solid objects and redemption
Bill Brown, toward the end of this essay on this short story by Virginia Woolf:
The fragment appears in “Solid Objects” as the figure of the material metonym whose metonymic function has been arrested–the unconsummated metonym, as it were. The unconsummated metonym is the figure, or the conceptual image, that Woolf offers us to think the object/thing dialectic, to think the world anew. John collects broken parts that are not really parts of anything determinable: “it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler, or window-pane; it was nothing but glass.” His materialism, where parts are related not to wholes but to other parts, enacts a kind of redemption that refuses the (Heideggerian) temporality of recuperation.
Sounds a bit like an ad without products, this fragment, this “unconsummated metonym.” It certainly, according to Brown, points toward the same temporality of redemption.
You should read both the story and the essay if you have a chance…
though capable of transmitting shocks in China
There’s got to be something to say about this. I’m going to save it away for future use, but it’s certainly a symptom of something, no?
What needs to be thought through, perhaps, is not so much the idea of some sort of collective consciousness, some sort of transindividual noosphere, as they have it, which surely exists on some level interesting or utterly banal, but what is at stake in materializing it? Why do we need it to exist “out there,” “in the air,” measurable at times of affect and panic like 9/11. What is it that we don’t or can’t believe about ourselves that he need nodes collecting data, mining out the possibility that we are all in it together?
In the worst case, perhaps it comes out like this:
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way–to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves–should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or pale grey?–ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound.
The GCP people have a page on the “Poetic History” of their project (links funny - go look around. Or don’t.) And they totally miss all the good (complicating?) stuff like this…
bottleneck
From Wikipedia:
Von Neumann bottleneck
The separation between the CPU and memory leads to what is known as the von Neumann bottleneck. The throughput (data transfer rate) between the CPU and memory is very small in comparison with the amount of memory. In modern machines, throughput is very small in comparison with the rate at which the CPU itself can work. Under some circumstances (when the CPU is required to perform minimal processing on large amounts of data), this gives rise to a serious limitation in overall effective processing speed. The CPU is continuously forced to wait for vital data to be transferred to or from memory. As CPU speed and memory size have increased much faster than the throughput between the two, the bottleneck has become more and more of a problem.
The term “von Neumann bottleneck” was coined by John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing award lecture. According to Backus:
“Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. Thus programming is basically planning and detailing the enormous traffic of words through the von Neumann bottleneck, and much of that traffic concerns not significant data itself, but where to find it.”
And now Woolf in To the Lighthouse:
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.
Thinking about literary modernism - “stream of consciousness” narration and the like - as a problem of bandwidth or “data transfer rate,” just as, in a sense, consciousness itself is during this period, for Freud and Bergson and others, an issue that boils down to how many sense impressions / repressed memories can fit through the very narrow pipe. Woolf struggles in To the Lighthouse to get it all down, chokes the text with data, so that across (despite) all the abundance of detail we feel all that is being left out, all that can’t make it into the text.
(I’m not going to bring it all into this post, but searching for the word “word” in the text is, well, very revealing…)
And something else - thinking about this bit from the quote above:
Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.
And this, from Lukács:
The greatest discrepancy between idea and reality [in the novel of romantic disillusionment] is time: the process of time as duration. The most profound and most humiliating impotence of subjectivity consists not so much in its hopeless struggle against the lack of idea in social forms and their human representatives, as in the fact that it cannot resist the sluggish, yet constant process of time; that it must slip down, slowly yet inexorably, from the peaks it has laboriously scaled; that time – that ungraspable, invisibly moving substance – gradually robs subjectivity of all its possessions and imperceptibly forces alien contents into it. That is why only the novel, the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea, includes real time – Bergson’s durée – among its constitutive principles.
The novel - or really, literature in general - now as the materialization of the human inability to think/say/write more than one word at a time. Only now, with machines that promise/threaten/already do “think” or “process” everything all at once, once and for all, can we see the secret pathos that lives within the form.
As of now, the computer retains its romanesque form, its all too human handicap (from Wikipedia again):
Cache between CPU and main memory helps to alleviate some of the performance issues of the von Neumann bottleneck. Additionally, the developement of branch prediction algorithms has helped to mitigate this problem. It is less clear whether the intellectual bottleneck that Backus criticized has changed much since 1977. Backus’s proposed solution has not had a major influence. Modern functional programming and object-oriented programming are much less geared towards pushing vast numbers of words back and forth than earlier languages like Fortran, but internally, that is still what computers spend much of their time doing.
didn’t that help the armenians?
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…)
ache of modernism
Two passages. The first from Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?–that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,–’Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’ … But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”
And the second from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.
Twin horrors of the modern period: the “horrid fancy” of human immanence within nature, and, on the other hand, the “terrible” realization of its cyclical continuance without human eyes to see it. In both cases, the horror is predicated on a strange conjunction of consciousness, unconsciousness, and time…
It is significant, I think, that “anthropomorphic” has no inverse, no opposite. There is no word, that is, for the attribution of inhuman characteristics to humans or humanity.
query
From Martha Nussbaum’s “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,” located here if you have access to this sort of thing.
Mrs. Ramsay protects her private self. But we notice that it is not the same neatly shaped conscious self that she might communicate to others. Her solitude is not formed for or toward the outer world. We reach here an especially deep difficulty in the way of knowing another mind. What we usually think of as “the mind”–that is, its conscious mental acts, acts that could at least putatively be rendered in language and communicated to another- -are only, perhaps, a part of the mind, a part bound up with the outer world of “being and doing,” a sort of marshaling of the mind preparatory to communication.
Woolf’s depiction thus supports a view of consciousness similar to the one advanced by Nietzsche in Gay Science, where he depicts self-consciousness as a relatively late evolutionary arrival, useful only in connection with communication. Most of our mental life, he plausibly stresses, could be carried on without it, at a level of experience and awareness more like that we are accustomed to attribute to other animals. This account has recently received strong support from research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
Question: where would I look for some of this “research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology”? Any sort of Dawkinsite popularizations that would do the trick?
In addition to the Nietzsche, Nussbaum might have cited the fantastic stuff in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, toward the end, when he discusses consciousness as a somewhat superfluous late arrival on the scene (like life itself, like death). I’ll get the full quote when I can get upstairs to where the book is without waking up the teething infant, but for now, some of the surrounding materials:
For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching the aim of death.
and
The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the ‘Nirvana principle’, to borrow a term from Barbara Low).
