Showing posts with label roland barthes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roland barthes. Show all posts

26 Feb 2024

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 2)

 
Cover of the original German edition (2007) [a]
 
 
I.

According to Byung-Chul Han: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental characteristic of the Western soul, even of Western thinking." [48] 
 
Hegel, for example, is bored by inertia and hates the heaviness of matter: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental trait of Hegel's 'spirit'." [49]
 
And even Zarathustra was opposed to the Spirit of Gravity and wished to see young people become light of foot like dancers and for dancers to become birdlike, so that they may experience the incredible sensation of taking flight [b]. Weighed down by the Spirit of Gravity, they are prevented from ever loving themselves and discovering their own goodness, says Nietzsche. 
 
Of course, this all goes back to Plato who conceived of the human soul as striving towards the divine and infinite: "Its feathered wings allow it to shed its heaviness and float upwards towards the gods [...]" [50]

Far Eastern thinking, by contrast, "is pro-gravitational [...] insofar as it seeks to accomodate itself to the weight of the world" [51], rather than inciting resistance. Keep your feet on the ground seems to be the message.
 
 
II. 

The sea was angry that day my friends ... But that's okay, because maritime adventure is another popular metaphor in Western philosophy: "Conquering stormy seas is seen as a heroic undertaking." [56] 
 
Both Hegel and Nietzsche love to compare thinking to setting out on an endless ocean; for the former - perhaps the most hydrophobic of all philosophers - this requires real courage; for water is the most mendacious of all elements "because it permanently changes its form, because it does not have a form of its own at all" [57] [c] and fails, unlike solid ground, to offer stability (an important aspect of essence):
 
"Western thinking has its source in a desire for solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat." [58]
 
Kant also relies on a metaphor of seafaring to illustrate his concept of thinking; he trusts in a good captain to navigate with knowledge and to keep the boat clear of dangers: 
 
"The Kantian art of helmsmanship conquers the sea by framing it with a system of principles and fully charting it with coordinates." [58]
 
Reason will triumph over the darkness of the oceanic depths, tame the wild waves, and keep the ship off the rocks. Even Heidegger subscribes to this, although he argues for the importance of exposing thought to the abysmal sea.
 
This is not a very Chinese way of thinking: for Chinese philosophers the mind is as great as the sea and in fact they form a unity. Thus, the sea is no threat to man: "Someone who is as big as the world will not be hindered or impeded by anything in the world." [62] 
 
There's no angst in the Chinese model; it's far more carefree and effortless: "You are effortless when you do not set anything against the world, when you fully unite with it." [62] 
 
Thus, as Han concludes: "Chinese thinking involves an altogether different relationship to the world; it is characterized by a deep trust in the world" [63] - and a love of water, in which is seen the highest goodness:

"Because it lacks all solidity, water does not exercise any coercion. It is yielding and flexible. Thus, it does not encounter any resistance. As it does not assert itself, does not resist anything, does not oppose anything, it does not compete in strife." [64] [d]
 
Water, we might say, seduces, although this is not a term that Han uses. He concludes this interesting chapter on land and sea (and ways of thinking) with a convenient summary of what has been discussed:
 
"For the Chinese, the sea is not a symbol of chaos or the abyss, nor is it a mysterious place that lures adventurers. It is neither the sea of Odysseus nor that of Kant and Hegel. It is a place of in-difference, of the unbounded and inexhaustible. In the Far East, the transition from land to sea is not experienced as a transition from a firm ground to an unstable support. It is a transition from the limited to the inexhaustible and comprehensive, from difference to in-difference, from fulless to emptiness, from presencing to absencing, from holding fast to releasement (Gelassenheit). This is true not only of Daoism but also of Zen Buddhism. The moment of satori (illumination) is one of a great transition that leads to an oceanic feeling." [68-69] [e] 
 
Han continues:
 
"For the Chinese, water, or the sea, is the symbol for a thinking or a behaviour that, from moment to moment, adapts and snuggles up to the transforming world [...] The world is not abysmal. It is merely manifold in its manifestations. It is not a being but a path that permanently changes course. Far Eastern thought does not circle around identity. Transformations and change are not felt to be a threat. They just represent the natural course of things, to which one needs to adapt." [69]
 
The Chinese sage does not feel the need to set sail and conquer the world - he's happy just to snuggle up to the latter and be shaped by it ... One is almost tempted to say: Like a woman [f]


III.
 
Because we are so caught up in grammar - the metaphysics or presence of God within language - it makes it very hard for a Westerner ever to really think or speak or see the world like someone from the Far East. 
 
Han's native Korean, for example, doesn't presuppose an active subject - in fact the subject is often left out of things altogether, which is problematic for Westerners who find it hard to conceive of a subject-less happening; we have to have an actor behind every action (be it a human actor or a god) [g]
 
Han writes: "The subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master." [81] What would be noble, from a Buddhist perspective, would be to escape this delusion (and subjectivity) entirely.    
 
Would it be noble also to remain silent? Confucius often wished to remain silent. But Han is at pains to point out that Confucius's silence "does not aim at the unsayable, the mystery that cannot captured by language" [82]. Nor does he want to remain schtum because he thinks language is insufficient "and cannot signify its object adequately" [82]
 
In fact, the unsayable - that which escapes language - "is not a theme in Far Eastern thinking" [82] - it's a Western thing: "Language is renounced in favour of a remainder that can be expressed only in song" [82], for example. Or silence is affirmed as the only thing that can do justice to this extralinguistic residue (be it metaphysial, asthetic, or ethical in character). 
 
The silence of Zen masters is an empty silence; it does not refer to anything, but is designed to make others think about the reality of the world, which just is as it is, neither secret nor mysterious; "there are no murky depths" [83] for philosophers or psychoanalysts to uncover or root around in like pigs in search of truffles.   
 
 
IV.
 
The final chapter of Han's book is on greeting and bowing, i.e., forms of friendliness - although, interestingly, he suggests that originally to greet someone "must have involved emitting a dark, gutteral, threatening sound" [90], as, etymologically, the word means to attack, provoke, or unsettle.
 
Somehow, even as a (slightly shy but also somewhat cheeky) three-year old, I already knew this; which is why I was not just being friendly when I stood on my front garden wall and greeted strangers passing by [h].   
 
Han writes:
 
"Initially, the other represents a possible threat and danger to my existence. The other has an usettling effect. The gutteral sound of gruozen is probably an immediate reaction to the primordial threat posed by the other, another human being. By emmitting a gutteral, threatening sound I challenge the other to fight." [91]  
 
Eventually, once there's a degree of mutual recognition, the greeting becomes more of a form of reassurance; it tells the other that they are accepted and that you mean no harm to them. But, crucially, both parties remain separate; a greeting does not instantly or automatically create intimacy; the greeter greets the other across a pathos of distance and from within their own essence. 
 
Offering a friendly greeting lets the other be in their essential otherness - it's not aiming at some form of merger; it says I'm me and you're you. But the Japanese do not verbally greet with a grunt, they bow ...
 
According to Han, bowing is all about absencing oneself from the scene; there's no exchange of gaze or mutual sizing up. In a deep bow, parties form a flat plane between them, levelling out difference. Neither party bows to the other, they bow rather into the empty space between them. Technically speaking, no one is greeting or being greeted; and no one is subjugated or subjugating. 
 
Han writes: "A deep bow does not mediate between persons, does not reconcile anyone with anyone else. Rather, it empties and de-internalizes those involved into absencing individuals." [98]

And that's why bowing is so philosophically important; it's not just a form of politeness, but a way of negating essence and identity [i].


Notes
 
[a] I am using the English translation of this work by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steur as Absence, (Polity Press, 2023) - all page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.  
 
[b] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'On the Spirit of Gravity'. 
      Readers who are interested might also like to see my post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.
 
[c] Later, Han will note that whilst water may not have a form of its own, "it is anything but 'amorphous'. It always has a shape, because it takes the form of the other in order to unfold. It is friendly because [...] it snuggles up to any form." [64]

[d] This way of thinking isn't entirely unknown in the West - one thinks, for example, of Henry Miller's insistence on loving everything that flows - but, on the whole, it's undoubtedly true that we in the West prefer things to be dry and solid. Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 7 June 2013: click here.

[e] Again, this line of thought is not entirely alien to Western thinkers; Zarathustra, for example, tells his followers that in order to be overhuman they must become a sea so as not to be defiled by the polluted rivers of the all too human world, although, admittedly, that's not not quite the same thing as the oceanic feeling of oneness that Far Eastern philosophers champion and Han concludes that Nietzsche - for all his attempted reversal of Western metaphysics - "remained a Western thinker" [70]
      Interestingly, Freud - another great Western thinker - argues that (if it exists) the oceanic feeling is a primitive form of egoism preserved from infancy.     

[f] I'll let readers decide whether that's a  good or bad thing, but would remind those in need of reminding that even Nietzsche toyed with the supposition that truth might be a woman; see the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. If that's the case, then that pretty much changes everything; no phallogocentic certainty; no solid foundations or fixed forms, etc. (Again, I'll let readers decide whether this would be for better or for worse.) 

[g] Han notes: "For Asian aesthetic sensibility, something that happens without a subject being involved, without the imprint of a doing, is both noble and beautiful. The imprint of a subjective act is a typically Western motif." [84] 
      Nietzsche, of course, attempted to think deeds without an actor, but, says Han, he was unable to "turn from the philosophy of doing and power to the philosophy of happening" [85], which is why he remained very much a Western thinker and "more or less attached to subjectivity" [85].
      As for Heidegger, whilst he "may have repeatedly allowed himself to be touched by Far Eastern thinking" [88], he also remained in many respects a Western thinker attached to the idea of essence. And if he frequently used the trope of the way, his way "differs from the way as dao" [88]. Ultimately, Heidegger's being is a bit more mysterious and withdrawn than the being-so of Eastern thinking, which is what we might call everyday immanence.   

[h] See the post entitled 'Say Hello Then!' (3 Aug 2018): click here.
 
[i] I'm pretty sure Roland Barthes recognised this in L'Empire des Signes (1970), though I'm not sure Larry David fully appreciated this in episode 7 of season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011). See the post entitled 'Shit Bow: Larry David and Roland Barthes on the Art of Japanese Etiquette' (26 Oct 2017): click here
 
 
To read part 1 of this post, please click here


25 Nov 2023

Silence is Violence (Or How Wokeism Restricts Freedom by Compelling Speech)

 
 
I. 
 
I don't know who came up with the slogan Silence is Violence, but it's certainly pithy - as an effective slogan should be.
 
In effect, it's a radical extension of the old idea qui tacet consentire videtur and powerfully conveys the contentious arguement that refusing to speak up against racism, for example, is tantamount not merely to lending one's support to discrimination and oppression, but is an act of violence in and of itself.
 
However, as a reader of Roland Barthes, I have long subscribed to the idea that fascism compels speech [1] and therefore have real concerns with the slogan silence is violence - and with the people who chant it in all seriousness (often having failed to think the idea through).
 
In brief: my worry is that the same kind of people who censor or restrict certain forms of speech on the one hand, now also wish to disallow the right to silence on the other hand; insisting that we must speak - although only in an approved manner [2].
 
 
II.
 
Of course, compelled speech has long troubled civil-liberties campaigners and not just Barthesians like me who would wish to keep the option of strategic non-discourse on the table. 
 
The fact that woke activists fail to recognise the inherent authoritarianism of forcing people to identify themselves, express their views, and confess their feelings - so long as they conform to what now passes for moral and political orthodoxy - is certainly ironic (to say the least).
 
And writers including George Orwell and Michel Foucalt must be spinning in their graves ...  
  
 
Notes
 
[1] Roland Barthes, 'Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977', trans. Richard Howard, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 3-16. Published by the MIT Press. This text can be accessed via JSTOR: click here
      I am referring to the paragraph in which Barthes says: "But language - the performance of a language system - is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech." The reason for this, of course, is that speech acts don't take place in a vacuum; they unfold within the bounds of power (and very often enter into the service of power).       
 
[2] Mick Hume summarises all this as follows:
      "The slogan 'Silence is Violence' does not only mean that you must speak out, but that you must follow the correct script. You are free to say exactly what everybody else is saying, and say it loud. Free speech must always involve the right to offend, to speak what you believe to be true regardless of what others think. The flip side of free speech is that you must have the right to be silent when you choose - particularly when somebody is trying to compel you to speak as instructed."
      See his article 'No, silence is not violence', Spiked (16th June 2020): click here.   


24 Aug 2023

I on Sports: One Guy's Opinion of Football as a Televised Global Spectacle


 
According to Roland Barthes, professional sport in general - and perhaps football in particular - is a modern phenomenon cast in the ancestral form of spectacle:
 
"At certain periods, in certain societies, the theatre has had a major social function: it collected the entire city within a shared experience: the knowledge of its own passions. Today it is sport that in its way performs this function. Except that the city has enlarged: it is no longer a town, it is a country, often even, so to speak, the whole world ..." [1]
 
That's true, I suppose - and even more so now, 60-odd years after Barthes was writing, when football is played, watched, and talked about in almost every corner of the planet; from Timbuktu to Tipperary. 
 
Only the Olympics comes close to capturing the huge global audience that the World Cup attracts every four years; we're quite literally speaking about billions of (mostly poor) people enthralled by the sight of 22 millionaire-idiots kicking a ball about for 90 minutes in the attempt to score a goal. 
 
It's arguable, of course, that the fans in the stadium are more than mere spectators; that everything that the players on the pitch experience, they also experience; that unlike theatre or cinema goers, football supporters actively participate in the spectacle and may even help to determine the outcome of the game. 
 
But then, the vast majority of fans are not actually pitchside; they're watching the game on TV and I would suggest that's a whole different kettle of fish; this is football that is no longer sport in the old (noble) sense of the term, but sport as choreographed entertainment and commercial product; sport in an age of hyperreality and hypercapitalism.
 
The agony and the ecstasy of the football fan is not so much liberated any longer, as cynically exploited and I woud suggest that the game has now lost its beauty, its innocence, and its meaning. But then, as Sam Malone would say: This has been just one guy's opinion ... [2]
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Roland Barthes, What Is Sport? trans. Richard Howard, (Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 58-59.  

[2] See Cheers, season 6, episode 2, 'I on Sports' (Feb 1988), dir. James Burrows: click here to see all of Sam's sports editorials. 

 
For a related post to this one on football and the (lost) art of time-wasting, click here


25 Apr 2023

Mourning Post: with Reference to Roland Barthes's Journal de Deuil

A favourite photo of my mother
(taken in 1947, aged 21)
 
 
"Does being able to live without someone you loved 
mean you loved her less than you thought ...?" 
 
 
I.
 
There are some books we love immediately upon first reading; and there are other books which it takes time (and several readings) to fall in love with. 
 
Then there are books like Roland Barthes's Journal de deuil (2009) [a] which one only begins to appreciate once one has lived through a similar experience as the author - in this case, the death of a mother.
 
 
II.
 
The day after his mother's death, in October 1977, Barthes began assembling notes written on quartered slips of paper in which he reflected on his sadness, sense of loss, and the fact that modern society seems to leave no time or space in which to express one's grief; as soon as someone dies, there's a frenzied attempt to move on and the bereaved are encouraged to get over it, as if they have a minor illness [b]
 
During the following two years, Barthes wrote over 300 of these notes, the contents of which eventually being published in the form of a mourning diary
 
I do not here wish to present an overview of these fragments of text, but simply comment on those ideas which most resonate with me at this time and express my agreement with Barthes that the individual should insist on their right to mourn; for it is also the right to "the loving relation it implies" [55]
 
In a nutshell, dear reader, don't let your suffering be stolen from you ... [c]
 
Note: the titles supplied below are mine.
 
 
III.
 
On the Corpse Bride
 
There was, I would suggest, something of the same high degree of intimacy between Roland Barthes and his mother as between D. H. Lawrence and his. 
 
Thus, for example, the opening note of the former's Mourning Diary which suggests that the first night grieving for one's mother is comparable in terms of its passion and emotional intensity to a wedding night, reminds me of the opening verse from one of the latter's early poems:

"My love looks like a girl tonight,
      But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
      Are not gold,
But threaded with filigree silver,
      And uncanny cold."
 
The same poem concludes: 

"Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams 
      Of perfect things.
She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,
      And her dead mouth sings ..." [d]
 
 
On the Maternal Body
 
This first note is followed by one written the next day in which Barthes, who was homosexual, counters the accusation that he has never known a woman's body: "I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying." [4]    
 
Me too: and it's only now that I stop to think of the strangeness of this fact; that one was fated to care for the body one was born of when that body approached its end and that from out of the death of this maternal body one is somehow issued anew. 
 
To quote from Lawrence once more: "My little love, my dearest / Twice you have issued me / Once from your womb, sweet mother / Once from your soul ..." [e]
 
 
On Posthumous Desire
 
The fifth fragment dated 29 October is one of the most astonishing: it exactly summarises my position and how I feel. No commentary is required, it just needs quoting in full:

"The desires I had before her death (while she was sick) can no longer be fulfilled, for that would mean it is her death that allows me to fulfill them - her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death." [18] [f]
 
 
On Turning Life (and Death) into Literature 
 
I understand why Barthes didn't want to discuss his mother's life, let alone write about her death, for fear of "making literature out of it" [22]
 
However, as a writer, he just couldn't help himself - and neither can I. 
 
For like Barthes, I recognise that literature originates with a death - the death of a porcupine, for example, or perhaps even the death of the author - and that Walter Benjamin was right to say that what we ultimately seek in art is the knowledge of an event that is denied to us in reality. [g]   
 
 
On Last Words
 
Many people about to die do so in silence, particularly if, like my mother, Alzheimer's robbed them of their ability to communicate years earlier. 
 
And I'm not sure there's anything further to say to the dying beyond a certain point; kind gestures - such as a smile, a kiss, a squeeze of the hand - seem to matter more at the very end. 
 
Having said that, the romantic notion of last words - one which "falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes" [h] remains ingrained within our culture and even Barthes finds himself often thinking of his mother's words spoken "in the breath of her agony" [40].
 
Similarly, I find the final two words spoken to me by my mother constantly recurring; the first a word of greeting and the second one of recognition: Hello Stephen. The memory of these words will, I trust, always move me. [i]    
 
 
On Courage
 
Barthes is right: mourning doesn't require courage; the time for courage is when your mother is sick and requires care; when you witness her suffering, her sadness, her confusion and have to conceal your tears (or, as in my case, control your anger and frustration). 
 
 
On Absence [I]
 
Barthes is struck by the painful nature of absence; that it is not so much a lack, as a wound. And struck also by the fact that, with his mother gone, he no longer has anyone to announce his arrival to (or greet him) when he gets home. 
 
Again, I understand this perfectly. But, luckily, I have Cat for company and whilst cats may or may not understand what it is to mourn, they certainly know when we are sad, depressed, or anxious and act accordingly (i.e., attempt to comfort us).   
 
 
On Absence [II] 
 
Everytime I go upstairs and look into my mother's room, "there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realisation that she no longer exists, she no longer exists ..." [78] 
 
And I realise also that the dead are all equally dead and gone; it doesn't matter if they died two months ago, like my mother, 36 years ago like Barthes's maman, or two millennia ago like that Siberian princess preserved in ice. 
 
Death is a flat and timeless ontological plane upon which nothing matters and nothing changes and to know this - to know that the dead are eternally and absolutely dead - is also to know that we too "will die forever and completely" [119] [j].    
 
 
On the Truth of Mourning
 
The fragment dated 28 May, 1978, is another that is worth quoting in full:   
 
"The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that  maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time)."

Unfortunately, being 60 - the same age as Barthes when he wrote this - there's not even a great deal of time any longer separating me from death (although, hopefully, I'll not be hit by a laundry van in the near future) [k].  
 
But this tragic realisation enables one to understand why it was Nietzsche taught his readers not to pray, but to bless ...
 
 
On Some Sunny Day
 
In a very brief hand-scribbled note left for me and my sister, my mother expressed her hope that, one day, we'd meet again. I don't think that's very likely (or even very desirable; the thought of personal immortality is one I find laughable and abhorrent) [l].
 
But, like Marcel Proust, Barthes is devastated by the fact his mother has died and echoes the author of À la recherche du temps perdu when he writes: "If I were sure of meeting Maman again, I'd die right away." [157]
 
 
On Acedia
 
As we know, the ancient Greeks had a word for everything, including that state of listless indifference in which the heart slowly contracts and hardens: ἀκηδία - or, as we write in Latinised modern English, acedia (or accidie). 
 
It's a concept that Christian theologians borrowed and developed in moral terms; and it's a concept that many writers in the 20th century seemed to have a penchant for, though tending to discuss it as a psychological (or existential) phenomenon. Aldous Huxley, for example, wrote an essay on the subject and concluded that it was one of the main afflictions of the modern age [m].
 
Walter Benjamin also gave acedia an important place within his literary criticism, describing it as an indolence of the heart [n]; whilst Barthes, writing in his Mourning Diary, notes that whilst he believed that following his mother's death there would be a liberation in kindness, what has actually happened is he finds himself "unable to invest lovingly in any other being" [118].
 
In a later fragment, he defines acedia as a form of desolating egoism and writes:
 
"Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life - or love." [178]            
 
Again, it pains to me say, but I know exactly what he means ...  


Maintaining the Quotidian
 
When my mother died, I thought I'd want to flee the house; to get out as often as possible and meet as many people as possible; to get back into the world
 
But, two months on, I've been nowhere and seen no one and I think Barthes provides a clue as to why this is; one tries to continue living - for a while at least - as if she were still here and according not so much to her values, but her needs. 
 
By maintaining the household order (or what Barthes terms the domestic quotidian) - cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. - one shares in the activities that shaped her life and it's a way of remembering and silently conversing with her [o].


Anti-Mourning
 
Q: What is "the furthest from, the most antipathetic to" [196] mourning in gentle silence? 
 
A: Reading Le Monde, "in its acid and well-informed tactics" [196], says Barthes, writing in 1978; checking social media, in its malevolent toxicity, say I, here in 2023.   

 
In Memory / Filial Piety
 
Like Sade, Barthes has no concern for posterity; no desire to be read and remembered after he's dead; no wish for a monument. He is, he says, perfectly content to vanish completely [p].
 
However, Barthes cannot accept that this should be the case for his mother; "perhaps because she has not written and her memory depends entirely on me" [234]

That's why I'm writing this post (and those related to it); I would also like my mother's kindness and modesty to be recorded. As I said at her funeral [q], if I don't speak up for her, no one will (certainly not my sister). 
 
But as Barthes's translator Richard Howard notes, perhaps the ultimate task of every son is neither to bury nor sing the praises his mother, but to show a little gratitude; "to exalt her exceptional contribution to his own happiness" [260].   
 
 
Notes
 
[a] The English edition of this work by Barthes was translated by Richard Howard as Mourning Diary and published by Hill and Wang in 2010. All page numbers in the post refer to this edition. 
      Arguably, it might have been better to have come up with an alternative title. For in a note of November 30, 1977, Barthes instructs: "Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering." For Barthes, this Proustian notion of suffering is that which remains (ever present) when emotivity passes. See pp. 73 and 103-04.   
 
[b] Barthes writes in the note dated 20 July, 1978, on p. 163, that he finds the idea of taking an anti-depressant drug to help him overcome his grief shameful; as if suffering were a disease, rather than something essential. 
 
[c] In a fragment on p. 71 of the Mourning Diary, dated 29 November, 1977, Barthes writes: "I can't endure seeing my suffering being reduced - being generalized - (à la Kierkegaard): it's as if it were being stolen from me." 
      However, he later realises the importance of transforming suffering from a static stage to a fluid state. See the fragment dated 13 June, 1978, on p. 142.
 
[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bride', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 65-66.  

[e] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin Mother', in The Poems, pp. 66.
 
[f] See also the fragment dated 16 November, 1977 on p. 53: "Sometimes roused by desires [...] but they're desires of before - somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before."
 
[g] Later in his Mourning Diary, Barthes will admit that writing is his salvation and that depression is when "in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing". 
      See the fragments dated 21 November, 1977 on pp. 59 and 62. See also the fragment on p. 105 dated 23 March 1978 in which Barthes speaks of integrating his suffering with his writing in his book on photography (Camera Lucida). And finally, see the notes dated 17 and 18 of January, 1979, on pp. 224-225, in which Barthes admits that since his mother's death he has no desire to construct anything new except in writing.    
 
[h] Michael Erard, 'What People Actually Say Before They Die', The Atlantic (16 Jan 2019): click here.

[i] Having said that, Barthes acknowledges (with horror) the possibility that the memory of a mother's last words will one day fail to move (make cry or make smile). See the fragment dated 19 November, 1977 on p. 57. 

[j] Having said that, in a thanatological fragment published back in September 2014, I wrote:
      "We shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life." 
      
[k] On 25 February 1980, Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. He died from his injuries one month later, aged 64. 
 
[l] I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea of metempsychosis (i.e., the transmigration of souls) and like the idea of atoms being endlessly recycled and assembled into new bodies and objects of all kinds. Seeing the swallows flying "through the summer evening air" whilst on holiday in Morocco, Barthes tells himself: "how barbarous not to believe in souls - in the immortality of souls!" See the fragment dated 13 July, 1978 on p. 159. 
 
[m] See Huxley's essay 'Accidie' in On the Margin (George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 25-31. Readers can also click here to read the essay online in the Project Gutenberg ebook.   

[n] See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (Verso, 2003).
 
[o] See the fragments dated 18 August, 1978 on pp. 190 and 192. 

[p] In his will, the Marquis de Sade expressed the wish that his grave be strewn with acorns, so that it would be eventually covered with oak trees. In this way, "any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone, save for the few who in their goodness have loved me to the last". 
      See the English translation (from which I quote) by R. J. Dent in Philosophy Now, Issue 143 (April/May 2021): click here to read online. 

[q] See the post entitled 'From a Baby in a Basket ...' (27 Feb 2023) which reproduces in full the few lines spoken at my mother's funeral: click here. 


"And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you."


4 Jan 2023

Post 2000: From Journal to Mémoire

 Torpedo Girl: Valkyrie Crusade 
 
 
I.
 
The first written entry on Torpedo the Ark was not a post as such, but a statement for the About page which began with an admission of failure:
 
"Having spent many years among the ruins writing nothing but fragments in praise of fragmented writing, there was finally nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but enter the blogosphere and embrace the postmodern recreation of that most charmingly sentimental of forms, the journal."
 
In other words, Torpedo the Ark marked a retreat. But still, no shame in that. If it becomes strategically necessary to withdraw so as to better engage the enemy at a future time from a more advantageous position, then retreat is precisely what you should do: He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day ... [1]


II.

Of course, whether Torpedo the Ark can legitimately be described as a journal, is debatable. But I like this word. It seems to have a more literary resonance than diary and it's certainly preferable to the ugly little word blog, which Peter Merholz coined in 1999 (as a shortened form of weblog).
 
Journal, of course, also has an intellectual resonance which suits my purposes, as many of the posts are philosophicalish in nature. At any rate, I've never thought of Torpedo the Ark as a blog; nor of myself as a blogger. But then neither am I simply a journalist (even if some posts are based upon news items and press reports). 
 
I suppose, if pushed, the term I would use to describe myself would be scripteur, i.e., a non-authorial writer. Or, as the posts often combine fiction with theory, maybe I might even refer to myself as un romanciér. As the Torpedo the Ark tagline (borrowed from Barthes) indicates, I consider the posts as spoken by a character in a novel [2].
 
Lately, however, as my period of Essex exile grows ever longer and my isolation more acute, my mood and thinking has begun to change [3]
 
Not doing anything, not going anywhere, not seeing anyone in the present - and unable to even imagine a future life - obliges one to make a further retreat: first into the virtual realm of online publishing; and now into the past, exploiting one's own memories. 

Thus, Torpedo the Ark might best be described today as a mémoire, rather than a journal of events and ideas (although I have long sought to question such genre distinctions and wouldn't insist on any essential or absolute difference) [4].
 
By this I mean a text that is haunted by loss, though hopefully one that is still composed with a certain gaiety. For whilst I know one cannot recapture one's youth or recreate old joys via writing, I'm hoping that I may at least preserve something of the promise of these things (and remember where happiness once lay).        

 
Notes
 
[1] The origin of this saying can probably be traced back to the ancient Greek orator and statesman Demosthenes, who reputedly came up with it to justify his fleeing of the battlefield at Chaeronea, in 388 BC. 
 
[2] I say more on this idea in the post entitled 'Disclaimer' (8 Jan 2016): click here.        

[3] See the post 'On Self-Isolation' (6 Dec 2022): click here

[4] One consequence of the death of God and the subsequent collapse of values, is that genre distinctions and the dualistic hierarchies that support them become unprotected and thus vulnerable to challenge. So it is that, despite the best efforts of those still keen to preserve such distinctions - see, for example, Rasma Haidri's post of March 10, 2021, on Brevity's nonfiction blog which asks 'Are Journals Memoir?' - we witness today an increased level of intertextual promiscuity. 


21 Dec 2022

Just Because the Sky Has Turned a Pretty Shade of Orange and Red Doesn't Mean You Can Simply Point a Camera and Shoot ... Or Does It?

Golden sunset and red sunrise over Harold Hill 
(SA / Dec 2022) 
 
 
I. 
 
For many serious photographers, these two snaps taken from my bedroom window - a golden sunset and a red sunrise - constitute perfect examples of cliché
 
That enormous numbers of people enjoy looking at such pictures doesn't alter the fact that images of dusk and dawn have virtually zero aesthetic value; their mass production and popularity only confirming their banality. 
 
As one commentator notes: 
 
"Their very ubiquity is what seems to repel; photography has tainted what it sought to cherish through overuse. It miniaturises natural grandeur and renders it kitsch." [1]
 
If you're a reader of Walter Benjamin, you might explain how mechanical reproduction devalues the aura - by which is meant something like the uniqueness - of an object or event [2]; if you're a fan of D. H. Lawrence, you'll probably start shouting about Kodak vision and how this prevents us from seeing reality, just as cliché inhibits the forming of new perspectives [3].  
 
Now, whilst sympathetic to both of theses authors, I also want to be able to take my snaps and share them with others in good conscience. And so I feel obliged to challenge those who are hostile to photography per se - even if, on philosophical grounds, I share their concerns.
 
And I also feel obliged to challenge those who are dismissive of certain genres of amateur photography - pictures of flowers, or cats, or of the sun's risings and settings - out of cultural snobbery; i.e., those who sneer at aesthetically naive individuals and speak of the wrong kind of people making the wrong kind of images.
           
 
II. 
 
I'm thinking, for example, of the Marxist academic, writer, photographer and curator, Julian Stallabrass, who is interested in the relations between art, politics and popular culture and who sneeringly entitled a chapter of his 1996 work on the widespread popularity of amateur photography 'Sixty Billion Sunsets' [4].
 
As Annebella Pollen notes: 
 
"Stallabrass's denigration of mass photographic practice is based on what he perceives to be its overwhelmingly conventionalised sameness (unlike elite art practices, which are positively polarised as avant-garde, creative and distinctive)." [5]
 
In other words, because Stallabrass sees every sunset photograph as essentially the same, he dismisses them all as "sentimental visual confectionary indicative of limited aesthetic vision and an undeveloped practice" [6]; in other words, stereotypical shit. 

Unfortunately, this attitude is echoed by many other critics and theorists convinced of their own cultural superiority. If you thought postmodernism did away with such snobbery, you'd be mistaken - which is a pity. 
 
For whilst I may agree that just because the sky has turned a pretty shade of orange and red one is nevertheless required to do more than simply point a camera and shoot in order to produce an image that is also a work of art, there's nothing wrong with just taking a snap and plenty of snaps have genuine charm and, yes, even beauty. 
 
In the end, even a bad photograph can seduce and what Barthes calls the punctum - i.e., that which is most poignant (even nuanced) in a picture - is often the failure, fault, cliché, or imperfection. Perhaps, in this digital age of imagery shared via social media, we therefore need to rethink what constitutes a good or bad photograph.    

And, ultimately, Stallabrass is simply wrong: no two sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same and no two photographs of sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same; there is an eternal return of difference (not of the same or to the same). 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', eitherand.org - click here
 
[2] See Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935), which can be found in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (Bodley Head, 2015).
 
[3] See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Art and Morality' (1925), which can be found in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161-68. 
 
[4] Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, (Verso, 1996). 
 
[5] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', op. cit.
 
[6] Ibid.