Anonymity Blues

 Posted by at 9:36 am  Atelier, Echo Effects, Holy Fool/Hero  Comments Off
Aug 292014
 

A glimpse in the rear view mirror fills you with terror: the past is disappearing into a blank of anonymity. Attempting to avoid the void you drive faster: you will beat the beast, this slavering, bloody beast. Your determination wavers, you can feel its hot fetid breath on your neck.

“Perec! Perec!”

You hear the bird calling but the frantic drumming of your heart overwhelms the bird of compassion. Some other voice, perhaps from the wings of the stage, out of shot, out of reach, demands to know: what is the ground of our subjectivity? Tell me, Perec, tell me! But there is this other question I posed, what are the political implications of psychoanalysis?

‘This is a book about “communist desire” – that is the deep-seated moving force within people which impels them to strive to give their lives self-chosen collective meaning, by opposing oppression, arbitrary coercion, abolishing hierarchical structures, and ending the various forms of alienation.’ (RP Jul/Aug 2014 page 58)

So here is another pairing: individual/collective. Individual or collective; Freud or Marx. Individual and collective; Freud and Marx. As soon as we have a pairing we (in the so-called West) are immediately gripped, held within the imaginary of individualism and death to the opponent; the only life is death to the other. Of course we live within the collective but constantly imagine the hero, the selfie, the only thing that counts – everything else must be sacrificed.

What is the ground of my subjectivity? What if I was able to make the answer, YOU.

What are the political implications of psychoanalysis? What if I could make the answer, the collective.

Yesterday I went to see the Dardenne brothers new film, Two Days, One Night. I had scribbled some notes around the above before seeing the movie so there was a nice touch of Jungian synchronicity because the film is an essay on just this issue of individual/collective. Brilliant but not a fun filled movie, though one that seriously looks at current issues and holds the tension throughout plus an impressive piece of acting from Marion Cotillard.

Perec Perec

 Posted by at 12:38 pm  Anti-Gravity Surgery, Echo Effects, Exodus, Holy Fool/Hero  Comments Off
Aug 262014
 
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We often put pairs of words together, and repeat ourselves. Some of the pairs we would like to think of as opposites. Death is not life. Life is not death. And so on. Then we could say Life/Death is an antonym.

But a little on maybe we want to say, “Perhaps Life/Death is a false antonym”. Because we can’t have one without the other. So now we start to think that Life/Death are not opposites. Actually we might even start to think of the Life/Death pair of words as synonyms. Or, hedging our bets, false synonyms, if we think that we are going too far.

Then there is the ‘/’ oblique sign between life and death. Is it merely a signal of the pairing? Or does it also signify? Does it signify a gap for instance, like the caesura in a poem? A pause, which tells us we need to take a breath.

(“…in real life there is always resistance, even though we have to breathe constantly. Inspiration. Brief pause. Expiration. Brief pause. Resistance is probably related to authenticity“) What is our thinking here?

Halfway and we need to take a breather, and continue our search for meaning by other means. In 1982 the Georges Perec published an article piece of longer-form journalism (or feuilleton as we like to call this form of writing) called ‘THINK/CLASSIFY‘ in la Genre Humain (reprinted in Species of Spaces and other Pieces, tr John Sturrock 2008). Note the use of capitals, inverted commas and the oblique sign were all in the title.

Section K of the article is titled ‘Some Aphorisms’, and explores the idea of creating a certain number of formulae for pairs of words (eg using a formula such as: ‘A little ‘A’ carries us away from ‘B’, a lot brings us closer‘, and so on). Perec imagined a computer programme, which it would be easy to construct that “produces ad lib a near infinite number of aphorisms, each one of them bearing more meaning than the last”.

Perec provided a list of a short series of formulae (Page 203) using the words forgetting/remembering to create some aphorisms. Here is the same list now applied to Life/Death:
Life is a malady for which Death is the cure
Life wouldn’t be Life if it weren’t Death
What comes by Life goes by Death
Small Death makes big Life
Life adds to our pains, Death to our pleasures
(I thought about reversing the Life/Death pairing here to Death/Life, but properly resisted the temptation)
Life delivers us from Death, but who will deliver us from Life?
Happiness is in Death, not in Life
Happiness is in Life, not in Death
A little Death carries us away from Life, a lot brings us closer
Life unites men, Death divides them
Life deceives us more often than Death
etc.

Perec now asks in the article, “Where is the thinking here? In the formula? In the vocabulary? In the operation that marries them?”

‘LIFE/DEATH’: It may be noted that 1982 was also the year of Georges Perec’s death at the age of 46 from lung cancer. He tells us about his strange experience (P 189) while working on the THINK/CLASSIFY piece: “What came to the surface was of the nature of the fuzzy, the uncertain, the fugitive and the unfinished, and in the end I chose deliberately to preserve the hesitant and perplexed character of these shapeless scraps, and to abandon the pretence of organizing them into something that would by rights have had the appearance (and seductiveness) of an article, with a beginning, a middle, and an end”.

Anon rules ok!

 Posted by at 11:13 am  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 232014
 

‘Void’ you say, as you play with the dynamics of anonymity.

‘Perec! Perec!’ 

Is that a bird I can hear? 

And there is a middle aged man . . . Can’t do much with him! Is it TS Eliot at the age of 43 or perhaps 53? Or poor old BKS Iyengar dead and only a middle aged yogi at the age of 95. Surely those eyebrows are a sure sign of yogic maturity. If it is then all I have to do let my eyebrows grow, stop trimming them every few weeks and I too could be a yogi. But which celebrity would endorse me and lift me into the rarefied, possibly drug and alcohol fuelled, sexually abusive world of the famous, wealthy and powerful.

And, furthermore, I didn’t hear you asking the important questions: what are the political implications of psychoanalysis? What is the loss we must account for? And can I learn to love? Who is this middle aged man? I don’t mean ‘who’ is he, rather, what is he doing in your piece of writing? Is he a dope fiend? Has he been in analysis for the last twenty years? In which case perhaps he has an answer to my first question. Or, alternatively, is he an ancient student of BKS Iyengar? 

Or is he a short sighted poet?

‘Perec! Perec’!' 

There’s that bird again. Calling us to the void. Or to avoid. Calling us to anonymity. Calling us towards the full stop.

Anon rules ok!

 Posted by at 11:13 am  Atelier  Comments Off
Aug 232014
 

‘Void’ you say, as you play with the dynamics of anonymity.

‘Perec! Perec!’ 

Is that a bird I can hear? 

And there is a middle aged man . . . Can’t do much with him! Is it TS Eliot at the age of 43 or perhaps 53? Or poor old BKS Iyengar dead and only a middle aged yogi at the age of 95. Surely those eyebrows are a sure sign of yogic maturity. If it is then all I have to do let my eyebrows grow, stop trimming them every few weeks and I too could be a yogi. But which celebrity would endorse me and lift me into the rarefied, possibly drug and alcohol fuelled, sexually abusive world of the famous, wealthy and powerful.

And, furthermore, I didn’t hear you asking the important questions: what are the political implications of psychoanalysis? What is the loss we must account for? And can I learn to love? Who is this middle aged man? I don’t mean ‘who’ is he, rather, what is he doing in your piece of writing? Is he a dope fiend? Has he been in analysis for the last twenty years? In which case perhaps he has an answer to my first question. Or, alternatively, is he an ancient student of BKS Iyengar? 

Or is he a short sighted poet?

‘Perec! Perec’!' 

There’s that bird again. Calling us to the void. Or to avoid. Calling us to anonymity. Calling us towards the full stop.

Aug 212014
 
photo-3

“I am ready to take the stand”, the middle-aged man said in a gesture of willed objectivity which reminded me of the work of another writer, George Perec. Not Life A User’s Manual. No, nothing so large, I was being reminded of a minor, mostly forgotten piece called Espece d’espaces written by Perec in 1974. The work is less than 100 pages in all, and is to be found in the ficto-documentary collection called Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (tr John Sturrock, 2008).

Perec begins Espece d’espaces with a Foreword. The first sentence goes like this, “The subject of this book is not the void exactly, but rather what there is round about it or inside it (cf fig 1)”. Figure 1 itself is printed on the front papers of the book before the contents and the foreword. The Figure is called ‘Map of the Ocean’, and consist in a drawing of a square on an otherwise blank page, except for the title underneath and then under that in brackets ‘(taken from Lewis Carroll’s, Hunting of the Snark)’.

As much as I know already from this beginning that this is an autobiographical work which Perec is giving in to, so too I knew that the sentence spoken by the middle-aged man was also the beginning of his autobiography. He himself is the subject. Of course like Perec no facts about his life will be revealed, but he will be telling what is round about it or inside it.

Giving in to becoming the subject, and it will seem to us is that it is a void. But not exactly because in this autobiographical work by Perec or a middle-aged man we are already aware of some things. For one thing we are aware of his absence. He is absent from the story, and this has already created an intensely sad atmosphere (what we know from Perec’s life: he was a Parisian Jew born in 1936, whose father enlisted as a soldier and was killed in action by the time he was six and his mother murdered in Auschwitz before the end of the war). He will not provide this information, nor he will add to or adorn his account with any other biographical details because he is confident we already know this sadness simply having opened the cover and turned the blank front pages, perhaps not even noticing the Figure 1 in the first instance.

So too the middle-aged man’s remark, “I am willing to take the stand”. As if written at the start of a foreword to his own work of autobiography, and I know already that nothing will follow, that no narrative will be provided, and no life story is to be told. There is the same absence as with Perec. And there is the same oceanic quality of sadness as in the front papers of Espece d’espace, because he has already told all the information about his life that it is necessary to know. Oceanic, and the sadness seems all in shadows, but just as Perec account of Espece d’espace unfolds, when we look closer and listen deeper what is around about it or inside it is suffused with lightness and with light.

(Espece should have a grave accent on the middle ‘e‘ . Please who can show me the key to write this?)

Cruelty

 Posted by at 2:50 pm  Echo Effects, Fundamental Perversions, Hitting the Potholes  Comments Off
Aug 142014
 

A couple of days ago I finished reading A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride and a few minutes ago I finished reading Judith Butler’s review of Derrida’s The Death Penalty: Vol. 1. as I get through some of the backlog from recent issues of the LRB. Ummm I can hear you murmuring somebody is giving themselves a hard time. Well, I might respond, if it’s not tough it’s not worth doing! It took me a few attempts to get into Eimear McBride’s award winning first novel. The early pages are about the young female protagonist as a child . . . was it that I simply couldn’t connect with the abbreviated syntax, truncated grammar or was I already sensing the brutality of the world she was describing and I was resistant to entering the brutal family nexus. It was easier once the protagonist was in her later teens but not much easier. A lone mother, the repression of Catholic orthodoxy, the languages that were available in the context of coming of age, of sexuality, of the boundaries of what is abuse and self-harm, and centrally the tragedy of her younger brother.

What McBride makes brilliantly clear are those drives that push us further into crisis, she makes tangible Eros and Thanatos, that push for pleasure and cessation. Can we escape the cruelties of life? Cruelty being some sort of combination of Eros and Thanatos. The guilt and the debts we owe to the collective. Will the collective demand our life in return for our errors? Torture, execution, death or the slowly dragged out suffering of long incarceration. Butler, as an American is keenly aware if the dynamics of American justice. Of the fact that there are 3000 waiting on death row, the fact that a disproportionate number both in prison and on death row are African Americans or Hispanics. She follows Derrida’s exploration of cruelty and the death penalty, that we cannot escape our cruelty by abolishing the death penalty. She refers to Angela Davis who argued for the move away from vengeance towards restitution and repair. But it would seem our excess aggression, our envy and rage, make the project extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.

The question might turn to the sort of political institutions that we are able to hold in place. David Cameron famously talked of Britain being broken. I don’t suppose he would agree with my contention that it is now even more broken than it was five years ago. A process that of course was initiated by Margaret Thatcher as the Tories attempted to turn back the tide on post-war social democracy.

As I said, I did in fact finish reading McBride’s courageous book even though there were parts towards the end that were barely readable (by me, at least); making apparent what we can do to each other through our push towards retribution, ignorance, and cruelty through a fine piece of writing. Just don’t ask me to read it again.