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Eagleton on Zizek this week in the TLS:

Take, for example, his “defence” of Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism in the 1930s, and of Michel Foucault’s championing of the Iranian revolution some forty years later. Both commitments Žižek views as deeply objectionable; but in his view they were at least commitments to the need for revolutionary change, even if both Heidegger and Foucault backed the wrong horse in this respect. Behind this case lies Žižek’s indebtedness to the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom this book devotes some critically sympathetic pages. For Badiou, the good life, ethically and politically speaking, consists in a tenacious adherence to some “Event” which bursts unpredictably on the historical scene, transforms the very coordinates of human reality and refashions from top to toe the men and women who remain loyal to it. One of the atheistic Badiou’s examples of such an event is the life and death of Christ.
There is a certain rather Gallic formalism about this notion. As with existentialism, the precise content of the redemptive event, as opposed to the miraculous fact of its occurrence, is not always the main point at stake. Žižek agrees with Badiou that it is better to cling disastrously to such a revelation of truth than to remain indifferent to it, which is surely not the case. There is nothing admirable in fidelity for its own sake. Luke-warmness is not the most heinous of crimes. French radical thought has often turned on a contrast between some privileged moment of truth and the bovine inauthenticity of everyday life, and Badiou is no exception in this respect. There is a spiritual elitism about such ethics, which is hard to square with this book’s suggestive reflections on the idea of democracy.

I’ve read just about all the Flaubert criticism there is to read that’s available in English, and lots that’s not. But Jacques Rancière’s “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” published recently in Critical Inquiry, might just be, pound for pound, the best I’ve ever read. (I apologize if you don’t have access to the journal one way or another). I’ve got lots to say about it, but will for tonight mostly just quote a bit to give you a taste. 

The fictional definition of Emma is in keeping with the big concern of the 1850s and 60s that was encapsulated in one word: excitement. At that time in France, the diagnosis could be heard everywhere at every time; society suffered from a fatal disease that affected the social order and individ- ual behaviors as well. It had become an unrelenting turmoil of thoughts and desires, appetites and frustrations. In the good old times of monarchy, religion, and aristocracy, there had been a clear, long-standing hierarchy that put every group and every individual in its right place. It gave them a firm footing and limited horizons, which are the conditions of happiness for poor people. Unfortunately that order had been shattered, first by the French Revolution, second by the rise of industrialism, third by the new media—the newspapers, lithographs, and so on, which made words and images, dreams and aspirations, available everywhere to anybody. Society had become a hustle and bustle of free and equal individuals that were dragged together into a ceaseless whirl in search of an excitement that was nothing but the mere internalization of the endless and purposeless agitation of the whole social body.

Such was the discourse of the notables and the learned persons. What must draw our attention is the synonym they gave for that excitement. That synonym was democracy. They had first met democracy in the shape of the government of the people, the government of free and equal citizens, where the rulers and the ruled people are one and the same. Needless to say, they had efficiently worked during the French Second Republic (1848–51) to crush the threat of democratic anarchy, at the cost of handing over their own freedom to a new emperor. But it was not enough to crush it by force. They had to annul its political significance, make it a mere sociological phe- nomenon. Therefore a new democratic ghost was substituted for the older; political democracy, they said, had been crushed, but there was a new, far more radical uprising of democracy that no police, no army could tear down: the uprising of the multitude of aspirations and desires, cropping up everywhere in all the pores of modern society. To be sure, the idea was not exactly new; Plato had invented it two millennia before by stating that democracy, in fact, was not a form of government but the way of life of those “free” Athenians who cared for nothing except their individual pleasure. The modern antidemocrats translated it into a more dramatic version, as the uprising of the multitude of unleashed social atoms, greedy to enjoy everything that was enjoyable: gold, indeed, and all the things that gold can buy, but also, what was worse, all that gold cannot buy—passions, values, ideals, art, and literature. Such was the big trouble as they saw it. It would be a lesser evil if poor people only wanted to get rich. Poor people are sup- posed to be “practically minded.” But poor people were now taking a new view of what practical-mindedness meant. They wanted to enjoy all that was enjoyable, including ideal pleasures. But they also wanted those ideal pleasures to be practically enjoyable ideal pleasures. 

For those who come upon Flaubert’s book, Emma Bovary is the frightening incarnation of that desire. She craves ideal romance and physical love. She constantly negotiates between material and ideal sources of excitement. When she has resisted her love for Leon, she thinks that she deserves a reward. She buys a piece of furniture. And not any piece of furniture: a gothic prie-dieu. This is what respectable persons perceive as the law of democracy, the law of universal equivalence: anybody can exchange any desire for any other desire. A critic sums it up as follows: “Madame Bovary, this means the pathological overexcitement of senses and imagination in dissatisfied democracy.” That would be a good reason for sentencing her to death. But respectable persons are not asked to judge Emma; they are only asked to judge her inventor. The first person who has an interest in killing her is Flaubert. Besides the trial of the writer, there is the trial that the writer mounts against his character. Besides the evil that frightens respectable persons, there is the evil done to literature by Emma, which means the evil that he wants her to do, that he embodies in Emma.

Perhaps you can sense where he’s headed with all this… The anxious war of Art vs. the aestheticization of everyday life as the battle between Flaubert and his creation, but it’s even more complex than a reactionary defense of privileged access to the aesthetic, as the aesthetic in question, the aesthetic perhaps proposed by Flaubert in Bovary is one that itself resists hierarchy, the oldest hierarchies that define the shape of art, and not just the shape of art. 

There is one person who could have explained it to Emma. Unfortunately it is the person whom you are not supposed to meet in a convent. It is the Devil. Before writing Madame Bovary, Flaubert had written the first version of his Temptation of Saint Anthony. The devil that tempted Saint Anthony was much cleverer and much more generous than the old nuns in the convent. He gave him the explanation of “mystic languor” as he dragged him on an aerial journey through space. He made him discover what life truly is when our sensations are released from the chains of individuality. With his help, the saint could discover strange forms of preindividual or impersonal life: “inanimate existences, inert things that seem animal, vegetative souls, statues that dream and landscapes that think.”5 In such a world our mind loses all its conventional bearings. It bursts into atoms of thought that come into unity with things that have themselves burst into a dance of atoms. The Devil reminded the saint that he had already felt that experience of fusion between the inside and the outside: “Often, because of anything at all, a drop of water, a shell, a strand of hair, you have stopped short, your eyes fixed and your heart open. The object you were gazing at seemed to encroach upon you, as you bent toward, and new ties were found: you clutched each other, you touched each other by subtle innumerable embraces.”6 

Those “subtle innumerable embraces,” those shells, strands of hair, and drops of water, together with sunrays, breaths of air, and grains of sand or dust whipped up by the wind make up the sensory framework of Madame Bovary. They are the real events of the novel. Every time that something happens in the fiction—notably the birth of a love—they are the real content of the event, the real cause of the emotion. Let us remember what happens when Charles first falls for Emma: “The draught beneath the door blew a little dust over the flagstones, and he watched it creep along” (B, p.35). 

When Emma falls for Rodolphe, she perceives little gleams of gold about his pupils, smells a perfume of lemon and vanilla, and looks at the long plume of dust raised by the stagecoach. And when she first falls for Leon, “weeds streamed out in the limpid water like green wigs tossed away. Now and then some fine-legged insects alighted on the tip of a reed or crawled over a water-lily leaf. The sunshine darted its rays through the little blue bubbles on the wavelets that kept forming and breaking” (B, p.107).

This is what happens: “little blue bubbles” on wavelets in the sunshine, or swirls of dust raised by the wind. This is what the characters feel and what makes them happy: a pure flood of sensations. Much later, the Proustian narrator will evoke the message addressed by the sensation to the person that it strikes, a message that he will sum up as follows: “Try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.”7 But the Flaubertian characters don’t solve the riddle. They don’t even understand what kind of happiness can be enclosed in swirls of dust and bubbles on wavelets. They want those microevents to be linked together in a real plot. They want the swirls and bubbles to be turned into properties of real things that can be desired and possessed, into features of individuals that they can love and who can love them. From the point of view of the writer, they don’t mistake art for life. They mistake one art for another and one life for another. They mistake one art for another; this means that they are still trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions, its characters envisioning great ends, its feelings related to the qualities of persons, its noble passions opposed to everyday experience, and so on. They are out of step with the new poetics that has shattered the hierarchical poetics of action in favor of an “egaliarian” poetics of life. This also means that they mistake one life for another. They still perceive a world of subjects and predicates, things and qualities, wills, ends and means. They think that things and persons have qualities that individualize them and make them desirable and enjoyable. In short, they think that life is defined by aims and purposes. They have not listened to the lesson of the Devil: life has no purpose. It is an eternal flood of atoms that keeps doing and undoing in new configurations. 

This is brilliant stuff, but there’s one thing perhaps that I’d tweak or add or augment. These micro-events that Rancière so persuasively describes are also a matter of time - they are time images, visual manifestations of the passage of time. The blowing of the dust, the movements of the insects - these events are a matter of a new, secular temporality that, like the aesthetic involved in their encapsulation in the novel, is incompatible with standard narrative forms. (Sometimes I call these temporality the anti-ephiphanic, other times simply the everyday. I comes to the same thing, in the end…) Novels can light on these moments, but novels cannot stay - and a novel made entirely of them (of course this happened, in a sense, later, with Woolf and others) simply does not work as a novel, does not do what a novel is supposed to do.

More to be said, of course…  

at spurious:

The deeds of the world are slowly disappearing. The suburbs will spread everywhere, and the life of us all will be written on the American page. And all writing henceforward will concern the ordinary, the everyday. There will be nothing of which to write but that. And language, meanwhile, will turn over like a sleeper. And all of literature will have been part of its dream. And everything we’ve done, likewise. And when it awakens, it will face us without a face and look at us with no eyes and speak in great long words that will be our words unravelled.

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(Xposted from Long Sunday)

K-punk has a truly brilliant piece up about Children of Men. For one thing, he does a terrific job of decoding the squeamish-making situational conceit of the work - a world in which women can no longer have children - a conceit which of course sends us when we first hear about it almost automatically in all sort of directions that aren’t really borne out by the film itself (anxiety about working women, anxiety about homosexuality, anxiety - a la Pat Buchanan et al - about the death of the “white race,” etc…) K-punk’s version is much more (aesthetico-ideologically) optimistic and truer to what we see on screen…

The third reason that Children of Men works is because of its take on cultural crisis. It’s evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. (If the sterility were to be taken literally, the film would be no more than a requiem for what Lee Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism’, entirely in line with mainstream culture’s pathos of fertility.) For me, this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?

Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and repermutation. Could it be, that is to say, that there are no breaks, no ’shocks of the new’ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the ‘weak messianic’ hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?

I’m going to say more about this on my own site when I get a chance, but one of the (very basic) things that I loved about the film was that, despite the fact that human life itself is dwindling out, that these people are living in either the aftermath or the final stages of what looks to be the ultimate catastrophe, one which will surely culminate, within a few years, in the end of the human race, they go about their business - commuting to work, stopping for coffee, watching tv, etc. The film pounds us with the savage uncanniness of the thought of rejiggering our retirement accounts, redoing the kitchen, or, of course, seeing movies as the world ends around us…

Think of the dystopian works that share this stance: 1984 and the cafeteria talk, Josef K. thinking about his missed breakfast at the opening of The Trial, etc…

One does wonder about the economic organization of this imagined world. Certainly it’s not our system - can’t be. Uncreative destruction without growth, hyper-full employment, hyper-inflation geometrically beyond Weimar precedent. There’s no sign in the movie of what has happened on this score, save for the fact that we see no one - save for the coffeehouse people, presumably - who isn’t a public servant…. And there are ration books…

If it is socialism, it is of course a stripe of national socialism. But what do we make of a fantasy of a socialism that can only arrive by natural dictat, after the real end of history, just before the end of mankind itself?

9/11, of course, wasn’t the end of the world in any sense, no matter what anyone wanted us to believe then or wants us to believe now. But I do distinctly recall as I shuffled around Brooklyn Heights that day, a sense that something strange in just these terms was afoot. On the one hand, there was a palpable if tacit giddiness that seemed to stem from the idea that there’d be no more work that day, tomorrow, maybe even the whole week. People I ran into coming home early from work were excited to be off, if also horrified. A snow day, as it were, for the entire city. (It is controversial to register this ambivalence, of course - remember the recent dustup about Thomas Hoepker’s photograph?) Something else to think about, something to do other than paper shuffling or service work, or studying etc. On the other hand and at the same time, I am quite sure that many of us, just days or hours or minutes or even seconds after the climactic scene, were thinking “but what about that work that I have to do.” I know for a fact that an acquaintance of mine, despite being aware in a general way of what was going on, continued to work at his dissertation chapter in the university library, tapping away as the whole world freaked out.

Just before the first tower fell and I was forced by the cloud of dust to head home, I remember making deals with myself about just how much time I could give myself for this sort of thing. I was reading for my oral exams at the time - I think I decided that I would take that day off but no more. In the end, I started reading again on September 13. Or maybe it was the night of the 12th.

Long story short, I think our fantasies and fears about catastrophe, dystopia, and the end of the world have quite a lot to do with somewhat banal anxieties and ambivalence about the work that we do, the conditions under which we work, and the possibility that our work situations might one day change. But I’ll say a bit more about this soon.

Anyway, more later. But do go read K-punk on this - I’m not saying here anything he hasn’t said far more penetratingly and eloquently. It’s a brilliant post…

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Of course, even the ad without products has been pressed into service from time to time, and ever more often of late.

There is so much to say about this one. I’m thinking about using a whole bunch of ads this semester when I teach, this one, the ikea lamp. I finally found a utility that allows me to rip them out of youtube and keep them warm and safe on my hard drive…

Anyway, telegraphically: a picture perfect example of the perverse fetishization of banality itself, warm eroticization of the stupid office plant, the breathless building. A smackdab of “love at last sight” - where the “un éclair… puis la nuit” of the exchanged glances rhymes with, really encapsulates, the ever the same / ever new temporality of the rest of the commercial - and is in turn sublimated into the car itself.

Benjamin said, at the end of the Work of Art essay, that mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Here, we’re not quite dealing with the destruction of mankind in the flames of fascism - not quite, and lots of that to be had elsewhere - but there is something to be said about the sexiness of this officespace and this officelife in this ad that of course would be entirely absent in real life.

Compare: Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera… Which, yes, exposes the apparatus, massifies the everyday life in question, but actually, in a sense, is up to something similar enough to be interesting - save without the product, or almost-product in this case, at the end.

The ELO song, appropriately enough, was featured in the trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I can’t remember (ha!) whether it made it into the film itself.

It couldn’t be something as simple as an unconsciously prophetic sense that these office jobs, they’re not staying forever. A future perfect nostalgia for what only will have been, not be. As I stalk and smoke around the modernist office park where I teach, I am struck intermittently with the strange knowledge that this job can’t possibly last a lifetime. I’m not talking about tenure, not talking about moving on, I mean the humanities itself, the university. I am young to be an assistant professor - I have about 40 years to do before social security kicks in (ha, again! that’s another thing…) There’s no way it will last that long. It, like everything else, will be rationalized, auctioned off, streamlined, offshored, outsourced, rightsized, done away with in the interest of efficiency. I can see myself now with the eyes of the year after next. The phenomenology of precarité, the erosive geology of late-but-not-getting-any-later capitalism. And my business is far more insulated from the vicissitudes of the weather called creative destruction than, say, our office worker’s in the VW ad.

The car, in other words, is not the only thing that is convertible. Things move quickly: ask yourself if they would make the same ad today… Instead, stuff like this, in which a gnawing banality no one even bothers to aestheticize meets with the catastrophic, emptily.

(Confession: my fascination with the first ad, the Bill Briggs one, is probably what led me to buy my own VW. Not a beetle convertible of course - what do you take me for? But a zippy Jetta wagon, turbo and everything.)

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Crossposted from Long Sunday. It’s a follow up to Jodi Dean’s recent post at LS on desire and 9/11, and the comments below it.

The concluding paragraph of Benjamin’s Work of Art essay:

“Fiat ars - pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and, as Marienetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of a politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Relatedly, think back to the summer before the attack, the Pearl Harbor trailer. Christ - the damn thing actually ran for about a year before every single movie that made it to the theater. I must have seen it thirty times.

Think back to FDR’s speech that runs as a voiceover, as we watch the kids pretend to be fighter pilots, soliders screw nurses, women hang out laundry. The everyday.

How long is America going to pretend that the world is not at war?

From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, we have been described as a nation of weaklings and playboys, who hire British or Russian or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.

We’ve been trained to think that we are invincible. But our people think Hitler and his Nazi thugs are Europe’s problem. We have to do more. Does anyone think that victory is possible without facing danger? At times like these we all need to be reminded of who we truly are - that we will not give up.

December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the empire of Japan.

We are war. Tell that to the soldiers who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific. Tell that to the boys in the flying fortresses. Tell that to the Marines.

Toward the end of the trailer, subtitles appear on screen:

it was the end of innocence and the dawn of a nation’s greatest glory.

Think of how focus-grouped and wideband market-prepped this movie was. The trailer in particular. Think about what secret or not so secret desires the producers were touching, titillating, conjuring?

The contemporary reviews were on message:

Ninety minutes into this massive movie the attack commences, and the spectacular images come hurtling like fireballs. This is, let’s be honest, what we’re here for, and what most Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movies serve up best: the poetry of destruction (Newsweek).

The picture is nearly painstaking in its traditionalism, a tale of love, war, and valor in which nostalgia for ‘’simpler times” gets mashed together, almost fetishistically, with nostalgia for old movies and for the spirit of knightly self sacrifice during World War II (Entertainment Weekly)

Telepathy, for sure. If we have to know anything, it is that the causes of things aren’t always as straight and clear as Occam’s Razor might suggest.

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An interesting bit of machanime via boingboing today:

An Unfair War is a moving 5 minute short film made using the video game The Sims 2. It’s an anti-war short, in the form of a monologue by a writer in a city that’s being demolished by foreign “liberators” who are bombing it to hell. It’s his farewell to the world, and while the action doesn’t move very fast, the animation is surprisingly emotive. Link

It’s not that there aren’t problems with the film. A bit cliché, yes, and why does the guy need candles when his desktop boots?

But what is interesting, following up on this post, is the very idea of using the Sims 2 in order to make a point about the relationship between “ordinary” life and violence.

The Sims has alternately been read as either a game with enthusiastically embraces mindless commodity culture or one that contains a subtle critique of it. You wander around your house, head off to work for blindly invisible hours, only to get back to “real life” which consists of making dinner with your kitchen toys and watching tv. Sometimes, there’s a member of the opposite (or same, I suppose) sex around to flirt or argue with. Eventually - and I owned the first edition, so this is something that I’ve experienced - the whole affair because so tedious and empty that you stop playing the damn game. *

But here, that banality - the hermetically sealed room (is there a door), the old fashioned looking pc, the candles, and the crib - the reduction of life to a set of consumer objects marks the obverse not of some mode of lived authenticity, but of the war itself, the gunshots and bombs and fighter jets whose sounds seem to be borrowed from another sort of game - from war simulations, first-person shooters, and the like.

In short, while this movie is not perfect, it remains deeply suggestive - hints even at the critical resistance that might well lie dormant in the ad without products described by Agamben and cited above in my banner…

* I understand that there are those who don’t stop, and that Maxis has released an online version and modules that are more interesting than “making dinner at home,” but the basic point holds, I think…

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Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

No more amazement, bemusement, cute quips and quotes, expressions of horror that are down deep registrations only of indolent ennui. Not the exception, but the rule. Nothing special. Nothing new, all of this.

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One place to look for Benjamin on Loos is “Experience and Poverty.”

A complex artist like the painter Paul Klee and a programmatic one like Loos - both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past. They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.

This is a fantastic piece. Interesting stuff on an architectural theorist and novelist Paul Scheerbart, whom I’m going to look into when I get back to the library. A bit more:

Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty - their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty - that it will lead to something respectable. Nor are they ignorant or inexperienced. Often we could say the very opposite. They have ‘devoured’ everything, both ‘culture and people,’ and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them. No one feels more caught out than they by Scheerbart’s words: “You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan.”

(What comes next, about Mickey Mouse, actually, is fantastic as well. But I’ll leave you to find it on your own…)

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Teaching Mrs. Dalloway today, had a harrowing experience. I don’t really like to blog about what happens in my classroom, but I’m a little more troubled about this than usual. And so I will.

So today I’m working through the oscillation between the Dalloway/Ramsay side of the story and the Septimus plot line. The way the novel develops into a profound performance of the conjunctions and disjunctions of people in modern society - all working toward the amazingly strange climax of the novel, where Septimus kills himself and Clarissa D. vicariously “experiences” his death. The way that I read the text, it is in large part about what fills novels and what has to be left out (usually) for novels to function properly and cleanly. It is, in a sense, a hysterical text, one that, like Septimus himself, can’t stop thinking and talking about what it shouldn’t, what is socially unacceptable to fix on.

As Septimus’s wife, Lucrezia, thinks at one point,

But such things happen to every one. Every one has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives up something when they marry. She had given up her home. She had come to live here, in this awful city. But Septimus let himself think about horrible things, as she could too, if she tried.

Woolf’s novel likewise lets itself think about horrible things. So far so good.

But then we come to my favorite passage of all.

He was already halfway to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again)–no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)–the only flowers she could bear to see cut.

This seems to me a good thing to talk about, a surprising reversal for the students to metabolize. It is an enormously complex passage, with another turn of the ethical wheel every time you think you’ve come to a rest. And the fact of the matter is that it is Clarissa who’s thinking this, right, thinking about not thinking about the Armenians (the Armenian genocide, of course, is what we’re talking about here…) I thought I could take for granted that the students would distance themselves from Clarissa at this moment - just as she is distancing herself from herself here - and at least agree that, no, the roses don’t help the Armenians, not one bit. The interesting discussion is supposed to start from this given - what do we make of a novel that features a scene like this one? What do we make of our position as novel reader, students of aesthetic objects, in the wake of this? How is everyday life - ours and hers - formed in resistance to horrors happening off stage, across the Channel or across the world? We can turn no poetry after Auschwitz into no roses after Armenia and work from there.

But the problem is, my students, en masse, started defending Clarissa’s logic here, her alibi. Her roses do, in a way, help the Armenians, as they increase the total sum of beauty in the world. One voice, two, three - a bunch in accord on this. OK, so I get a bit mean, and say, your favorite song on your iPod, that helps a victim of ethnic cleansing in the Sudan? Yes, sort of, comes the response. Living well here in the US helps a tsunami victim, a kid who’s lost both of her parents? Sure, in a way, it does, because somebody needs to live well. I’m not shitting you - this is how the conversation went. I began to catch a bit of Woolf’s hysteria myself. When we nuke Iran, like, being happy here in the US, that balances it out? They hadn’t heard about Iran… but thought yes, in a small way, the scale is balanced.

Some jokster - I really hope he was joking, it wasn’t entirely clear - contributed the fact that the death of 1,000,000 Armenians is really only a drop in the bucket of the total world population. I hope he was joking. When I asked him if he would say that about the Holocaust, everyone got very quiet all of a sudden. They know they’re not supposed to trivialize that. But then someone else said that the dead are truly dead - they’re not around to care about Clarissa’s roses. I nearly lost it, had recourse to humor, stupidly. Couldn’t handle what i was hearing.

I don’t want to be mean. They’re very smart kids, my students. Eventually, one of them spoke up against the roses. But I am a bit worried about this conversation, their intransigence on this point. I wasn’t trying to convince, initially; I didn’t think they’d need to be. But if they won’t back down, even in the face of their instructor’s obvious disbelief and dismay, in their belief that a good job here somehow balances out a bit of carnage over there, having a good sex life makes up for disease and destruction somewhere else, feeling in general happy and good and enjoying the little things, say, in itself works against the flash of light, the mushroom cloud, the searing of skin, the blindness and shrapnel piercing human flesh at the speed of sound, the tumor footprint spreading wider as the population ages, I’m afraid, well, we’re past the point of no return. These are kids.

(BTW - ideological reprogramming, were that my style, and it’s definitely not, wouldn’t work here. They’re hyper-canny about preaching. The word “bias” has infected nearly half of their papers, a word I had never seen in an English paper until the last year or so…)

I’m not sure what to think about all of this…. Except that, well, when I read this tonight, it seemed even more true and plausible than it might have yesterday… (a big clip from the piece under the fold - but why don’t you just go and read it at its home…. It’s a fantastic piece…)

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From Walter Benjamin’s “The Image of Proust” in Illuminations:

What was it that Proust sought so frenetically? What was at the bottom of these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain? When Proust in a well-known passage described the hour that was most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find it in his own existence. We might even call it an everyday hour.

There are lots of different ways to describe Benjamin’s distinctive form of writing, his idiosyncratic form of thought. Some prefer the term “thetic,” which obviously works best with the pieces actually broken into theses, like the “Theses on the Philosophy” of history or the “Work of Art” essay. Others go with “dialectical,” which works as well, but perhaps distracts a bit from the actual contours of the texts.

This passage from the essay on Proust is a perfect example of what I would call Benjamin’s late and distinctive form. And it bears an amazing message, if you listen closely.

The third sentence takes up the blurring of the event, the significant occurrence, into the banal, the long durée, the everyday. For a gloss we can turn back just a bit for this:

Only the actus purus of recollection itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes the unity of the text. One may even say that the intermittence of the author and plot is only the reverse of the continuum of memory, the pattern on the backside of the tapestry.

In Proust’s work, then, we find a reversal of - or the surfacing of the reversal of - the conventional way that he conceive of novels. Rather than organizing the inchoate, the author and plot only interrupt, disrupt, punctuate the underlying continuum of infinite recollection. This reversal levels the finite event down into the infinite “unfolding” of time.

Well enough. But then back to the next sentence of the initial quote, which sends us in a very different direction:

When Proust in a well-known passage described the hour that was most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find it in his own existence. We might even call it an everyday hour.

Do you see it? The leap? From the dissolution of significance into the everyday, without a breath, into this - into the generalization of the particular, into communicability. We start with nihilism, neglect the anxious consideration of the abyss that we might expect, and turn in the next sentence to communication.

Reminds me, just this tiny passage, quite a bit of the move that’s being traced out here - the work that gives this blog its name.

The commodification of the human body, while subjecting it to the iron laws of massification and exchange value, seemed at the same time to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography, it took its leave of both the inarticulate cry of the tragic body and the dumb silence of the comic body, and thus appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated. The epochal process of the emancipation of the human body from its theological foundations was thus accomplished in the dances of the ‘girls,’ in the advertising images, and in the gait of fashion models. This process had already been imposed at an industrial level when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the invention of lithography and photography encouraged the inexpensive distribution of pornographic images: Neither generic nor individual, neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the body now become something truly whatever.

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