Horner's Corner

 

In Disobedient Rooms: On J.G. Ballard By China Miéville

 

The publication of any book by J.G. Ballard at this moment–let alone so colossal and career-spanning a volume as The Complete Stories, running to nearly 1,200 pages–is an occurrence that can only be about more than itself. All writers are writers of their time, of course, but Ballard, who after a fight with cancer died in April 2009, feels somehow uniquely, precisely so. This book marks the fact that we are all post-Ballard now: it’s not that we’ve gotten beyond him but rather that we remain ineluctably defined by him. Completists have pointed out that, its title notwithstanding, this volume is not a truly comprehensive collection of all Ballard’s published short fiction. Those few omissions are a disappointment. Nevertheless, they are few, and despite them the book is indispensable.

 

more via In Disobedient Rooms: On J.G. Ballard.

Basil Bunting

(1900 – 1985)

“Compose aloud; poetry is sound.” – Advice to young poets, Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) is best known for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’ which has come to be recognised as one of the key texts of British modernism.

more via Basil Bunting – Poetry Archive.

Photograph © Jonathan Williams

Nothing

substance utters or time

stills and restrains

joins design and

supple measure deftly

as thought’s intricate polyphonic

score dovetails with the tread

sensuous things

keep in our consciousness.

Celebrate man’s craft

and the word spoken in shapeless night, the

sharp tool paring away

waste and the forms

cut out of mystery!

When taut string’s note

passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet

fade, strong over unseen

forces the word

ranks and enumerates…

mimes clouds condensed

and hewn hills and bristling forests,

steadfast corn in its season

and the seasons

in their due array,

life of man’s own body

and death…

The sound thins into melody,

discourse narrowing, craft

failing, design

petering out.

Ears heavy to breeze of speech and

thud of the ictus.

Basil Bunting, from Odes

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

Ignoring the mainstream, spreading enthusiasm for difficult music and sustaining sonic subcultures: Colin Marshall talks to Chris Bohn, editor of The Wire

Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation  on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I was reading a slightly older profile of the magazine in the Telegraph. It had a quote from you saying that The Wire is best thought of as a magazine that does not cover certain types of music rather than a magazine that does cover certain types. So I’ll put the question to you: what does The Wire not cover?

The stuff you could consider heavily featured in the mainstream media. Obviously there’s some crossover with the mainstream media and the underground, noncommercial media, but generally we have no interest in covering stuff you just see on — if you go to a newsstand any see a range of magazines, be it music, culture, fashion, whatever, you see certain names cropping up over and over again. We just have absolutely no interest in being part of that interchangeability of faces, names, et cetera, et cetera. We’d rather focus on the music that interests us, and that most frequently is “non-mainstream” music, “underground” music, whatever that means.

That’s kind of a very slippery word, you might say, because “underground” in a political sense is a whole lot different from “underground” in a Western sense. In London or, I should imagine, where you come from, almost anything goes. You can do anything without consequences. But last November I was in Leipzig for a festival of underground culture from the German Democratic Republic period, the communist period in East Germany that obtained between ’48 and 1989 before the wall came down. Then, underground culture had a totally different meaning. It’s a salutary reminder to know that sometimes music is as serious as your life, and you can end up in jail for playing it. That’s not often he case here. Every so often I have to take one step back from the word “underground” and remind myself that it can be a far different thing to what perceive.

Continue reading here

3quarksdaily.

CPS: In your work you describe today’s left as being disoriented, fragmented and melancholic about the possibility of achieving alternative political futures.  In this situation, is it possible or even desirable to revitalize old leftist concepts such as communism, people’s democracy, and the like?  Do these concepts have any remaining life in them, or do we need to experiment with new political forms?

Wendy Brown:  In the Euro-Atlantic world, what we call the West and the Global North, those terms have pretty much become counter-productive for describing a left vision.  I think the reason for that is obvious: in the 20th century, for many people, communism as it was actually instated in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, in China, North Korea, a few other places – so much carries the signification of a heavily policed society, of strong and authoritarian states, of what gets called for better or worse totalitarian culture and society – that divesting what we might value in communism in its theoretical formulation and in our political attachments to it, divesting that value from that actual lived history is very difficult in the popular sense.  I certainly still teach The Communist Manifesto and try to get students to appreciate what it was that Marx was articulating and imagining.  I think it is worth teaching other texts, as well, that do the same thing, but I think it is very difficult at a popular level to make arguments on behalf of communism that don’t simply deposit your argument back with that history.  That said, it is probably a little different in the Global South where I think it is possible to speak about Marxism, about socialism and about communism without necessarily having that same recurrence to especially the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.  I think it is possible and probably essential there as well, though, to begin to use some other terms.

CPS:  Are there any terms you have in mind? Any new signifiers?

Wendy Brown: I don’t particularly have a good answer to that question.  In my own work, I have tended to use the language of democracy.  In using it I have had to first make a move that is similar to the one I just described with communism, only at another end of the spectrum, which is to separate democracy from its colonization by liberalism.  When I talk about a vision of a different world than the one that we have in contemporary market democracies, contemporary Western states neoliberalized and otherwise, unfree and inegalitarian, my first move is to separate democracy from the contemporary versions of it that are used both to legitimate Western states and to legitimate imperial exploits with democracy.  My move is always just to remind us of the etymology of the term, that it means very simply in its Greek formulation: the people rule or popular power.  There are lots of arguments about the demos; some argue such as Ranciere, that it really means the poor; others argue that it really means the people.  Those arguments are interesting but I think what is important in using it is to be able to seize a term that people think they do value, people who are not necessarily on the left, and seize it for left purposes.  That is one approach.  I am open to other possibilities as well, things that get a little closer to the political economic end of what we used to mean by communism than democracy necessarily does.  I am open to ideas that people have about what those terms ought to be.

CPS:  Thanks, so that leads to my next question.  Many democracies, especially in the Global South, are limited in the socioeconomic reforms and democratic policies they can pursue, by the demands of capital – such as IMF conditional loans and the fear of capital flight.  Do you perceive the relationship between late global capitalism and democracy as intrinsically incompatible?

Wendy Brown:  Yes, if by democracy we mean that rich sense of democracy. If what we mean is the elements of shared power, shared control over conditions of life that I take democracy to entail, then of course they are incompatible with what you just described.  That said, obviously there are other claims about what democracy means.  If you get the Von Hayek and Milton Friedman types in front of this microphone, they will explain why not only are those forms compatible with democracy, but that the world of neoliberalism is the world of democracy – it is all that democracy means.  It means that kind of freedom.

CPS:  You have argued, speaking of neoliberalism, you have argued that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you “disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.”  What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno?  What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?

Wendy Brown:  That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair.  I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does.  I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism.   By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.  Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.  It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity.  Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction.  So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.

CPS:  Do you see within this order any points of fracture, points of entry that could be tapped or worked upon to transform the way people engage their contemporary conditions?  That can change the way they think … to start thinking more politically, in a more meaningful way?

Wendy Brown:  I see what you are saying.  Is there just neoliberal flattening of the human subject and human culture, or are there little places where there is a cry or a need? Yes, I do think that many, many people actually find the current conditions in which they live their lives to be deeply dissatisfying, and not just personally – but it was the kind of thing that you see ranging from the hope that was invested in the Obama campaign to the anger and resentment invested in the Tea Party movement.  I think it is wrong to simply see the population as entirely interpellated by neoliberal governance; I think a lot of people manage and navigate around neoliberalism without necessarily ingesting its values as their own.  There is a chafing there; there is an opening, an interval there.  I am not convinced that any of us, left or right, have figured out exactly how to exploit it.

CPS: You mention the Tea Party.  What exactly do you think the Tea Party is a symptom of, and is there any way to harness this kind of populism to a more progressive agenda?

Wendy Brown: I think a lot of us are very new to figuring out what the Tea Party is and is a symptom of – so I am not quite ready to commit on that subject.  I am just reading the same New York Times articles that everybody else is and trying to get the hang of it.  Clearly, it is polyglot.  Clearly, there are a lot of different political dissatisfactions that are being harnessed by what for the moment is a single movement but doesn’t necessarily look like it will stay unified.  That said, I think one thing that one can see in the Tea Party political attachments, if that is what they are, is a sense of deep frustration with a state that cannot solve political, economic or social problems.  I am especially struck by the number of Obama supporters – let’s put it this way, Obama voters – who now identify themselves with the Tea Party movement.  They haven’t even necessarily turned against Obama but they are clearly frustrated by an economy out of control, by the absolute scandal of bailed out big banks and big corporations, by the extreme inequalities in income that seem incommensurable with the old principle of hard work and reward.  Obviously, that kind of dissatisfaction and anger could be captured by left as well as by right.  I am not even convinced that it makes sense to see the Tea Party movement as right.  It is taking all kinds of reactionary positions, but I am not convinced that everybody attracted to it has the desire to be or will be, in some permanent way, a card-carrying member of what is being characterized as right-wing extremism.  I think that the very kinds of dissatisfactions that many left liberals feel with a state unwilling to actually dominate the corporations that have it over a barrel, and the finance capital that has it over a barrel, are shared by Tea Party types. Yes, I think there is exploitable material there.  That said, one of the really painful things that the Tea Party movement also reveals is what it means to have disinvested in education in this country.  There is just an extraordinary amount of political ignorance and fantasy in what I’ve seen as some of the leading Tea Party analyses and positions.  It’s not that fantasy and ignorance are new to politics, but you can really see what it means to have given up on having an educated citizenry in this country.  It is not just that the facts are wrong but the ability to make arguments and analyze what are admittedly complex situations is just woefully missing in a lot of what you hear in Tea Party formulations.  That is true on the left too, so we’re in a very serious crisis of knowledge and education in this country, and I do worry that our concern to try to figure out how to mobilize discontent, despair, and resentment for the left rather than the right probably doesn’t take the measure of what is needed in the domain of education.

CPS:  Actually, I was going to ask, what you are saying right now seems to have a link to a talk you gave two nights ago on the crisis within the humanities.  You were arguing – correct me if I mischaracterize you – but you were arguing against the way that there is such a specialization and jargonization of what we do – where it becomes hard to explain what we do to people outside of academia.  Do you think this kind of insulation within academia helps feed political ignorance and this divide?

Wendy Brown:  Sure, we’ve really lost the ability – and I am not blaming us as individuals – it is really part of a creation of niche industries everywhere in capitalism today. But, we’ve really lost the ability as social and cultural scholars – I want to say humanists but I am trying to get social scientists in there too – we’ve lost the ability to be able to talk about what we do and promulgate the knowledge we have in an everyday fashion.  I think that happens in the classroom and it is not even just a question of what is outside. More and more, for example, political science educates its undergraduates in the profession of political science, rather than in the study of politics. That means we are cranking out students who may know how to behave like professional political scientists but they don’t really know how to analyze political problems.

CPS:  Speaking of political discourse, when I was listening to your lecture “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty” you mentioned that the physicality of walls, this pre-modern physicality of walls built along nation-state borders is a way of both condensing and managing anxiety.  There is something reassuring about a wall, even if it is only a theatrical performance.  If you could, just speak a little about walls and anxiety, or just anxiety in a broader picture, of how you think anxiety plays a role in shaping contemporary political discourse.

Wendy Brown:  That is a really great question. I’ve been thinking a lot about anxiety lately and it is partly because I am so aware of how much anxiety is a feature of everyday discourse in the US when people are just describing their personal state.  One of the things I’ve been trying to think about – it is not quite related to the walls question but we will go back to that – is whether the sheer level of anxiety in human beings has been increasing in ways that are commensurate with the loss of certain kinds of boundaries, the denigration of defining features of communities, all that we associate with globalization.  I think the answer is probably yes, and I hope somebody will do a study on this: historicizing anxiety and thinking about the history of the human subject in terms of a more anxious subject today than ever before. There are lots of reasons that students, for example, are anxious in ways that I don’t remember being anxious as a college student. There are concerns about performance and job markets, but I am really talking about a world of anxiety that is quite disseminated and quite general and does not simply pertain to the high ambition end of the American middle class.  On the subject of walling, I do think that part of what walls are doing is addressing a very understandable anxiety about the loss of bounded political entities.   I talk about that at length in the work on walls in terms of a decline of state sovereignty but I also would talk about it in terms of the decline of a sense of place that the nation, among other things, has provided for these last several hundred years.  Globalization is tearing at that.  It is tearing at it in the sense of both leaving people without a sense of what the nation is as it becomes ever more heterogeneous, as immigration transforms the literal population and culture of the nation.  But it also is a decline in the sense of the nation as something that one has membership in and belongs to in a way that is significant in comparison with the sense of being part of a planet or a globe.  I think human beings need a sense of place – to put it really simplistically – that is increasingly hard to find today.  Not only because of intense mobility, but because of the loss of a sense of the containing dimensions of a nation.  I think walls very much address that; in a fantasmatic way they produce the image of a bounded, settled jurisdiction and of a we.  They produce a we and they produce a they that is hardly real, and hardly significant at a demographic level but is very significant at the level of political imaginary.  My answer to your question is yes, a lot of anxiety about not having that we can be addressed by building a wall and saying: this is us, this is who we are.  I also think it can work to produce a purified, idealized sense of the nation. This is an old we; this is a white we in the case of Europe or the US; this is a we that has at its door an other that endangers it sense of identity.

CPS: What you just said brought something to mind – would you disagree with the fetishism of the loss of place in contemporary philosophy? The idea of multiplicity and play – I am talking about an approach that critiques this very human need to be bounded and to have a home and identifying markers, and instead, celebrates a form of Nietzschean Dionysianism?

Wendy Brown:  That is an interesting question.  I would actually give a different account of Nietzsche.  I think Nietzsche is very clear on the importance of horizons.  He understands that without horizons the human being goes crazy.  He is our big horizon thinker. Dionysian maybe, but Dionysus hung out in Greece, and was not a global god, so yes, to answer your question, I strongly believe that human beings need some sense of place, of I-ness, of we-ness, that theories of cosmopolitanism either elide altogether or sneak in while pretending they’re not.  Obviously, a strong conception of a global citizen, a cosmopolitan ideal, could have that global citizen actually living and connecting to a particular place, but most theories of the global citizen and of the global village insignificantly honor the need for a human-scale sense of place.  A nation-state is too big for that sense of place but human communities provide it, and so do slightly larger or even non-human ways of bounding what and who we are.  I do think that is really important and I don’t think that political theory will get us very far if it can’t acknowledge and attend to that particular dimension of being human.

CPS: Thank you so much. As just a final word, what new work or book projects from you, do we have to look forward to?

Wendy Brown:  The walls project is coming out in June, or July maybe, with Zone books.  Then, I’ve been working for a couple of years on something I hope to finish in the next year, which is a rethinking of Marx’s critique of religion.  What I am trying to do there is think about what is often treated as an early and relatively unimportant concern of Marx, one that he is presumed to have dropped once he moves on to full-blown materialism and study of political economy.  What I am doing is tracing the ways in which his engagement with Feuerbach and his critique of religion extends all the way through his work right up into Das Kapital.  One of the things that has allowed me to see is the ways in which Marx can contribute to understanding a contemporary problem of ours, which is this: why is it that at the very moment that capitalism seems finally to have painted all the colors of the globe and really has ascended as a global power – why is that moment coterminous with the resurgence of world religions?   Marx is often thought to not be able to help us think that problem at all because Marx is usually thought to be saying that capitalism secularizes and even abolishes religion and that religion is one of the casualties – in his sense, good casualties – of capitalism’s desacralization of the world.  I think that is a wrong reading.  I actually think Marx has a deep understanding of just how religious capital is and how much it requires and entails religion.  That is what the re-reading of Marx is for, and I hope that book will be done in another year, but we’ll see.

CPS: Wendy Brown, thank you so much for taking the time.

(This interview was first published by Broken Power Lines -a blog which now seems to have disappeared. So the whole text is now reproduced here.)

This was the link:

via Broken Power Lines : This blog is devoted to how power never functions as intended. .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 A Danish ‘realist’ painter with a taste for the melancholy and the infinite that the visible world seems to suggest to the receptive mind

 

 

 

 

Some things seem so odd, so completely insolite, that in coming across them one can only assume that they are completely without historical precedent, that they exist outside of all tradition. Consider this, for example:

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=OJ2mftZpfGE]
Fast Tube by Casper">

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

via Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

A little review of a few chapters of Fred Jameson’s new book, Valences of the Dialectic

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), “Three Names of the Dialectic,” is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, “Three Names” does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it–indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that’s saying something, as you’ll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp–the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter–but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions–indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

Read the rest at Working notes: Three names.

 

 

Sudkova, Spring in My Little Garden, 1930s

Josef Sudek

via her sails filled with dream.

Pierre Bourdieu said, perhaps not as famously as one would wish, that “public opinion” is an “artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage”. In particular, he charged that the manufacturers of public opinion in fact produce what they supposedly report: a consensus on what the problems are, what the appropriate questions are, how they should be framed, and so on. With that in mind, I give you this recent ABC/Washington post poll, which tells us that American class self-identification is roughly as follows: 39% say they are working class or worse off, 45% middle class, and 18% upper-middle class or better off. And where the poll does an important part of its work is in this question:

“Necessary elements” of a middle-class life

Being able to…

Own your own home – 80%

Save for the future – 78

Afford things you’d like to have – 77

Afford vacation travel – 71

Buy a new car – 67

This is a very leading question, and a considerable amount of thought must have gone into it, at least in its original formulation (I don’t know how long the question has been asked for, in this form). In a previous post, I mentioned research on American ‘class consciousness’ by Vanneman and Cannon, which pointed out that research on the American class structure was heavily shaped by the activities of the state in that field. In the post-WWII period, the US government funded and drove research which sought to create an understanding of class as status, based on certain patterns of consumption, income and education, rather than an antagonistic relationship centred on production. In that bowdlerised sociology, class is like a continuous ladder of prestige and status, which one might ascend or descend, rather than a conflict built into social relations.

It doesn’t actually matter if it was the state or private capital who decisively formulated these conventions, but the poll question cited above is undoubtedly shaped by them. Decades of thought – or doctrine – are embedded in this simple query. It assumes that there is such a thing as a “middle class life”, that it would have as its essential characteristics certain consumption patterns, and that the only real disagreement is over how important each element of consumption is. What’s interesting about these results is that many respondents appear to have defied the implicit bias in the poll, and defined themselves as, say, working class when their income would give them a reasonable chance of access to all of the “necessary elements” of a “middle class life”. The responses would suggest that there are layers of motivation and interest informing the interpretation of the questions, and thus the answers. Even with that, the poll did its job in that, like thousands of other polls framed in much the same way, it obtained a middle class majority.

“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it” – George Carlin,

via LENIN’S TOMB.