples because he desires power above all else. Gandalf is, in many ways, a sort of Merlin-figure, though not at first as potent a wizard as Saruman. Merlin himself is heir to the Celtic shamanic tradition, which, like all shamanic traditions, had both its light side and dark side. Shamans have often been accused of being charlatans, willing to exploit the gullibility of others for their own ends. But there is a dark side to everything and because shamanism has had its dark side, that should not blind us to the fact that shamans have also been engaged in a sincere quest for spiritual vision. Like all institutions, shamanism is not superhuman, and shamans themselves are nothing if not human. Gandalf is human, no less than Saruman, though this fact expresses itself differently. And, being human, he knows how fallible he is; that’s why he has a sufficiently healthy respect for the Ring to fear taking possession of it. He is circumspect in regard to it, whereas Saruman is not, because, for Saruman, the Ring is the answer to his dreams of power. Gandalf is therefore wiser than Saruman, who is the kind of shaman who has given shamanism a bad reputation. But is this an accurate picture of shamanism as such, or simply a reflection of the fact that as an institution it is human, and therefore corruptible under certain circumstances.
            The Lord of the Rings abounds in such archetypal contrasts. Other examples are the relationships between Sam & Frodo and Pippin & Merry. But to deal with these two relationships properly would take us too far out of our way. One example it is possible to deal with here, however, is the relationship which develops between Legolas, the Elf, & Gimli, the Dwarf. I see Legolas and Gimli as two contrasting aspects of Aragorn, aspects which he must unite if he is to function successfully as an integrated human being - or ‘King’. They are representatives, if you like, of two different archetypes - the Apollonian and the chthonic - the light and the dark. Legolas is of the Woodland Realm, and Gimli is of the caves and mines under the mountains. Dwarves are concerned only with the making of wealth and building great cities underground which display their wealth; these activities seem to be their two primary purposes in life. The fact that their growth is stunted and they live underground is indicative of their lack of wider horizons and concern for what goes on in the larger world. Nevertheless, although there is no love lost between Dwarves and Elves, Legolas and Gimli very quickly become inseparable friends. Gimli’s relationship with Legolas, the Apollonian figure in the fellowship, will perhaps help transform his horizons and no doubt also teach Legolas that there is more to life than the realm of Apollonian light.
            Why call Legolas Apollonian? First, there is his perpetual youth, then the speed and accuracy with which he handles a bow. Apollo is the “Far-Shooter” as well. The realm of the Elves, from which Legolas has sprung, moreover, is that of song, music, poetry, art and healing - all of which are associated with Apollo. It doesn’t matter that Apollo is a Greek god, his functions are universal. In the Celtic tradition, they are divided between Oenghus, Mac Oc, Dian Cécht and Lug. In the Indian, many are assumed by Vishnu - or Krsna. The Nigerian poet, Wole Soyinka, said many African myths have their equivalents of Apollo and Dionysus. There does not seem to be a Dionysian counterpart in The Lord of the Rings. But this is hardly surprising since Dionysus was an androgynous god, and also the only Greek god who enjoyed passive sex, while The Fellowship of the Ring is a fellowship based on male-bonding, which requires a big dollop of repressed homosexuality, especially of the passive variety. Dionysian abandon would have been a very disruptive influence on the Fellowship, which was conceived along strictly male lines. To counter this imbalance, Aragorn, once he was ‘King’, would have to assimilate Dionysus to his own ego-ideal to become fully integrated. In other words, the ‘King’ would also have to be ‘Queen’. Maybe that’s the meaning of Arwen - another elven aspect of Aragorn? (True to Hollywood form as ever, in the movie the elven Arwen ceased to possess any archetypal meaning at all, and became little more than Aragorn’s romantic interest. Tolkien, meanwhile, was probably turning in his grave.)
            The last pair I want to consider here are Boromir and Faramir, the two contrasting sons of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Boromir is a warrior, with a warrior’s outlook. Not for him the complexities of “things deeper and higher”. Faramir, on the other hand, is associated with Gandalf. He has insight and wisdom, and, although he is a warrior as well, he does not regard war as a glorious end in itself, only as a means to the end of defending Gondor. Furthermore he will have nothing to do with the Ring, and would not use it even if by doing so he could save Gondor from destruction at the hands of Sauron’s armies. Unlike Boromir, he does not believe that the end justifies the means if the means are incompatible with the end, and for that reason he freely let’s Frodo and Sam go on their way without attempting to seize the Ring. Boromir thinks he can use the power of the Ring to do good, to keep Middle-Earth safe from the legions of Sauron; Faramir knows that that is a delusion. Boromir, in other words, is like those who wish to use the power of the state to set people free. Not that he is insincere; but he lacks insight; and that is his ultimate weakness.
            I have been told that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory of the 2nd. World War. I could not disagree more. (Nor for that matter could Tolkien!) Of course, the events of that war fed into the work in certain ways, but on the whole what symbolism there is in The Lord of the Rings rises above the particular and embraces the universal. It works, in other words, on a deeper level than historical allegory. Let’s take Sauron as an example. Sir Ian McKellan—never trust anyone with a “Sir” in front of their name!—who played Gandalf in the film of Tolkien’s epic, has said there are no Saurons around today. This overlooks one very important fact and that is that, in the context of the action which takes place in both the book and the film, Sauron is not an embodied person at all, but a spirit, the spirit at the centre of the Great Eye of Mordor. “The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you; to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable.” McKellan overlooks, in other words, the symbolic dimension of The Lord of the Rings. I see Sauron as the spirit of rule itself, not any particular ruler, and the spirit of rule invariably seeks to make itself secure - especially in insecure circumstances - by maximising its sphere of control. That is why Sauron is always on the lookout for the Ring. And the Ring, of course, wants to return to Sauron. States look to governments to keep them in business. The police, just to take an example, are always calling on governments to give them more resources and powers. Governments want to be secure themselves and thereby look for pretexts to give the police what they want. States and governments are natural allies against the people they rule, and look for any opportunities whereby they might strengthen themselves against a potential adversary. Governments and states, both of which have always had as their raison d’etre the need to conquer and hold down subject populations, are not the friends but the enemies of the people they rule. Mostly, the potential enmity lies dormant. But often circumstances emerge which bring that enmity to life. The outcome is a reawakening of the spirit of Sauron, along with a reactivation of The Great Eye of Mordor. In present circumstances, we might attribute Sauron’s reawakening to economic circumstances - i.e. the prospect of increased competition for limited global markets from the burgeoning economies of countries like India and China, with a consequent falling rate of profit - a classic scenario, in fact - and the need to take measures - war abroad, repression at home - to ward off the repercussions in the West itself.*
            I realise that there are many other possible interpretations of The Lord of the Rings. There is a Christian one, for example, in which Aragorn would appear as some kind of Christ-figure. What we are dealing with here is not any set of predetermined ideas, as you might find in allegory, but a much more nebulous universe of possible meanings, of which none is the meaning as such. Symbolism, as opposed to allegory, works on an affective rather than intellectual level, an unconscious rather than conscious one. Allegory, as Tolkien rightly says,    seeks to impose meanings onto a reader; symbolism does not. Symbols may suggest meanings, but these are ultimately all in the mind of the reader; for the work itself is no more than a story, as Tolkien himself was at pains to point out. Furthermore, symbols mutate and evolve in the way allegorical figures do not; and they do this because they leave us free to let them suggest what they will. Think, for example of Blake’s The Sick Rose.
            The Lord of the Rings is not just another escapist fantasy-yarn. It is full of prescience and dark foreboding, much more so than 1984, for example. And also much more hopeful, which makes it far more dangerous to the powers that be. We need hope; we need to overcome the ‘post-historical’ fatalism which has gripped us since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Frodo’s mission, of course, is far from complete and whether it will ever become complete depends on factors which, as things presently stand, are beyond our control. As the fable shows, so much is down to chance and happenstance that it is impossible to make predictions. Nevertheless, The Lord of the Rings is an inspiring fable with a subtext that has even more relevance today than it had when it was originally written.
_________________________________________________________________* If a historical parallel is required, we need look no further than the burgeoning economic power of Germany and America at the end of the 19th. Century and the threat it posed to the interests of countries like Britain and France. Hence the scramble for colonies and the emergence of imperial rivalries which were to lead to the 1st. World War.

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September 11th, 2018

9/11/2018

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BACK TO BASICS

The US anarcho-primitivist, John Zerzan, is certainly no idiot, in spite of the ‘luddite extremity’ of his message. I do not necessarily agree with him, but he does have the courage to take his insights to their logical conclusion, and stand by them, come hell or high water. I am not personally a great fan of taking things to their logical conclusion. After all, that’s what Hitler did, but Zerzan’s actual insights are rather more interesting than Hitler’s, so I am prepared to give him a little more latitude. However, I must confess, that someone who uses language to denigrate and condemn language for being at the root of human alienation - including our alienation from reality - is rather like the Cretan who said that all Cretans were liars – which obviously meant his own statement, if true, must be untrue. But I love paradoxes, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. Nonetheless, that does not mean that Zerzan’s insights regarding the alienation implicit in civilisation are not often acute. As I said, he is no idiot and is, after all, only echoing some of Freud’s arguments in Civilisation And Its Discontents.
            The first of his ideas is that civilised humanity has lost its way and its first step in doing so was the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago. I’ll have something to say about this later. Such phenomena as civilisation, language, time, technology, art, representation, religion, work, and so on, are all symptoms of us having lost our way. He is not actually suggesting that we return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifeways, but rather that we progress towards them in order to rediscover our lost Eden – as it were. Apparently, we were much better adjusted and happier during this stage of our evolution as a species which lasted for about 99% of our time on this planet. 10,000 years ago, however, the Agricultural Revolution ended this idyll and we have been maladjusted ever since. There may be a lot of truth in this, but it is less his analysis that I have difficulty with, than his solutions to the problems he identifies. Many would doubt the feasibility of progressing towards a Utopia which is a faithful reflection of this lost Eden - anarchists like Murray Bookchin especially. Hakim Bey, the author of TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones) talks, I believe, of the return of the primitive - rather than a return to (or progression towards) the primitive – in the manner of Freud’s “Return of the repressed”, which Freud said always returned in disguised form. Zerzan has attacked Bey quite savagely, but Bey seems to me to have something of a point here.
            Another anarchist, Murray Bookchin, dismisses Zerzan’s ideas out of hand. He makes a big play on the distinction between Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism and he places both Zerzan and Bey to their detriment in the latter category. For my own part, I don’t think we should leap so readily to these partisan either/or positions. Many anarchists speak of changing life as well as society, and that seems crucial to me. Anyway, all in all, I think these two ‘kinds’ of anarchism are rather stuck with each other. Anarchists will no doubt continue to experiment in new ways of living and being, whether or not there is some kind of social revolution to complement their efforts. And their experiments may still be valid for all that.
            Bookchin comes originally from a Marxist background. His book, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left contains fascinating accounts of his time as an activist in the Thirties as well as his time in the New Left during the Sixties. As a result of his experiences and time on the left, Hegel and Marx are definitely among his intellectual heroes, in spite of his having graduated to anarchism since his Marxist days The thing is, however, he does take a lot of this Marxo-Hegelian baggage with him into anarchism – particularly the Dialectic. Let me tell you what I think about dialectical reasoning. It consists of adopting an idea, which is your conclusion before you have even arrived at your premises and then working towards that conclusion through a series of ‘resolved’ antinomies, in an effort to integrate all conflicting positions into the conclusion you have already arrived at. (Kant at least understood the paradoxical nature of his antinomies and therefore didn’t waste too much time in trying to resolve them.) In Plato’s time, the dialectic was a relaxed and gentlemanly procedure in which the object was to win arguments, not to determine the ends of history – a la Hegel or Marx. Hegel thought the Prussian state, which was his employer of course, was the end of history and Francis Fukuyama cites Hegel as an influence on his book, The End Of History; for Marx it was the Communist society in which the state had withered away. I think Marx’s take on the “end of history” was perhaps a little less interested than Hegel’s, but that is another matter. Bookchin was in this dialectical tradition and proudly carried its banner with him and was always willing to invoke it in his writing. My feeling is that he should have recalled Robert Burns’s line, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley.” For had he done so, he might have freed himself “frae money a blunder” as a result.
            But back to Zerzan. I wonder, if he too does not have an Hegelian scheme he works to and wants to impose on reality – his own version of The Negation Of The Negation – with the original negation being Man’s fall into civilisation and the negation of that negation being Humanity’s liberation from civilisation. I am not denying the possibility of such a negation of a negation emerging out of the ‘blind forces’ of ‘history’. What I would deny is conscious planning and preparation to achieve it in some kind of utopian spirit. To paraphrase Louis Macneice, World is a bit crazier and more of it than that. Will alienation be overcome as a result of our conscious choices? I very much doubt it. Perhaps Zerzan is right, but my incredulity does tend to get the better of me at the suggestion, in spite of the fact that, as far as I am concerned, the jury is still out and I don’t want to arrive at any premature conclusions regarding what its verdict might be.
            From an analytical perspective I accept a lot of Zerzan’s critique of civilisation. However, solutions to the problems civilisation creates are another matter entirely. That we have only to progress towards a simpler more ‘primitive’ way of life and all the problems of the last 10,000 years will sort themselves out seems a bit far-fetched to me. When dealing with civilisation’s prehistory, Zerzan talks in a time-scale of about two million years of human evolution or more. I am not sure if he includes Australopithecus in this huge sweep of ‘early man’. However, it does seem to include homo-erectus and homo-habilis and, later, Neanderthals. Homo-sapiens fits into this scenario as a late-comer and from what I can gather the rot started with ‘him’. I have no idea how this squares with current scientific thinking on the subject of our evolution and therefore I don’t know if Zerzan is right or wrong. I am also not going to comment too much on whether or not pre-civilised ‘man’ was on much more friendly terms with wild animals than civilised man - as Zerzan says was the case. I suspect that that is some kind of projection. I am sure Paleolithic humans were as wary of sabre-tooth cats as I myself would be if I ever encountered one, and I really don’t think that civilisation has all that much to do with that. As for the claim that people communicated telepathically rather than with words in those far-off days, well, what can I possibly say? Furthermore, I do strongly suspect that the idea that things began to go sharply downhill with the Agricultural Revolution and domestication some 10,000 years ago is more than a little simplistic.
            Agriculture seems to take the rap for a lot of our problems. But there was no straight-forward evolution from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones – and from there to states and all the horrors of civilisation. It seems to me that human societies bifurcated at the end of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer era and agriculture wasn't the only path we travelled down. The concurrent emergence of nomadic pastoralists appears to complicate this neat scenario. According to some schools of thought, nomadic pastoralists played a crucial role in the emergence of states. They were much more warlike and hierarchical than agriculturalists and as a result would eventually conquer the latter, subjugate and exploit them, creating states in the process and becoming warrior aristocracies whose way of life was supported by the peasants who were now well and truly under their thumb. Thus, domination, exploitation and inequality didn’t just evolve from agriculture. Franz Oppenheimer recognised that already in the 19th Century. The existence of more warlike pastoralists was really what threw the spanner into the works of stateless societies, not agriculture. This idea seems much more realistic to me than the one which has class-societies emerging from non-class societies in some kind of evolutionary way. I suspect that if certain members of a basically egalitarian society attempted to coerce and exploit other members of the same society, those other members would very quickly rebel and put them back in their places. On the other hand, for more aggressive and militarised outsiders, like nomadic pastoralists, it would be much less of a problem. All they would need to do is conquer, subjugate and terrorise the local populations they encountered into submitting to their will. They would have both the means and the psychological disposition to do so because their own way of life as nomadic herders in perennial conflict with other nomadic herders would have made them much more warlike than the sedentary agriculturalists. That doesn’t seem to be a possibility which Zerzan has given much thought to however.
            So, I disagree with Zerzan who sees the fall of a free humanity simply in the emergence of agriculture. I am not saying that that would not have been traumatic, but how crucial it was I cannot say. And since I disagree with Zerzan about that, I would also have to disagree with him regarding what it might take to extricate ourselves from the mess civilisation has bequeathed us. Along with Zerzan, I agree with Freud, Lacan, Heidegger and others that such phenomena as civilisation, language, time, religion and so on engender forms of alienation. Heidegger recognised it in our flight from Being to subect-object relations and an instrumental view of the world. Lacan views the Symbolic Order as one in which our needs and desires are alienated. Heidegger also critiqued technology as a source of alienation. Zerzan explicitly recognises the importance of these seminal thinkers – among whom he includes Wittgenstein, who he regards, along with Heidegger, as one of the two most important philosophers of the 20th. Century. Zerzan cites other thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Debord, as well as the American Abstract Expressionist painters who had moved away from representation towards something more inchoate and 'primitive'. His intellectual background is thus fairly catholic from that point of view, indicating that he has a wide culture and is willing to find inspiration wherever he comes across it. However, I have to re-iterate that the problem for me remains power, not civilisation. That is to say, economic, political and military power and the connections between states, capitalism and warfare. I don’t have any definite answers to any of these questions – especially not of the wholesale variety which Zerzan put’s forward. And the fact that I don’t have any answers – though I do have a lot of questions – means that I do not think we have too much control over the future, which is, I suspect, in the lap of the gods.

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Religion and Poetry

9/1/2018

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RELIGION & POETRY
(The case of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
G. M. Hopkins

Quite recently, on Facebook, I had a small difference of opinion with another poet about the poem Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It wasn’t serious, but I felt the need to state it as my opinion that it was still a great poem. He agreed, but he qualified his own enthusiasm for it by saying “Yes, it is a great poem for the ear and the heart until I overthink its implications.” I assume (I may be wrong, of course; I frequently am.) that he was referring to religious implications. Hopkins was a Catholic and a Jesuit priest and that aspect of him is certainly on display in Pied Beauty as it is in much else he wrote. Just in case anyone doesn’t know the poem, I have taken the liberty to reproduce it here.

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

I must confess that for me Hopkins is by far and away the most enjoyable and linguistically stimulating Victorian English poet. I do not respond to other Victorian poets with anything like the relish with which I respond to Hopkins. Not Tennyson, not Browning, not Arnold, not Hardy, nor anyone else. I can work up very little enthusiasm for any of them. But Hopkins is another kettle of fish entirely. And I have felt the same since I first read his The Wreck Of The Deutschland. Furthermore, the religious elements in the poem just seemed all of a piece with the rest of the poem, because to me they are essential not just to the content of the poem, but also Hopkins’ language and technique – the sprung-rhythm used and the general linguistic panache of the poem right from the opening stanza.

                                    “Thou mastering me.
                           God, giver of breath and bread,
                  World’s strand, sway of the sea,
                        Lord of living and dead:
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me
                                       flesh
            And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee."

            Could anyone but a Christian - and a Catholic to boot - have written this? Its language is drenched in that religion from the very first word, and, though I am not a Christian and detest what that religion has come to represent, I can still respond to the very Christian sentiments expressed in that poem because I see them as part and parcel of the whole aesthetic experience of the poem, which, indeed, could not do without them. To paraphrase Nietzsche, who said that the aesthetic alone justifies life, Hopkin’s poetry too justifies life - especially in the light of the fact that it can be such a glorious celebration of life into the bargain - not because of the religious aspect of the poetry, but because of its actual aesthetic qualities; and yet it just so happens that these aesthetic qualities are a product of Hopkins’ whole religious temper and outlook in such a way that you cannot separate the two. The fusion is such that you cannot appreciate the poem as an aesthetic experience, without recognising that Hopkins’ own religious sensibility is part and parcel of that aesthetic experience.
            Is there anything unusual about this? Are not the religious elements in The Iliad also part and parcel of the enjoyment of that poem? Do not Zeus’s marital tiffs with Hera add comic relief to the grinding tragedy of what’s going on down on the ground? And of course, the whole architecture of Dante’s Divine Comedy would be unthinkable without Dante’s religious vision. Sometimes, I think that you have to take the rough with the smooth in poetry and not worry too much about what might have inspired a poem. What matters after all is the end-product, not how the poet arrived at it or the accidental make-up of a poet’s personality which contributed to how the poem got written. Hopkins is a wonderful poet, end of; his work is extraordinary and to quibble about the religious inspiration behind it is kind of like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. It’s there; just live with it and be grateful.
            Richard Dawkins seems to believe that Haydn should have written an evolution oratorio instead of The Creation. No doubt, he sees himself as some kind of Commissar for the Arts dictating the proper subject-matter for a piece of music, a painting or a poem, while damning whatever doesn’t conform to his requirements and consigning it to some kind of critical limbo because, of course, the fact that he’s a scientist makes him especially qualified to make such judgements. In contrast, Murray Bookchin, who is an anarchist with a strong desire to change the world in accordance with his own vision of it, at least seems to recognise that the arts – as opposed to politics - where mytho-poesis is invariably reactionary – may safely have a mythopoeic dimension - which, of course, could also draw on certain religious impulses. Bookchin may be a bit too obsessed about the deleterious influences of what he calls “Lifestyle Anarchism” - a la Hakim Bey - but he is perfectly right when he writes “Mythopoesis is a way to sharpen and deepen human sensibilities”, especially in its application to art, music or poetry. So it's OK, in spite of "No masters, no gods" et cetera, gods are OK in a poem. And that's because, in spite of Philip Larkin's dismissal of "the myth-kitty", poetry is not all about social-realism after all and can easily accommodate and soak up religious impulses without losing a stitch.
            The more important thing for me, however, is that we can’t judge work purely on its subject-matter and content. You have to look at it as a living whole aesthetic event – and at the way the subject-matter and content contribute to it as a living whole aesthetic event. Unless you are peculiarly susceptible, Hopkins’ poetry is not going to turn you into a Christian. Auden was right to say "Poetry makes nothing happen", so have no fear. You really are free to enjoy it in spite of the ‘sinister designs’ it may have on you. You are not, after all, a captive child receiving religious instruction at school. There is nothing sinister in the enjoyment of religious impulses in poetry – any more than in music. And that’s certainly true of the Christian elements in Hopkins’ work – or TS Eliot’s Four Quartets for that matter. Such work should be taken as it is found. And if you think there are sinister implications in that, then there is not much more I can say.

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July 30th, 2018

7/30/2018

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AXES TO GRIND

What is Political Correctness – or PC to abbreviate? The term is a somewhat slippery one and not all that easy to define, since things that are considered to be politically incorrect appear to change from one month to the next, thus making what’s “correct” hard to pin down. But let’s have a bash at it.

In one sense, of course, PC is just a form of good manners – or of giving strangers the benefit of the doubt as to whether or not they are human like yourself. I suppose all cultures display such doubts about strangers, but also most cultures seem to have some kind of prohibition against inhospitality towards strangers, so things in that regard appear to balance each other out. Good manners or (politeness) of this kind seems to throw a blanket endorsement over the rest of the human species – unless, of course, the past behaviour of actual individuals or groups compels you to withdraw that blanket endorsement and become more suspicious or hostile. This desire to give large swathes of people the benefit of the doubt regarding their humanity and treat them decently forms an integral part of Political-Correctness and that, of course, should not be forgotten.

But Political Correctness comes in all shapes and sizes. Melanie Klein spoke of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother – we see the pair quite often in fairy-tales in which the Mother is replaced by the wicked Step-Mother. They are, of course, two different aspects of the same mother, but very young children don’t always see it like that. The Good Mother is the loving kind mother who caters for your desires, while the Bad Mother who doesn’t is perceived as vindictive and cruel for denying you access to the objects of your desires - particularly to the breast. Likewise, there is often a good side and bad side to Political Correctness – and sometimes the two even fuse, becoming good and bad at one and the same time. On one side PC might be like the Lacanian version of Freud’s Ego-Ideal, and on the other Freud’s version of the Superego – which is perceived as vengeful and vindictive - or as placing impossible demands on the Ego. The Superego in this Freudian account becomes a kind respectable vector for unconscious sadistic and punishing impulses acting under the banner of moral standards and values.

When PC becomes too keen on censoring certain forms of activity under whatever pretext, perhaps we can justifiably say that the Ego-Ideal of Political Correctness has given way to its Superego. Whether or not this analysis is literally true, one thing is certain. PC is problematic in many ways – not because it holds up certain ethical norms which the Ego-Ideal freely accedes to, but because it goes far beyond that and imposes a kind of censorship on the way we may happen to think or express ourselves based on certain ‘political’ criteria.

I am very far from endorsing the kind of anti-PC outlook and behaviour which Donald Trump endorses. Let’s face it, Donald Trump is a gross boor who trades on the perception that he is not a member of the ‘effete elite’ of Democrats and liberals who oppose him and that somehow makes him an ‘authentic’ American. What’s so tragic about this whole situation is that for those who are justifiably against the ‘effete elite’ of Democrats and liberals, Trump is offered as the only alternative. Not only that, but Trump is so obviously anti-PC in both its Ego-Ideal and Superego forms that that is seen as some kind of bonus in many people’s eyes. Indeed, as Steve Bannon - of the far right Breitbart News - himself has acknowledged, Political Correctness - and the Identity-Politics associated with it - is one of the biggest assets that the far right can have – which is ironic considering that no-one is more into Identity-Politics than far right white nationalists – though perhaps we’re digressing a little bit here. Trump is only a symptom of political alienation in general, and the Democrats and liberals who oppose him, and their PC values, seem to me to be very much part of that overall problem.

Before I proceed, I would like to expand a little on what I mean by the Ego-Ideal as opposed to the Superego in this context. For Lacan, I believe, the Superego is an unconscious agency whose function is to repress desire (In the name of the Father?) whereas, the Ego-Ideal exerts a conscious pressure towards sublimation. The rest is only relevant here if you are a doctrinaire Freudian which I am not. The difference I want to stress in connection with Political Correctness is the difference between a free and flexible pressure towards treating others as human beings like yourself and respecting the dignity due to them as such, and a rigid and inflexible censoriousness, which we have come to associate with so much politically correct behaviour. I am using the two terms, Ego-Ideal and Superego purely as analogies here, without implying that these psychological agencies are actually involved in the phenomenon under discussion – although, of course, they may very well be.

What especially concerns me about PC is its censorious attitude towards the arts and writing in general which doesn’t appear to conform to a PC agenda. See for example, what has happened at Oxford University recently in connection with an engraved Rudyard Kipling poem called If, which, whatever you think of the poem as a poem, has absolutely nothing racist or imperialist about it. Nevertheless, it has still been defaced – and replaced by a more politically acceptable poem by Maya Angelou - because Kipling was reputedly an imperialist. The censoriousness of this repressive PC tendency stretches from the tradition of dead white heterosexual males to current works of art or the theatre which apparently do not meet up with the requirements of certain self-appointed guardians of Political Correctness. That such censorship invariably misses the point of the work in question, is obvious in connection with a poem recently published by a magazine whose editors have since stated that they now regret having published the poem because it failed to comply with certain standards of decency towards certain members of the public, despite the fact that irony saturated the poem from beginning to end and only an idiot could have taken the poem to be deliberately offensive. Like most people with exes to grind, the guardians of PC values aren’t exactly renowned for their critical nous - or their appreciation of nuance.

In my own work for the theatre, for example, I have come under attack from certain feminists for apparent attitudes towards women which they as women thought were offensive - without them, of course, looking at the context of what was said, or appreciating the role of irony in what I had written. They remind me of a certain Jewish friend with whom I went to see The Merchant of Venice and who thought the play was anti-Semitic because certain characters within it were anti-Semitic and expressed anti-Semitic sentiments. Drama - especially Shakespearean drama - doesn’t always work in the way my friend thought. In that play in particular, the contrast between what is stated in the dialogue and what actually happens reveals a layer of irony which can be easily missed. I myself have written about this in a blog called Shylock The Extremist. (Blog Archive, Jan, 2017)

Mark Twain has, I believe, been banned in American schools, because of the frequent use the N-word in his novels – as if Mark Twain had written Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn according to the principle that the narrator of a novel should be above what he or she is narrating and the characters within the body of the novel itself. The principle, of course, is fallacious and has been exploded on many occasions. Blood Meridian, a brilliant novel by Cormac McCarthy, also uses the N-word rather a lot, but how else is a narrator going to get close to what he or she is narrating and draw the reader into the world of the people being described in the novel without using their language - or indeed 'coming down to their level'? Immediacy is a very definite virtue in a novel and you cannot reproduce it by prissily skirting round certain ‘taboo’ words in either the narrative or the dialogue. If people feel children’s sensibilities need to be protected from, or mollicoddled in the face of, such immediacy in literature, then one may justifiably ask what those children are destined to grow up into.

Another nonsensical PC issue is related to the question of “cultural appropriation”. It was as if writers should only deal with those cultures in which they were brought up. It was also as if all human cultures did not have universal features which allowed them to be shared by people from numerous other cultures as well. Nothing human is alien to humans in general – if they are open enough to experience the world from ‘alien’ perspectives and integrate them into their own world-view. The furore over “cultural appropriation” seems to be specifically designed confine people to their particular cultural ghettos and stop them seeing others from a wider human perspective – which is surely the aim of PC from the point of view of the Ego-Ideal, if not from that of the Superego. The concept of "cultural appropriation" seems to me to follow logically on from Identity Politics, which has always had a strongly reactionary potential. We can see it in the way the "antisemitism" card has been played against Jeremy Corbyn in the last few months in the UK.

I have been rereading Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites recently - which must be one of the most unPC works of literature ever written - and had this to say about it afterwards.

“Funeral Rites contains, I believe, Genet’s most radical treatment of the theme of evil. In his other books he confines his treatment to the criminal underclass, but in F.R. he takes it to an entirely new level, by exploring it in relation to Nazism and the German occupation of France. The book is dedicated to a French Resistance fighter called Jean Decarnin, who is Genet’s lover and who is killed by the Nazis, but it is almost as if Genet himself feels compromised by the fact that his lover stood for all that was good and noble, while his (anti)heroes – Eric, the German Soldier, and his lover Riton of the pro-German French militia - embodied everything that was evil and ignoble – which Genet clearly finds much more sexually and aesthetically compelling. It reminds me of what Blake said about Milton, namely that Milton was a true poet because he was of the Devil’s party in Paradise Lost. Likewise, Genet is a true poet because he is on the side of evil and that is what energises his writing. (The same is true, of course, in the work of William Burroughs.) Indeed, one of Genet’s ‘complaints’ about the French Resistance fighters is precisely that their virtues and nobility are merely conventional. I wonder if this work could be published now without meeting up with a lot of politically-correct resistance. But to explore the dark underside of human nature without moralising is, I believe, one of the functions of art. Without it, it’s like counting using only even numbers and refusing to include the odd.”

Later, I go on to add.

“So how do we go beyond evil - the evil of Nazism just to take one example? For Nietzsche, it is simply a question of going beyond Christianity and the categories of Good and Evil which he identifies with Christianity. But is it really as simple as that? Genet’s answer is much more radical – in that he perceives evil as a universal phenomenon rooted in human nature, not just in Christianity, which simply places it in the domain of the Devil. Genet’s radicality in relation to evil is that it should be absorbed, not simply banished to the margins where Satan abides, and that absorption of evil is a function of the imagination – and art.

For Genet, it almost seems as if the sadomasochism at the heart of genuine evil – like that of the Nazis – should be recognised as part of everyone’s make-up, and not just that of ‘evil people’. For example, as I have learnt quite recently, sadism is a definite impulse in very young children. Masochism, of course, is a kind of sadism directed at oneself through the agency of another person and is probably a later development produced by guilt and a desire to be punished - as opposed to a desire to punish. From that point of view, Riton is a fascinating character in the novel. Everyone, I suspect, harbours within him or herself a Riton whose love for Eric, the German soldier had such a strong element of masochism in it that, while he is being screwed by Eric, he could long “for an increase in pain so to be lost in it.” He could also see himself in the guise of France being buggered by Germany – as if that were another layer of his own masochistic feelings for Eric. These things have to be faced. To react to such things in a fit of politically correct moral indignation seems to me to be completely inappropriate, while to put oneself in Riton’s situation and make that imaginative leap into being Riton himself, however much you might otherwise disapprove of his pro-Nazi behaviour, is a much more appropriate reaction. That’s why I think Genet is such a superb artist. He has taken this particular bull by the horns and turned it into genuinely great art."

Political Correctness seems to want a sanitised, indeed an anaesthetised world, especially in its repressive (Superego) form. It wants a Utopia in which no one is ever offended by what other people might say. As a result, it has become part and parcel of a new Inquisition designed to prevent us from freely expressing ourselves. One of the victims of PC, of course, is class-consciousness and the awareness of the much more real fault-line of class in our society. We would prefer, instead, to talk about how this or that painting might ‘objectify’ women and therefore promote rape. (Where is Camille Paglia when you need her?) Is there an agenda behind these forms of Political Correctness, an agenda promoted by the ruling-class to draw attention away from itself and get us talking about our precious identities instead? One is given to wonder. Certainly, PC is a good diversion, but please don’t tell me that’s where the struggle is finally at.

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July 13th, 2018

7/13/2018

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SHAKESPEARE'S 'RUSH'.

According to George Bernard Shaw, “The Devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purposes.” So let’s see how this works in one particular instance.

“The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and, no sooner, had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait;
On purpose laid to make the taker mad--
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof. and prov’d, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

The first 12 lines of this sonnet have been quoted ad nauseam as somehow exemplifying Shakespeare’s attitude towards the ‘evils’ of lust. The dramatic irony implicit in the last two lines is usually ignored. To take one example, the Conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, in his book, Sexual Desire, cites this sonnet while writing a moralistic diatribe against lust, completely overlooking Shakespeare’s subversion of his own point of view, which is implicit in words “yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” It’s not good enough. The poem is a whole or not a poem at all - a fact that should have entered Scruton’s equation. After all, if Shakespeare had finished the poem in the spirit of the first 12 lines, it wouldn’t have been a poem at all but just a polemic against lust.

Of course, the emotional content of the first 12 lines drives the poem forward. Pointless to speculate why Shakespeare felt as he did about lust at this point of writing the sonnet. Some very subjective reason, no doubt, re-enforced by a sense of guilt, for which his Catholic upbringing was perhaps partly responsible. People really should have had a much healthier attitude regarding the question of lust, since it is really part of the natural order of things. Furthermore, Shakespeare was an artist, who understood that for a poem to be successful, it had to be more than just a polemic. Some people do not read poetry closely enough because they have axes to grind, and they think poetry can be used to prove the point they are making. Roger Scruton writes a moralistic book about sexual desire using the above sonnet to support his position, but, as usual with people with axes to grind, he entirely misses the point of the poem in question.

Let’s try to imagine ourselves as Shakespeare writing this sonnet. This is something which academics and historians of literature, no less than moral philosophers, seem singularly incapable of doing. What sort of mood do you think Shakespeare was in when he started writing this sonnet? It’s 129, one of those with “the Dark Lady”in mind. One thing is certain about the poet, which is evident in the imprecision and irrational violence of the language, and that is that he is not emotionally very stable at the moment of writing the bulk of the sonnet. He has what that wise hippy fool, Danny, in the film, Withnail & I, calls a “rush”. Because our poet has had a bad experience with this thing called “Lust”, he says it is “perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust...”et cetera, et cetera - clearly, not a very balanced perspective on a purely natural human phenomenon. So what would Danny’s advice to Shakespeare be on reading the first 12 lines of this sonnet? “Change down, Man; find your neutral space. You got a rush. It’ll pass. Be seated.” It is as if Shakespeare had just had the sexual equivalent of a bad trip on LSD and is swearing to himself never to take it again, and backing himself up with all sorts of spurious emotional and moral reasons. We’ve all been there. How many times have I come back from a mortifying sexual encounter swearing to myself never to let it happen again? Which of course it always does. But then, that surely is the point of the sonnet.

It was in this reactive mood, then, that Shakespeare wrote the first 12 lines. And, hey, what do you think happened next? He came to the end of that phase of the poem and found that he couldn’t continue, that he had exhausted that particular seam of emotional and moralistic writing. He calmed down, found his ‘neutral space’ - along with a poem he saw needed completing. He probably left it awhile - a few hours, days even - and came back to the poem in a completely different frame of mind, one in which he had attained a certain ironic distance from the original emotion, and this enabled him to finish the poem. “Emotion recollected in tranquillity”- at least as far as the last two lines were concerned.

So much nonsense has been spoken about Shakespeare because it seems when people get up to speak about him they leave their imaginations at home. They even forget the very important fact that he was a dramatist as well as a poet. Shakespeare was a human being subject to same emotional swings as anyone else. But he was also an artist, who knew how to finish a poem. If he had continued writing according to his original intentions, he wouldn’t have been able to finish the poem, or else he would have written one that was so bad he’d have been too embarrassed to show it around to his mates. He had to step back from himself, step back from his ‘rush’, as it were. And it is only because he was able to do so that we have a poem and not just a diatribe.

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THE WILL TO POWER REVISITED

5/6/2018

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THE WILL TO POWER REVISITED

Friedrich Nietzsche is perhaps the most fascinating, and at the same time, baffling, perverse and contrarian philosopher to have ever left his mark on the western philosophical canon. In fact, I am sure he has taken a few leaves out of the Zen handbook, because he obviously knows what the sound of one hand clapping is like. He loves paradoxes, and the idea of erecting a system to imprison his own thought is clearly anathema to him. If you are looking for dialectical methods of thought whereby ideas are neatly packaged and labelled in terms of Theses, Antitheses and Syntheses then perhaps you should look elsewhere than in any book written by Nietzsche. Nietzsche surely believes in contradictions, but he doesn’t believe in ever resolving them in the manner of Hegel or Marx. He is undeniably possessed of genius, but, at the same time, of madness as well. His thought is a hodgepodge of the brilliantly insightful and the batty and absurd, and the attempt to unravel these particular strands of his thought seems an almost impossible task. In fact, he seems to take delight in running rings round his readers. However, I think the effort is worth it, if only to sort out the wheat from the chaff and get him into a clearer perspective - of course based on our own practical priorities and way of looking at things. Nietzsche was an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and did not believe in consistency – a phenomenon he would no doubt say with Emerson was “the hobgoblin of little minds”. But at the same time he should not be taken as some kind of oracle delivering infallible truths from on high. Sometimes he got it right and sometimes he didn’t and we ourselves have to exercise our own critical judgement concerning which bits he got right and which bits he didn’t.
            Here is an example from The Will To Power of something I think he did get right. It comes from his Critique of the Moral Ideal (P. 196). “Very few of us are clearly aware of the fact that when we adopt the standpoint of aspiration, when we say ‘it should be thus’, we commit ourselves to a condemnation of the whole course of events. For nothing is entirely isolated; the least thing has a bearing on the whole; ...When the least thing is met with a critique, the whole is condemned.” For Nietzsche this raises the question of how the whole can be judged by the part, for clearly in all our moral systems, the part is judging the whole. Later he writes, "In the real world, where utterly everything is intertwined and conditioned, to condemn or to think away anything is to condemn or think away everything." You cannot stand above the world. However, this doesn't prevent you from choosing between alternatives or different value-systems, but your choice will not be based on abstract considerations of right or wrong – a la Kant’s Categorical Imperative – but your own subjective and partial orientation. For Nietzsche himself, the choice was between a ‘Slave-Morality’ and a ‘Master Morality’ and the Will to Power is what is ultimately in question.
            It is this insight of Nietzsche’s which I think is quite brilliant. It leads, of course, to moral relativism. One doesn’t have to adopt the same point of view regarding plebeian (or slave) morality versus his own preferred aristocratic (or master) morality, which for all his psychological acumen, are hardly realistic alternatives in the world we actually inhabit. Nietzsche abhorred all sorts of egalitarianism – from Christianity to its – for Nietzsche – modern equivalents like socialism, democracy, anarchism, utilitarianism and so on. His were the ‘noble ideals’, though whether these ideals were those of a world anyone but Nietzsche inhabited is another matter entirely. As I said, he was possessed of genius, and for that we should salute him, but that doesn’t mean he was not possessed of madness as well. And the two, though not identical, are perhaps interconnected. Indeed, the one might have led directly to the other - given the choices that he believed were open to him at the time.
            I personally believe that we should not judge Nietzsche’s accomplishment on his positive (synthetic?) ideas, but on his negative (analytical?) ones. His own preferred kind of morality is not really the issue. Rather, it is the deconstruction of morality per se and his placing it in a relativistic context – as an expression of the 'will to power’, which predisposes individuals and groups to choose this particular moral system over that particular moral system. (Nietzsche’s main gripe was that the one that is chosen becomes the universal form of morality, set in stone and usually reinforced by religion.)
            I am sure Marx would have had his own particular take on this subject. I think he would, at least in terms of deconstructing abstract morality, have agreed with Nietzsche regarding the importance of the Will To Power, which he would have transposed to the class-struggle – i.e., two dogs fighting over the same bone – as I put it elsewhere. Indeed, this was part of his own critique of Max Stirner’s ‘egoistic anarchism’ in German Ideology, namely that egoism has a collective dimension which, for Marx, was expressed in the class-struggle. Of course, Nietzsche would probably recoil from this implication, but it certainly follows from his premises.
            Personally, I think that neither Marx nor Nietzsche is an oracle delivering truths from on high. I would no more trust Marx’s dialectical scenario delivering final victory to the proletariat than I would Nietzsche’s fantasy of an aristocratic master morality. But there you are. The future is another country, as they say, and is certainly not a closed book. Furthermore, I suspect the random plays a much bigger part in historical events than they're given credit for. As Louis MacNeice put it, "World is crazier and more of it than you think." If either Nietzsche or Marx is to continue to have relevance to us, it has to be an ‘us’ that has felt under the surface of their thought for its deconstructive elements and focused on them, rather than their own synthetic solutions. Nietzsche is still very relevant, but only for the questions he asked and not for the answers he thought he had found.

Further into THE WILL TO POWER, one becomes much more aware of Nietzsche's actual philosophical acumen and how radical his rejection of the whole western philosophical canon since Plato was. All those concepts like Substance, Subjectivity, Objectivity, Mind, Matter, Consciousness, Free Will, Truth, Identity (The identical case uniting disparate phenomena - like "canine" for "Fido" and "Rover".) Kant's opposition between Appearance and the Thing-In-Itself, Dialectics, Reason, Logic, Scientific Method, "the Cult of Objectivity", et cetera. All these things can be subsumed under the term Morality for Nietzsche - saying what you think, speaking your mind, honesty, truthfulness, sincerity, factuality and so forth. Nietzsche deconstructs everything philosophers have ever believed in. Indeed, it's as if philosophers were not human beings serving an agenda, but something like God, raised above everything and impartially seeing everything from the point of view of the whole. Underlying this quest for truth is the Will To Power and the imposition of points of view on the world which are considered 'appropriate' to it.
For this reason, Nietzsche prefers the Sophists to Socrates. Personally, I always had a soft spot for good old Thrasymachus when he contradicted Socrates pontificating about Justice, saying that Justice was what was in the interest of the stronger party or the powerful. Marx would probably have agreed. Hadn't he said, even earlier than Nietzsche that the ruling ideas were the ideas of the ruling-class of their time. And, though Nietzsche was no Marxist, he would probably have agreed with him. For this reason. Nietzsche asks the very pertinent question, namely "Who do ideas serve?" He wanted them to serve aristocratic interests, to end the slave-morality which was so intent on tearing down all notions of a higher culture for the sake of ideas like equality, ideas which were rooted in resentment and the lowest instincts of 'the mob'. Hence his diatribes against socialism, anarchism, democracy, utilitarianism and so forth, all deriving from the slave-mentality which Christianity had earlier pandered to.
He was, of course, not looking at the same world that Marx had looked at, and the distorting mirror is clear in both cases. Marx also saw the instincts involved, but he saw them in purely class-terms, whereby two classes faced one another across the unbridgeable divide of Capital and the Capitalist system of exploitation. Nietzsche was right from the psychological point of view, but perhaps not from the wider point of view of history itself, which has rendered aristocracies pretty irrelevant to the central struggle of class.
Nevertheless, though Marx was more in tune with the broader historical currents than Nietzsche, Marxists themselves are much more prone to idealising the working-class than Nietzscheans might be, and this is surely something in Nietzsche's favour. For, compared to Marx, Nietzsche saw concrete human beings - warts and all, as it were - whereas Marx, the dialectician, saw only abstract classes facing each other across a historic divide. (He was right, of course, but at what cost in terms of actual concrete phenomena - outwith his dialectic, which, after all, is a schema imposed on, rather than derived from, reality?) That Nietzsche was disgusted with most of what he saw does not invalidate what he says. He was a lot more of a realist regarding actual people as opposed to broad swathes of people or populations than Marx was. And that should surely be made part of the final equation.

But coming back in a more critical vein to Nietzsche's actual thought, one is given to wonder how Nietzsche might have seen things if he himself had been one of the slaves he despised. After all, being a slave was a pure accident of fate; nothing else. He did have a tendency to dichotomise things and paint them in black and white. One doesn't have to idealise slaves (or peasants or workers) to see them as products of a master/slave system which engenders a slave-morality in the slaves as opposed to a master-morality in the masters. And who knows but that if that system came to an end, the slave-morality of the slaves would also come to an end along with the master-morality of the masters. Of course, the slave-morality is destructive, vindictive, iconoclastic, resentful of privilege and all forms of 'higher culture', but what Nietzsche proposes is its perpetuation not its solution. It's as if. for him, slaves were biologically preprogrammed to be nothing but slaves and not full human beings. His concept of "The Will To Power" translated into political and socio-economic terms leaves out of account power as an enabling phenomenon as opposed to power as a disabling phenomenon directed at others – which is basically what state-power is. In Spanish, the term for power is "poder", but it is used both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, it may imply power over others. As a verb it means "to be able" - which has different connotations entirely. Which of these interpretations of the term "power" is Nietzsche employing when he uses it in phrases like "the Will to Power"? It's something, I feel, that we ought to be told.

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HUSSERL & POETRY

8/19/2017

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HUSSERL & POETRY

Edmund Husserl did not invent Phenomenology. After all, Hegel had written a book called Phenomenology of Mind (or Spirit) more than 100 years earlier. But Hegel’s book was a travesty, written with the intention of bamboozling readers into believing that history and human activity had a transcendent purpose and was unconsciously striving towards the fulfilment of that purpose. Husserl was the first to take Phenomenology seriously as a branch of philosophy in its own right, and get down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of describing what it actually means to be conscious and have ideas. His main book was simply called Ideas. After Husserl, of course, came Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, et al, who took Phenomenology in directions he himself would probably not have considered legitimate. However I don’t want to get into those areas of controversy.
            Ideas is a fascinating book, but extremely difficult to follow and I can only discuss here those aspects of it that interested me while I was reading it. Curiously enough, both Heidegger and Sartre are easier to follow, because they are I think imposing their own vision on the practise of Phenomenology – a vision which has wider philosophical implications. There’s is a more ‘moral’ approach, and much less technical. Husserl actually wants to describe as closely as possible the structures of consciousness. He is much more Kantian than Hegelian in that he limits his aims as Kant did when he discussed the properties and limits of Reason. Reason, of course, was a god to Hegel - much less so to Kant, whose concern was to determine its limits.
            When I read Husserl, I get a very strong idea of what a complex and multi-layered ‘thing’ consciousness is. (In my own life, I am very aware of this in relation to memory – some of whose facets do not connect at all up to others!) Of course, consciousness is not a thing at all. It constitutes ‘things’, as Husserl himself recognised, and the various aspects of things so constituted are always ‘ideas’. Things and their properties exist only in the realm of phenomena and we never unravel the thing as it is in itself – as Kant recognised. Perhaps the only thing we can have essential insight into is consciousness and that is precisely because it is not a thing. The natural sciences, for instance, deal largely with ‘things’. When they treat consciousness as a thing, they are making a big category-mistake. Consciousness grounds the thinginess of things and their ostensible properties; it is the medium itself whereby things come to be present to itself. It is therefore not simply one thing amongst many things, although it is often treated as such. Husserl also recognises the importance of belief in the way we experience the world – which he might call its doxic dimension. We couldn’t experience the world in any other way. That, of course, is not the same as saying that is how things are in themselves, for it is impossible to say how things are in themselves. We just bracket the world off and make various working assumptions about it which have proved efficacious up to now. (Shades of David Hume, I think!)
            Husserl also says that if you ‘do Phenomenology’, you have to exclude everything that isn’t relevant to it or doesn’t help you unravel the essential structures of consciousness. In other words, you are engaged in what he calls a “phenomenological reduction”, which suspends all non-phenomenological points of view and perspectives – i.e., those from the natural sciences, psychology, culture and so on. And I think he is right. For me, the most important section of Ideas is connected to the question of Noesis  and Noema  I suppose you could equate Noesis with the process of thinking itself and Noema with the object of thought – but of course nothing is ever so simple, since there would be no process of thinking without any objects of thought and vice versa; the two go hand in hand. That is to say that if we are thinking we are always thinking of something. Language can be unhelpfully ambiguous here because the word “thought” can refer to both the process of thinking and its object – e.g., I thought (verb) about you and I had a thought (noun) about you. Words like judgement are even more ambiguous. - e.g., he sat in judgement and his judgement was damning. The important thing to remember is that consciousness has both of these aspects which are distinct and yet inseparable and sometimes you have to penetrate the fog of ordinary language to get to grips with the actual ideas being expressed by using a special terminology – like Noesis (or Noetic) and Noema (or Noematic).
            Husserl’s discussion is so full of fiendish ramifications and complexities that I am not going to even attempt to deal with it here. But I couldn’t help noticing how it might apply to such activities as writing poetry or painting pictures, both of which are obviously processes with certain objects in view. Husserl is big on intentionality, but I have often noticed how my own intentions change in the process of writing a poem, so that the object of the poem to start with may not be the object of the poem when it is finished. This perhaps suggests that what we are dealing with is highly fluid and also perhaps full of unconscious pressures which influence consciousness in ways Husserl may not have taken into account - since he does want to exclude all psychological elements. Maybe he’s right; maybe he’s wrong, but it would still be interesting to see how unconscious processes impact on consciousness in the process of thinking and arriving at the final product of thought. This avoidance seems to me to be rather typical of most writers in the existentialist and phenomenological tradition.
            Husserl is also a great advocate of the role of the ego in conscious activity. It is there at the heart of it, according to him. In Sartre, for instance, the ego, is posited by consciousness like any other object of thought. It is not fundamental. But, of course, it all depends on what you mean by the ego. You often hear people saying “So and so has too much ego!” And the word “ego” here seems to have negative connotations. “Oh, if only his ego didn’t get in the way!” So there seems to be a good “ego” and a bad “ego”. Husserl’s “ego” is obviously a ‘good’ one – or at least necessary. It accompanies every thought and there is no getting away from it. Even animals have an ‘ego’ in this sense. They fight their corner. They defend their territories. They do their best to avoid being killed. And when they panic or stampede it’s every animal for itself. They seem to join together because it is advantageous to each member of the group to do so. This form of ‘egoistic’ behaviour is obviously not consciously posited in the way Sartre’s ego is posited. It’s much more primal and fundamental, which is perhaps why I think Husserl is right rather than Sartre. The ego does accompany conscious activity; it is there at its very heart. This message may not be very palatable to some people, who think we should be altruistic rather than egoistic, but really it has nothing to do with either altruism or egoism. It simply states that we are at the centre of ourselves, and this "we" goes with everything we are and do. And to deny that is to deny something very fundamental in our constitution. It doesn’t stop us being altruistic. After all, animals can be altruistic and have empathy as well, just like very young children can. This has nothing to do with ethics. It has to do with phenomenology instead, and ethics cannot and should not impinge on that; it should be bracketed off like everything else that is not purely phenomenological.
Anyway, back to poetry and Husserl’s possible relevance to it. When I think of poetry as a practising poet, I do not just think of it simply in terms of finished products, or the Canon – that is to say a body of ‘canonical’ works compiled by some kind of critical priesthood – as many commentarians of an academic persuasion would have us believe. I also think of it in terms of a process in which poetry is not only being written now, but is also a tradition which is undergoing transformation, fertilised by many sources and many other traditions. while still retaining its own distinctiveness. Irrespective of what T.S.Eliot said on this subject, the individual poet impacts on the tradition as much as the tradition impacts on the individual poet. The Tradition, in other words, is something that is inventing and reinventing itself as it goes along through whatever poetic random-mutations might emerge to its benefit. And these 'random mutations' are always the product of individuals.
            Perhaps we should draw more explicitly on Husserl here and talk in terms of Poesis (& Poetic) and Poema (& Poematic), the one referring to the process of making poetry and the other to the body of poems which is the end-product of that process and of course makes up 'the Tradition'. Traditional criticism seems only able to talk in terms of the latter, because, well it is familiar, and they feel safe doing so. Poets today still engage with that tradition (and other traditions) in their own inimical ways, and they are still being excluded from it because in the eyes of these Poematic critics they fail to pass muster and don’t meet up to expectations rooted entirely in what has already been produced. Criticism needs to free itself from these expectations and become much more open to other emergent possibilities in which we see Poesis impacting much more strongly on Poema. However, I fear they will continue to police new forms of poetry and new ways of writing it that don’t fit their preconceptions, just as they have up to now. And there’s not much poets can do about that until a new, more open-minded generation of critics emerges.
            I don’t think I can say too much more about this. This essay started off about Husserl and I seem to have strayed from my intended subject rather a lot. But only because Husserl’s own ideas – especially about Noesis and Noema - have stimulated me to apply them elsewhere – as Poesis and Poema. I apologise for this. It is, however, important that our thinking about poetry is fertilised from many unexpected quarters and Husserl’s, it has to be said, is a very fertile quarter indeed.

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HUSSERL & POETRY

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(The case of Gerard Manley Hopkins)