Showing posts with label romanticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romanticism. Show all posts

15 Jan 2024

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Three)

Cover of the Portuguese edition 
(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]
 
 
I.

The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world. 
 
I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].
 
But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...  
 
 
II.
 
"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]
 
In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction. 
 
Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c]
 
I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.    
 
Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols. 
 
The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.      
 
"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.  
 
Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).  
 
 
III.
 
Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. 
 
Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:   
 
"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]  
 
To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...
 
What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60]
 
I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).
 
 
IV.
 
Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...
 
It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:
   
"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]
 
This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.  
 
According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].  
 
Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:
 
"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]
 
This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached. 
 
However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].
 
This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.  
 

V.
 
The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world. 
 
I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise). 
 
This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.   
 
 
Notes
 
[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.
 
[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.
 
[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!" 
      See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.
 
[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.
 
[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).
 
[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12. 
 
[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"
      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.
 
[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.
 
[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92]. 
      He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.     
 
 
To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here
 
To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here
 

30 Dec 2023

Ross Barkan's Dream of a New Romantic Age

Ross Barkan (2017) 
Award-winning novelist, journalist, and new romantic

 
According to the American writer Ross Barkan, the times they are a-changin' and we are about to witness a romantic backlash to technology as the younger generation discover that it is in fact possible to live offline: "A rebellion, both conscious and unconscious, has begun." [1]  
 
Having said that, the truth is Barkan isn't sure about this coming cultural upheaval. After all, the future cannot be predicted, so he is merely putting forward a hypothesis (i.e., hazarding a guess) in order to produce an interesting end of year column for The Guardian.  
 
Thus, whilst he insists that this nascent new romanticism echoes "in its own way, a great shift that came more than two centuries ago, out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars", he still qualifies his argument by placing it in the non-space between maybe and might.  
 
Personally, I doubt that this rebellion against digital order and technology's enframing of existence will amount to very much. Those whom Barkan calls the young may be superstitious and in search of spiritual meaning - may indulge in nostalgia for a time they never knew and amuse themselves by constructing retro-futures - but I don't see them switching off their smartphones.  
 
Indeed, when I spoke to a small group of pagan witches a few months ago in praise of silence, sececy, and shadows [2], they were receptive to the ideas, but it was also clear that, as Barkan points out, the digital era has permanently changed the way people view the world and interact with one another: 
 
"For thousands of years, mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom. The smartphone's addictive entertainments immolated attention spans." 
 
And that's the problem, is it not? 
 
The changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were certainly significant and wide-ranging, but the poets, painters, and philosophers of Romanticism had not had their attention spans immolated, their imaginations captured, or their brains rewired. And so they could still think, feel, and dream in a recognisably human manner. I'm not sure, however, that's still the case today. 
 
For, arguably, the thing which the Romantics feared most has happened; not merely the enslavement of flesh and blood to the iron machine, but technology's "encroachment on the human spirit" and the emergence of an inhuman (and transhuman) future.        
 
Betraying his own romantic optimism, Barkan ultimately hopes, like Nietzsche, that art will prove to be the counternihilistic force par excellence [4]; art, that is, made by a creative class of men and women who, although beleagured, have retained something of their humanity and are ready to rise up - not the mediocre art produced by AI.     
 
If, for now, smartphones are ubiquitous and the tech giants still own and dominate the present, it is not clear whether they will own and dominate the future [3]. For generational change is coming, says Barkan, and "romanticism won't hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame" that might illuminate the world to come in an unexpected manner: "Perhaps we are ready to be surprised and amazed again." [5]   
 
Yeah, perhaps ...
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Ross Barkan, 'The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms', The Guardian (28 Dec 2023): click here. All lines quoted in this post are from this article by Barkan, unless otherwise indicated.
 
[2] See 'In Defence of Isis Veiled: What a Practice of Ocuultism Might Mean in an Age of Transparency' (9 Sept 2023): click here
      As a matter of fact, Barkan holds out even less hope than I do in the power of magic; it will take more than spells and incantations to challenge the digital world order and irrationality, on its own, is no virtue: 
      "Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun –-until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise." 
 
[3] Writing in a slightly different version of his piece in The Guardian published on his substack (Political Currents), Barkan says: 
      "Facebook and Twitter are losing their grip. TikTok rises, but will last only so long. Instagram hums through its strange middle period, no longer a place for genuine photography, reflecting unreality back to us. None of these platforms will vanish. But I would bet they will all matter less in ten years." 
      See Ross Barkan, 'The New Romantic Age' (28 Dec 2023): click here.
 
[4] For Nietzsche, if we are ever to move beyond the impasse of the present and give birth to new forms and ways of being, then "unheard-of-artistic powers will be needed". For art alone is the "great means of making life possible [...] the great stimulant of life". I think we might do well to question such romanticism with respect to the potential of art as means of cultural rehabilitation (and, indeed, Nietzsche will himself later insist on tying his own aesthetics to a form of Dionysian pessimism). 
      The lines quoted from Nietzsche can be found in 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 9, and The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 452, respectively.
 
[5] Ross Barkan, 'The New Romantic Age' ... click here.  
 
 

17 Apr 2018

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven


I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.


IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...


See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).


6 Sept 2017

A New Entry in the Big Book of Little Girls: Alma Deutscher (The Prodigy)

Photo of Alma Deutscher 
By Anna Huix (2016)


I.

One of the books I would still like to write, is my Big Book of Little Girls - a work dedicated to all of those fantastic creatures who are so much more than merely young females destined to grow up to be women in a conventional bio-cultural manner.

At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal and inhuman - little girls are extraordinary events whose individuation doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. They are defined, thus, not by their age, sex, or material composition (sugar and spice), but by the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

I already have an index of possible candidates for the book, both living and dead, actual and fictional. And now I have another name to add: Alma Deutscher ...   


II.

Born in February 2005, Alma is a highly celebrated and much-loved composer and performer. Starting her musical career early - she began playing the piano aged two, followed by the violin at three - this wunderkind has already written sonatas, concertos, and operas.

For some, she's an angel sent to redeem the world through melody and she herself contrasts the simple beauty of her music with the ugliness and complexity of the times. Anyone wanting to see people in jeans or hear works that deal with social issues, should probably stay away from her recitals: Let them look at passersby in the street or watch TV, she says, with the regal disdain perfected more by Marie Antoinette than by Mozart.

And suddenly one recalls that the term prodigy refers not only to a young person with exceptional gifts, but - as her own mother reminds us - to a monstrous being who violates the natural order and brings with them something more troubling than a nice tune; something unbidden and unexpected ...

At the very least, I think it reasonable to regard this young girl as genuinely inspired, if not, indeed, one possessed; a witch who whirls a magical skipping rope about her head and allows strange forces to work through her. Whether these forces be divine or daemonic in nature is debatable; but it's surely worth remembering that the Devil has all the best tunes and that the positing of Beauty as the highest of all high ideals has, in the past, put dreamy Romantics on a path to Hell ...

But then I'm just one of those whom Robert Schediwy characterises as an advanced culture-theorist, suspicious of any attempt to steer contemporary classical music back to the 18th and 19th centuries with their "uninhibited love of melody", before those decidedly ungalant, 20th century composers dared to experiment with dissonance and require listeners to develop new ears.

As for Alma, obviously I wish her well. But I also hope that, as she matures, she rethinks her relationship to the present, to reality, and to popular culture and sees how even beauty can become an ugly impediment to genius ...


See Robert Schediwy, 'Alma und die gefährliche Liebe zur Melodie', Der Standard (13 Jan 2017): click here.

To listen to Alma play, or to read numerous other press reports and interviews with her and her parents, go to her website by clicking on the link already given. Alternatively, there are plenty of videos available to watch on YouTube, including this one, in which Alma not only performs her own piano and violin compositions, but speaks about her work before an invited audience at the WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium (2016).