conversations

romanticism

In Romanticism (1996) in Aidan Day outlines a common position on romanticism:

the earlier, politically radical work of the first generation British 'Romantic' writers is better termed late Enlightenment. Their mature, conservative writings may be called Romantic .... The most important item in such a way of defining the literary productions of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain is that ... Romanticism is identified above all as being a politically conservative, sometimes reactionary tendency of thought and attitude. (p. 182)

It's an interpretation that I struggle with: the aesthetic is political,or rather it is the equation of the aesthetic with the ideological that troubles me. The stable, centred subject can efface problems for instrumental rationality with projections of artistic reconciliation. The aesthetic, or more accurately aesthetic discourse, has lost its critical edge.

I accept that in modernity the aesthetic is neither knowledge nor justice--it is different. The diremption between epistemology and ethics that founds philosophical modernity is not ideologically reconciled in aesthetics

machine culture

An interesting paragraph:

We are early 21st-century humanity, the inheritors of industrialism, the progenitors of the information age. We live in a machine culture; in our daily lives, we are more and more surrounded by and interfaced with machines. We are no longer, like our ancestors, simply supplied by machines; we live in and through them. From our workplaces to our errands about town to our leisure time at home, human experience is to an unprecedented extent the experience of being interfaced with the machine, of imbibing its logic, of being surrounded by it and seeking it out: pager, cell
phone.

It is by Phoebe Sengers in a paper entitled Practices for a Machine Culture, and she goes on to say that in a world where machinery is woven in to the fabric of our daily lives, it is, while useful, not enough to approach computation at an arm’s length, to make it the object or pre-given tool of the humanities. The humanities must not only observe, use, and critique computation, but also ingest it. Computing itself must become a humanist discipline.

biopolitics

In an article entitled 'Biopolitics and Connective Mutation ' in Culture Machine Bifo (Franco Beradi) says that it is thanks to Michel Foucault that the theme of subjectivity has definitively been freed from its Hegelian and historicist legacy, and thought again in a new context – that of biopolitical discipline.

The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived. Biopolitics is a modeling of the biological body and of the social body by what Foucault defines as disciplinary dispositifs.

However, if the Foucauldian analysis did pose the problem of genealogy in terms which were finally no longer Hegelian, but it was still attached to the mechanical forms of industrial discipline and it did not take into account new technologies of control. The concept of biopolitics, however, implies an evolution that goes beyond the classical form of mechanical discipline of the industrial age.

Bifo says that the concept of biopower designates that which brings life and its mechanisms within the realm of calculus, in other words, that which makes knowledge an agent of the technical transformation of human life.

Deleuze proposes the concept of ‘control society’ as a means to fully develop such an idea. Deleuze was a great reader of William Burroughs and Burroughs imaginatively anticipated the passage to the fully biopolitical age, that age whose dispositifs no longer present a molar character (such as the school, the prison, the factory, the asylum) but essentially molecular features, which are intrinsic to the very genesis of the conscious organism. We move here from the phase of industrial discipline to that of the mutation of the organism, taking place through the inoculation of mutagenic principles, and the cabling of psychic, cognitive, genetic and relational circuits. We might replace the word ‘control’ with ‘cabling’.

medicine: flawed thinking

Richard Horton's What's Wrong with Doctors in the New York Review of Books is a review of Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think. It is a critique of medicine's mistaken direction. The argument is that doctors must learn to think differently.

A solid base of medical knowledge is not enough to be a good physician or surgeon. Research into cognitive errors in medicine reveals that most mistakes are not technical. They stem from mistakes in thinking. Intuition, a clinical sixth sense, for example, is unreliable. But equally, the assumption that medicine is a totally rational process is also wrong. Doctors may be reasonably smart, but they repeatedly fall into common and well-defined traps.

What are the traps? It's the way they think in terms of its discourse.

Groopman says:

I like to conduct rounds in a traditional way. One member of the team first presents the salient aspects of the case and then we move as a group to the bedside, where we talk to the patient and examine him. The team then returns to the conference room to discuss the problem. I follow a Socratic method in the discussion, encouraging the students and residents to challenge each other, and challenge me, with their ideas. But at the end of rounds on that September morning I found myself feeling disturbed. I was concerned about the lack of give-and-take among the trainees, but even more I was disappointed with myself as their teacher. I concluded that these very bright and very affable medical students, interns, and residents all too often failed to question cogently or listen carefully or observe keenly. They were not thinking deeply about their patients' problems. Something was profoundly wrong with the way they were learning to solve clinical puzzles and care for people.

He identifies that the flaw in his thinking is different from the the new generation:

My generation was never explicitly taught how to think as clinicians. We learned medicine catch-as-catch-can. Trainees observed senior physicians the way apprentices observed master craftsmen in a medieval guild, and somehow the novices were supposed to assimilate their elders' approach to diagnosis and treatment. Rarely did an attending physician actually explain the mental steps that led him to his decisions. Over the past few years, there has been a sharp reaction against this catch-as-catch-can approach. To establish a more organized structure, medical students and residents are being taught to follow preset algorithms and practice guidelines in the form of decision trees.

Oh, the humanities

Since 1996 policymakers in Australia have modeled the sector as a marketplace of competing firms, and institutions have gained greater discretion to earn money and spend what they earn. But if research universities, particularly, are to operate at the global cutting edge, creative independence is more significant.

One of the effects in this reshaping of the high education sector has been erosion of academic freedom has been half-disguised in the trade of powers between institutions and Canberra. One strand of thinking in cabinet apparently sees academic freedom as a danger that must be controlled, as shown in the intervention by the previous minister, Brendan Nelson, in Australian Research Council project decisions grounded in academic merit.

Another effect has been the ongoing cuts to the humanities faculties in the name of a tight budgetary environment with some universities closing down their schools of humanities, saying that if students want to choose a liberal arts degree, they could go elsewhere. Some are even closing down their social science departments.

Mark Bahnisch observes that he has:

always been perplexed and annoyed by the tone of much of the conservative criticism of university education in the humanities and social sciences (I deliberately omit the words logic and argument). Either pundits, pollies and culture warriors extrapolate from some personal or anecdotal experience of a few isolated sociology departments from the 1970s and early '80s and imagine an Althusserian circle of hell trapping innocent young minds in the cold dead hands of French structural Marxism, or they completely forget that teaching Australian literature and history was a radical thing to do in the '60s, and one that many of their forebears opposed.

The reality is otherwise. The problem is not the cultural left, or its dominance.

Mark Bahnisch says:

The story of redundancies and the failure to replace humanities staff at many universities, for instance, is a narrative not of insurgent postmodern hordes but of funding being diverted to matching funds for "strategic initiatives" and the creation of accounting models that allocate funding based on bums in lecture theatres rather than the intrinsic value of subjects and disciplines, while seemingly always facilitating a proliferation of pro vice-chancellors and a modicum of marketing staff.

a note on modern subjectivity

Michelle Weinroth in Kant, Sendak, and the Limits of Modern Subjectivity in the Canadian Aesthetics Journal gives an account of modernist subjectivity:

Like the aesthetic category of the sublime, the modern subject is a bold conqueror of the infinite reaches of virgin territories; but swathed in the subjectivities of isolation, he sublimates the warm hearth of past organic communities in the form of an imaginary world order designed to slavishly endorse his every desire. Such is his indomitable need to restore some semblance of community within the recesses of his imagination. An accruing self-consciousness cleaves the modern subject into the fragments of self and otherness; society proves mediocre and ill-suited to the growing pangs of individual subjectivity. Unable to contemplate the outer world coherently, the modern subject lapses into maudlin nostalgia for the restoration of some prelapsarian unity.

a modernist art gallery

Modernism states that in an art gallery--such as the National Gallery of Australia----works of art must be viewed in a specific way. Lisa P. Schoenberg describes it thus in the Canadian Aesthetics Journal:

appreciation must focus on the work itself, which consists, say, of a set of perceptual properties, rather than on such extraneous matters as the artist’s intentions, the context in which the work was created, or its similarities to and dissimilarities from other works. While we might understand Modernism to require a radical kind of neutrality—the kind with which we approach things that have no significance for us, like the squiggles of a foreign alphabet, or the way neurological patients with visual agnosia look at faces, the kind where we impose no concepts, ideas, or even recognition of prior experience on that which we view—such neutrality is itself counter to the conception of art as a meaning-making activity, one in which we find or impose meanings on the perceptual structures of works by reading them through the distinctly non-neutral eyes of our experience. In urging us to resist this, Modernism is not neutral at all, for it is impressing on us a distinct and, by historical standards, unique set of practices regarding the appreciation of art.

We see the work as if presented in isolation. It presupposes an current all-encompassing conception of art under which the objects in museums come to be viewed as equivalent.

I find the not impositing of anything on the artists’ unique visions a most alienating experience.

Ereignis+ becoming

I'm picking up on an older post here on Ereignis, which I translated as appropriation or enowning. In the introduction to Heidegger's On Time and Being Joan Stambaugh,
the translator, says the following about the term Ereignis/Appropriation:

Being. Terminologically speaking, this term begins to recede in favor of Heidegger's Appropriation, a term which has never before had a philosophical significance. The word Being is simply too bogged down with metaphysical connotations. But Heidegger still retains it in order to maintain the relation to his earlier formulation of the question of Being. In other words, the question is the same, but in "Time and Being" Heidegger is groping his way out of metaphysics. Appropriation does not designate a "realm" as does Being, but rather a relation, that of man and Being. What is radically new and non-Metaphysical about Appropriation is not only that it is an "activity"--a non-static process--Appropriation is non-metaphysical because in the relationship between man and Being as appropriated to each other, the relation is more fundamental than what is related.

Ereignis is often translated as event---the event of appropriation. If philosophy used to think in terms of idea, as energeia, as actualitas, does it now think in terms of appropriation? I've always suspected the background to all this is Aristotle and a metaphysics of becoming. Heidegger’s concern is as not “being” (the givenness or availability of entities for human engagement) of classical metaphysics, but rather what brings about being, namely Ereignis, the opening of clearing within which entities can appear as this or that. It is an enabling power.

Ereignis often means enowning"; that in connection with things that arise and appear, they arise into their own.
The inner movement of Ereignis is one whereby (a) finitude opens a clearing in human being (b) in which entities
can appear as this or that.

This is quite different to what Thomas Sheehan calls the popular “Big Being” story, according to which Being Itself, lying hidden somewhere beyond our ken, occasionally pulls back the veil and reveals Itself to properly disposed human beings---Heideggerians

Foucault, space

Michael Foucault's Of Other Spaces He says that the great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. Then the turn to space, which he argues, has a history.

One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

He says that the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

shrinking back angst

In Being and Time, Heidegger developed his idea of angst, or anxiety, and how the totality of the world is exposed to the individual through it. Angst assists in revealing the nothing, because it, by its very nature, is undifferentiated. While fear is always fear of something or other, angst is a sense of dread that sets Da-sein aside from everything that is not itself. While experiencing angst, everything recedes from Da-sein such that we “can get no hold on things.”

After everything has receded away from awareness, Da-sein is confronted with the nothing. For this reason Heidegger states that “anxiety reveals the nothing.” We can come to an understanding that it is not “this thing or that” that made us anxious, but “that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was ‘properly’ – nothing.

Nothing is the word for an anxiety about something we cannot put our finger on---eg., the vague sense of emptiness that urban decay and de-industrialization causes. We sense a dark future; one that leaves us with a sense of powerlessness as we struggle to shrink back angst as the manufacturing industries go elsewhere. In this situation the routine course of our life is disrupted by calamities or inner doubt.

In Adelaide in the 1990s I saw the derelict buildings, empty building sites, closed y and boarded up shops and buildings. My taken-for-granted meaning of my life and world suddenly is shattered, and I realized that we in Adelaide had been hovering over an abyss all along. This negative presence expressed in derelict building sites indicate that global capital had gone elsewhere, and the city and buildings have gone downhill. What future for Adelaide as a place to live, given this tragic process of decay and a sense of loss?

So if nothingness is a negativity, then it is not something outside of everyday existence.

In the essay "What is Metaphysics?" written shortly after the publication of Being and Time Heidegger placed metaphysics in contrast to the outlook of modern science (deriving from Descartes) with its focus on the res extensa as an empirically given domain--and its consequent neglectof nothingness. "Nothingness," Heidegger observed, "is absolutely re-jected by science and abandoned as null and void"--which means that "science wishes to know nothing of nothing(ness). Traditional Western thought has tended to treat nothingness simply as negativity of a vacuum.

Nothingness was encountered in the state of "dread" (Angst), which was not equivalent to mere anxiety ornervousness, but rather meant a basic openness to nonbeing, that understood as a part of being. If nothingness is a negativity, then it is also intrinsic possibility and a defining character of human existence. Nothingness denotes neither a representational or conceptual entity nor apropositional denial; it is more a "nihilating" potency participating obliquely in the ongoing happening or disclosure of being.

a note on place

he Australian philosopher J. E. Malpas, in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999), has expressed points to the autobiographical novels of Proust, as crucial for understanding place, since in Proust Malpas finds the "explicit thematising" of the "idea of human life as essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identity found in place, and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the 'human.'"

Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, as well, of the political agency of place studies, since our human cultures are and have been threatened by spatial notions of conquest and colonization; terrible consequences are unavoidable "unless space (as territory which is mappable, explorable) gives way to place (occupation, dwelling, being lived in)." Overlapping Grosz is the work of Edward Casey , whose philosophical history of The Fate of Place (1997), protest the "neglect of place": In the past three centuries in the West--- the period of modernity---place, Casey argues, has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial.

Bataille revisited

I stumbled into taking the brim and Documents and came across Black Sun: Bataille on Sade by Geoffrey Roche. This text helps me to understand Bataille who I begun to read when I began this blog only to toss away.

Roche has more staying power. He says:

Bataille shares with Sade a number of thematic preoccupations. Bataille’s fictional work, in particular Story of the Eye, is similar to that of Sade to the point of appearing derivative. As in Sade, in Bataille there is a great deal of scatology, sex scenes in churches, blasphemy, humiliation, rape, torture and necrophilia....There are also philosophical similarities, although these have often been exaggerated. The most obvious theoretical commonality
is in their ethical orientation. Sade’s view that civilization and morals have softened man is close to Bataille’s attitude (Juliette, J, 776). Both writers draw a link between the absence of God and the nullity of morality suggesting a traditionally religious view of moral thought (Bataille’s project of founding an ‘anti-ethics’, without reason or justice, is explicitly a Godless ethics )

That makes sense. I can now understand Bataille as continuing the Surrealist project of revolutionary liberation from morality.

humanities+university

What happens to the social function of criticism, which has been to legitimize literature as an important activity and social enterprise, when the literary institution falls on hard times? When the old literary order collapses in on itself in a time of radical change and the shift from a print to an electronic culture. Television and other forms of electronic communication have replaced the printed book, especially its idealized form, literature, as more enticing, efficient, and authoritative sources of knowledge.

J. Hillis Miller concludes this text in Surfaces(vol.4) symposium on humanistic discourse thus:

This crisis in representation for literature departments accompanies a larger crisis of representation for the university as a whole, in particular for the humanities as an element in a new kind of university in a different world of global economy and global communication. The old American paradigm for the research university was borrowed from the Humboldtian model of the University of Berlin. This was widely influential in the United States, for example, in the founding of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876. The professionalization of the disciplines of English and other modern European literatures began at Hopkins with the establishing of the Modern Language Association in 1883. Partly under the influence of Matthew Arnold, the study of one national literature, namely English literature, replaced in England and America the role given to philosophy in the original Humboldtian university. This original role for philosophy is enshrined still in the fact that we are all doctors of philosophy, whatever our discipline. The presumption was that the university's function was to serve a single unified nation-state by preserving and passing on its values and ideals. English Departments played a central role in fulfilling that function.

That is a good account of the heritage of the Humanities that has been handed down to us. Times change though, especially in the latter part of the 20th century. For instance, as has been frequently pointed out, the single unified nation-state has come apart at the seams through our becoming nation is multicultural, heterogeneous, diverse. So what then for the humanities in a neo-liberal university that is run as a business? What is their future?

In this review of Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature, Paul Trout says that literature as a socially constructed category has always been peculiarly fragile and vulnerable.

It has failed to get as deeply inscribed within society as other institutions for two reasons.
First, since the early eighteenth century, and certainly since the Romantic age, the self-proclaimed mission of literature has been to ridicule and oppose the scientific, philosophical, social, political, and moral values of the surrounding society. High literature, especially, has resisted doing what it is the primary job of social institutions to do: legitimizing social values, making a factitious social reality appear natural.Even today, literary people at all levels continue to express hostility toward the main line of modern society, as if criticism of the social order, of politicians and business people, were sufficient justification of the arts.

And the second reason for the peculiar fragility of literature as a society institution has been its inability to provide itself with a cognitively rigorous justification:

Literature, as even those who live off it will confess, is impossible to define. No two people agree precisely or altogether on what it is, no two people think about it without murkiness and contradiction. As a result, literature lacks a theoretical basis, a systematic organization of its parts that would make it real and meaningful to others in the larger social world... Troubled by inexact, murky terms and a general lack of theoretical rigor, the institution of literature was ill prepared to withstand the attacks directed at it by the social activists and skeptical theorists of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

So literature's claim to being a body of truth and a way of knowing truth was deeply undermined. J. Hillis Miller acknowledges this kind of state of affairs. As he says:

For many people the old mission of the university no longer has persuasive force. We have not yet, however, invented a new paradigm for the nature and function of the university. The loss of this special role for the study of English literature puts English departments especially under stress in the new post-national, post-modern university. Those of us who are Professors of English have been deprived of our traditional role as preservers and transmitters of the unified values of a homogeneous nation-state.

Thankfully. Many of them were unbearable fools who hid their deep conservatism and intolerance for philosophy as aesthetics behind 'the literary experience.'

Hiller then asks: 'What alternative would be best?' He responds along these lines :

William Readings of the University of Montréal has done brilliant work in thinking through the problems of what he calls the "postmodern university." A major theoretical and practical challenge confronts departments of English now to redefine their role in the new kind of university and the new kind of non-unified national culture. If we do not find this new role we shall end up serving a purely ancillary function as teachers of communication skills for a predominantly technological university. I agree not only with Readings, but also with Derrida, Lyotard, Diane Elam, Gerald Graff, and many others who have in different ways called for the creation of a university of dissensus, that is, one in which the impossibility of reconciling differences by dialogue or by increased knowledge would be openly recognized and institutionalized.

One might imagine a university that remains in a state of permanent revolution, that is, one in which teaching and research would be defined not as the preservation and augmentation of what is already known but as the invention and discovery of the new, in response to a demand made on us by the other of what we already have.

mimesis + avant garde

I've been exploring a bit of aesthetics over at junk for code ( here and here) in relation to photography. I have just come across this review by Thomas Huhn of Andrew Benjamin's Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference, in Surfaces vol. 3. It is not a very good review, as it is too brief for complex material around the reworking of the task of philosophy in terms of the centrality of ontology, that is understood through the differences between modes of being.

Huhn says that Benjamin traces out one of the most crucial implications of his aesthetic ontology in regard to mimesis and the conception and role of the avant-garde. On the former he says:

Plato's stand against mimetic imitation occurs by way of his complaint that artistic renderings are at a third remove from the reality of the Forms. Hence central to the Platonic tradition is a theory of mimetic imitation which entails an ontology of original unity. If one reconsiders mimesis in light of its commitment to a static ontology, mimesis then appears less as the theory of imitation and more as the theory of a certain reflection of ontology. Mimesis, in other words, is a theory of the mirror. And the mirror, we might say, overachieves its task; instead of simply reflecting an ontology, it folds its reflection back in upon itself.

I've always puzzled about mimesis and mirrors even though I no longer buy into Plato's ontology.

On the latter--the conception and role of the avant-garde --- Huhn says:

If it is the mirror, and with it the tradition of mimesis, that serves to instill and prescribe homogeneity, then it is precisely in regard to it, according to Benjamin, that the conception and task of the avant-garde -- as an affirmation of pluralism -- becomes crucial

Andrew Benjamin: philosophical traditions

Andrew Benjamin, in this interview with Stuart Barnett in the Connecticut Review (Spring 1997), responds to a question about the role of deconstruction in British philosophy as follows:

The difficulty with the role of deconstruction within the British scene is that it's viewed as suspiciously by the establishment as it is by the so-called anti-establishment. The establishment of the right and the establishment of the left are both equally suspicious of this form of philosophical activity. Even journals such as Radical Philosophy are just as dismissive of French philosophy--say, Lyotard and Derrida--as the analytic journals. Thus one is squeezed by the two prongs of the establishment. Now I say that as an Australian living in Britain. I'm sure the British themselves don't see it that way. They see it in ways that have to do with the role which a conception of national identity--even though it's not announced as such--assumes within the philosophical.

A similar situation exists in Australia. The philosophy of the left and the philosophy of the right in Britain and Australia are residual national forms of philosophy and what one is working against are these residual national forms of philosophy. Hence there is both a marginalization of this "deconstructive" mode of philosophical activity and a residual hardening of attitudes on both sides against whatever is meant by deconstruction.

Benjamin says that the marginalized takes place through a nationalist discourse:

a discourse of the nation that is not recognized as such. And so there is this residual move back to Britishness on both the left and right. Though they don't realize that's what they're doing. They drive it out by labeling it as French, or labeling it as something else. And then they have nothing to do with it because it's other. What that means also is--again, in the British context--that it's very difficult to do original philosophical work that has its basis in deconstruction or the European orientation. Because both ends of the tradition the two prongs of that tradition remain uninterested in that. They remain interested in their own traditions.

It's no longer possible to distinguish between the left-wing and the right-wing establishment in terms of the way they denounce what they call French philosophy. That linkage of nation and philosophy is what comes out of the establishment(s).

So the reception and practice deconstruction in Britain and Australia has not transformed the British or Australian philosophical tradition. To avoid becoming ghettozed it must become international.

the decay of a literary culture

Are romantic and modern literature's "leading values the aesthetic versions of print logic? Remember the old Romantic dream of eradicating the distinction between perceiver and perceived and the symbol? Are these literary values destined to disappear as print is replaced by image?

Is this one way to understand the lament for the decline of print---the waning of book culture" even within the university---and the ascendancy of electronic media image-oriented culture. What is lost is the conception of reading as a revelatory experience that has its roots in religion and the faith in the transforming power of literature.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, evening, Cape Borda, Kangaroo Island, 2007

I guess I mean the the above that it is a liberal education, with literary studies at its core, that is decadent or dying. The action has shifted to cultural studies, and English becomes a minor department harboring a few aesthetes who like to read "a foreign literature written in a relatively familiar language". We no longer think that the use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. Literature is no longer understood, on the model of religion, as a body of inspired writings with discernible meanings.

As Alvin Kernan argued in The Death of Literature (1990) what has "died" are those high claims once made for the value of literature, and indeed other arts--claims of transcendent beauty, immutable meaning, and the precious creative potential of the individual. What has "died" is the view of literature that has prevailed from the high age of print in the eighteenth century through most of the twentieth century: the belief that the creative intelligence of an author is the source of literature, that there are such things as "works of art" and that these works of art convey aesthetic cultural inheritance which is beneficent.

Within the space of just thirty years, these once unquestioned and ostensibly permanent beliefs have been dispatched to the dustbin of historical fictions, where they now rest with such discarded concepts as the earth being flat and kings having a divine right to rule.This death is what many lament.

a note on television

When I'm working in Canberra I've the opportunity to be able to watch Sky News on Foxtel, the Australian pay television channel. I have the TV on all day whilst I'm working, often flicking to Fox News to watch the Republican rage against what they interpret as the darkness all around them for some comedy.

This presence of television in my life indicates the reality of the decline of print and the ascendancy of electronic media. The replacement of the printed word by the image and the voice substitutes immediate, powerful one-dimensional pictures and simple continuities for the ironies, ambiguities, and complex structures fostered by print and idealized in literature

What I've noted about this 24 hour live news form of television is that it presupposes, and presents itself as, being 'live broadcasting', in the sense of it being the present electronic production of the image.

The components of this presupposition are:
-- first, the mirror fantasy that the image we are seeing is direct (i.e., that it functions as if it were not "produced," by way of a particular technics or technology of representation, but were somehow an unmediated, straightforward presentation; and,

-- secondly, the fantasy that the image is direct for me (as if it were unproblematically addressed to me, presented to me, in a here and now that I share with the imaged event, such as the media conference by the Prime Minister.

These presuppositions form the presumed ontology of television as "live" broadcasting. Very often what is live in the here and now is anything but, as it is delayed. So we have a numbing of the sense of what history was as well as a a numbing of what the present could be.

Levinas: Heidegger and Ontology

A paraphrase by Lois Shawver of Emmanuel Levinas' paper 'Martin Heidegger and Ontology' which appeared in Diacritics 26.1 (1996)

Levinas: categories of experience

In the collection of essays entitled Entre Nous Levinas has an essay entitled 'Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy' In it Levinas says that Levy-Bruhl's analysis do not:

...describe experience as cast in the categories that from Aristotle to Kant--all nuances aside--claimed to condition experience, but in which, with a bit of inconsistency, magic and miracle are also accommodated. Levy-Bruhl questions precisely the supposed necessity of those categories for the possibility of experience..The problem of categories themselves is raised.

This problem is considered in terms of representation.

ground zero philosophy

The self-understanding of modernity is that it asserted itself as a definite break with the immediate past, and that the latter, variously labelled as the 'Dark Ages' or the 'middle ages', came to constitute the field of otherness against which all that was modern was to emerge. A simple set of dichotomies was then constructed in which all negative attributes were relegated to the epoch that was conceived as a hiatus in the course of civilization: blind faith, unreflecting prejudice, stagnation, absence of learning and free inquiry, superstition and so on. Even the rationalism of medieval schoolmen was overshadowed by their obedience to a Church authority that was viewed as arbitrary, mindful of its own political interests, and ultimately dedicated to holding knowledge and its pursuit under tight control.

A new world was born: one based on reason. The irrational past had to be destroyed for reason to exist, to make a fresh start and build the world anew. Reason then courageously fought the residues of irrationality in modernity to give us an enlightenment world. Many of us still live in the house of modernity.

It is only with the first crisis of modernity, precipitated by the extravagance of reason in the course of the French revolution, that a reexamination of the middle ages appeared possible and desirable. The impetus may have come from the Romantic reassessment of reason and the distrust of its claims to universal application, but it was quickly taken over by the very sort of rationalism that the Romantics rightly feared the most: instrumental (economic) reason in the service of the nation-state.

So what is crucial to modernity is the notion of an abyss between the periods of the pre-modern and modern. This abyss is what is preserved ; has to be preserved, for modernity to retain its identity.

And yet we know that if the culture of early modern times marks such an abrupt departure from what preceded it, then this rupture must have had its seeds in the culture of the middle ages. If that is the case, we do not have a break but a more or less orderly, or rather a discontinuous, development from the middle ages to early modernity.

What has happened from this crisis of modernity turning out to be otherwise than what it said it was, is that heterogeneity is now everywhere. Everyone now reads according to his or her situation and from different perspectives and so we have be a multiplicity of readings rather than one grand linear narrative. And so we have stepped into the postmodern and learn to live with difference.

Adorno: autonomous art

Adorno's interest in the work of art is in its potential to express truth in an age in which the dialectic of Enlightenment appears to be tending towards an increased barbarism. Art as a cognitive faculty for thought freed from domination depends upon its autonomy, that is, its distinction from the commodified realm of mass culture and its "mass deception." To quote Adorno, "the division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute" (Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944, 135).

The divide thus corresponds to the fact of the division of labour in capitalist society.[6] Accordingly, until that division is abolished high art and mass culture are unable to be reconciled--they are "two halves of an integral freedom that do not add up" (Adorno 1936, 53). The appearance of their reconciliation in the postmodern artefact therefore must be a false one, symptomatic of its subsumption by the culture industry.

The critical capacity of art exists only when "it has become autonomous". Adorno posits the possibility of a resistant space on the incompleteness of the domination exercised by capital and the market. He locates a lag within this subsumption in Europe, such that the educational system and various artistic and cultural practices were permitted some degree of autonomy

Heidegger: place, presence

As I'm struggling to make sense of place over at junk for code I want to continue looking at the way Jeff Malpas unpacks Heidegger's understanding of it in his Heidegger's Topology Being, Place, World. Malpas says:

Heidegger claimed that one of the great breakthroughs in his own thinking was to realize that this Greek understanding of being was based in the prioritization of a certain mode of temporality, namely the present, and so understood the being of things in terms of the “presence“ presencing” of things in the present—in terms of the way they “stand fast” here and now.

The issue of being is tied here directly to the idea of presence or presencing as such. Malpas says that this leaves leaves open as a question just what is meant by presence as such and whether what Heidegger means by presence is always one and the same. Thankfully, for us, he goes on to explore this.

He says:

It seems to me that Heidegger does indeed tend to think of being always in terms of presence, but that presence does not always mean presence in the sense of standing fast in the present, and so, when Heidegger refers to the way in which being has always meant “presence” or “presencing,” what remains at issue is just how “presence” should be understood. In fact, “presence” encompasses both presence or “presentness” (in the sense of that which is present as present) and the happening of such presentness (as the presenting or presencing of that which is present).

He says that I take “presence” itself to be ambiguous between both the entity that presences.... as well as presencing as such and thus take it to be ambiguous between beings and being... as well as between that which is
intelligible and that in which intelligibility is grounded. So there is one distinction here (between presence and what presences) that plays out in at least two ways (in terms of being and beings, as well as between the ground of intelligibility and what is intelligible). Malpas then says:

If this distinction between these two senses of “presence”—presence as that which is present as present and presence as the happening of such presentness—is accepted, then much of Heidegger’s thinking can be seen as an attempt to recover the latter of these two senses and, in so doing, to recover the necessary belonging-together of the former sense with the latter.

The presencing or disclosedness of a being is alway. a matter of its coming to presence in relation to other beings. This is why, for Heidegger, presencing or disclosedness is inseparable from the happening of a world. The happening of presence or disclosedness—the happening of world—as such. The “happening” here is the “happening” of the very things that we encounter in our concrete and immediate experience of the world.

Heidegger + place

The theme of Jeff Malpas's recent book Heidegger's Topology Being, Place, World is that of place and its role in Heidegger's thinking. Place is a term that Heidegger himself used for the ultimate destination of his way of thinking---- ie., thinking through the meaning of being ultimately leads to thinking about place. It connects with this place-oriented thinking over at junk for code.

Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated in the world, in "place."

In this review at Enowning says that place is a term that has not received proper consideration before this study.

The book begins by looking at the question of situatedness in early Heidegger, and then moves on to a detailed analysis of place in Being and Time, with many references to Dreyfus's study. The role of our bodies in our understanding of space and orientation is examined, as is dasein's embeddedness in the world. Questions about place and its meaning, its role in different works, are revisited through out the book, so that our understanding of its importance in Heidegger's philosophy grows steadily. In addition to Being and Time, the pertinent parts of the "Letter on Humanism", "The Origin of the Work of Art", and "The Thing", are covered in detail, as are several courses. And because the theme is place, "Building Dwelling Thinking" also gets close attention.

.
Place, in the sense used in this book, is not merely space or geometric volume as was commonly understood in modernity. It transgresses this.

Heidegger discusses the development of the technical understanding of space in Being and Time, and in more detail in his lectures on science, where reads he closely reads Galileo and Newton's texts to illuminate the paradigm changes within. However, Heidegger is concerned to think philosophy in terms of place not space.

In his Introduction Malpas says that:

Much of my argument here could be put in terms of the idea that the question of being is indeed underlain by a “more radical question”—namely, the question of place. Strictly speaking... I would prefer to say that being and place are inextricably bound together in a way that does not allow one to be seen merely as an “effect” of the other, rather being emerges only in and through place. The question of being must be understood in this light, such that the question of being itself unfolds into the question of place.

The question of being already implies (“unfolds into”) the question of place----its an interesting way of looking at the world isn't it.