To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play -Nietzsche

Freud was right when he said getting work and love right are essential for a good life, but he should have added a third: play. What is play? I think it’s something like a pure means, without any ends.  When we play we do something that has no real utility, no end, no extrinsic reward. It’s done for its own sake. As such, it is the exercise of our freedom.

When a child plays with something everyday -like a box, a cup, a coaster – she turns it away from its fixed meaning as a tool, a bit of equipment, and recreates it as a thing subject to the play of her imagination. Its potential to be a thousand things is there; the child makes it in imagination a multitude of them in an hour.

When we play, as adults, we release ourselves from the means-end  logic of the day. Play here reveals its affinity with art. Both, I think, have a utopian aspect: negating the sad realm of necessity, linking the infant we were to the joyful adult we are. Or might be.  I’d go so far as to say that making this possibility real for everyone should be the  ultimate aim  of politics. Stendhal called beauty the promise of happiness; play is the thing itself.

Play is the unneurotic unhurried childlike absorption in the present, a sign of maturity. To to be childlike is to be in the opposite state to childishness. It’s childishness that our mass entertainment industry stimulates in us, an endless distraction, without real focus on anything, the finger of the depressive hedonist flipping from channel to channel. Childish: the promise of satisfaction, forever witheld, just out of reach of the tetchy kidult. The full absorption in what one is doing is utterly different to this.

So we need play, we need it as we need freedom and love. Are they even possible without it?

For truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel de Montaigne

I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than as play: this is a sign of greatness -Nietzsche

All his life, which was blessed with publicity, Edward Said was often photographed. He had a knack for organizing the image, in which he typically appeared as a richly upholstered six-footer, his bold stripes and patterns from a Savile Row tailor, topped by a wavy stand of hair like black whipped cream. The best-known image is very different. In it, the distinguished professor is throwing a stone at an Israeli guardhouse. He rears back to hurl a jagged rock. Behind him, a young man has just thrown his own stone, and the two figures superimposed recall those early multiple-exposure prints of horses running or dancers dancing, images made to show the power of film. This photo evokes the urchins of the Intifada no less than Hector smiting the Myrmidons, because a fortunate accident or the photographer’s wit has posed Said in the heroic diagonal–dear to ancient Greek sculptors. But picture is hardly art for art’s sake. Agence Frances scored an immediate hit, with the photo instantly published around the world, instigating calls for Said’s dismissal from Columbia, with the corresponding passionate rush to his defense, including a long public letter from the University provost. No other photo captures so economically Said’s ability to make you look and think again: a prominent, self-declared Western humanist violently attacks his own civilization at its weakest point.

More at via Politics and Culture.

From top: The Meeting, The Pursuit, The Confession (a.k.a. Love Letters), The Lover Crowned. More on these pictures: here

An Interview with Marshall Berman

Tony Monchinski

… there is a paradox in fundamentalism. Every religion in the twentieth century is polarized: on the one hand it’s more humanistic and inclusive, on the other hand it’s more tribal, rigid and exclusive. Part of the exclusion is that not only does it exclude people from other religions but it also excludes most of the people from the religion itself. For example, to a Christian fundamentalist, most Christians turn out not to be true Christians; for a Muslim fundamentalist, most Muslims turn out not to be true Muslims.

All fundamentalisms have a depressingly similar structure. It’s easier for them [varying religious fundamentalists] to talk to one another and they have more in common with one another than they do with other Jews, other Hindus, other Christians, etc. But Fundamentalism is a very modern idea. It takes traditions that are thousands of years old and rejects almost all of them, conceptualizing a few of them and putting them into a system. It then judges all life according to that system.

Fundamentalism uses very modern forms of cognitive operations: it’s not the only modern way to see things, but it is certainly one of the ways to see things. Fundamentalism is also open to modern technology. It’s extremely avant-garde, so that in many religions the most sophisticated computer technologists are fundamentalists. In a sense Fundamentalists are more willing to buy into certain forms of modern technology more uncritically than secular humanists like myself. Willing to buy into anything if it will put forth their idea of the faith. (….)

T.M.: Your All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a ringing defense of modernity. For many segments of the left, Post Modernism is a specious concept. What, if anything, should we (the left) take from Post Modernism?

M.B.: I guess the most attractive quality in it is skepticism towards everything. That’s something we should always carry around with us. We should always be self-scrutinizing and self-critical.

But I don’t think many of the Post-Modernists themselves have actually done that. Part of the thing that is so infuriating to me about the Post Mods is the total lack of self-criticism, so that they can see how all previous thought was complicit in this and that — which is often certainly true — except for them. The idea that is impossible to tell the truth about anything except this. The naiveté with which they did this was attractive to many people, except me. I think Nietzsche is a very good teacher in that way, in that he shows we must say to ourselves, what if the opposite is true, instead of what I think?…(more)

Freedom and Fetishism

Marshall Berman

“The world,” says Wittgenstein, “is all that is the case.” Labour power, capital, commodities, surplus-value: these Tatsachen encase the world of the bourgeoisie. But there is something odd about this world: its “atomic facts” serve as its basic values as well. All possible descriptions have prescriptions built in; words themselves define the “proper” attitude to be adopted toward all the things they describe — and thus save men the trouble of morally making up their minds. But if, as we said above, freedom is logically bound up with choice; and if the capitalist outlook on the world tends to evade choice; and if, as Marx wrote in 1842, “Morality rests on the autonomy, religion on the heteronomy of the spirit” — then it is clear that it is as a religion, and not as a morality, that capitalist fanaticism must be understood.

This is precisely the sort of explanation Marx is attempting in his discussion of the “fetishism of commodities”:

… we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands … (Capital, 83).

The function of fetishism, and of religion in general, is to relieve the believer of responsibility for his actions. It is not he who is acting, it is the God (or daemon) who is acting in and through him; he cannot criticise, modify or change the world; he, like the world itself, is merely the vehicle of an alien Will. Similarly, the capitalist denies that it is in his power even to try to alter the ruinous processes of the market: it operates according to “eternal laws” to which he and all men are helplessly subjected. The fiction of Natural Law — which plays on all the ambiguities of both “nature” and “law,” and through which descriptive and normative discourse are fused — is immensely powerful in keeping men riveted to their roles. …(more)

All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity

Marshall Berman

google books

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

Slavoj Zizek has just given a lecture on apocalypticism -click here for the audio.(CH)

K-Punk on similar themes:

The standard tactic of capitalist realism in relation to eco-apocalypse is to work with the stupid ingenuity of the Symbolic. Here we might think of Lacan’s famous example of Holbein’s Ambassadors. Capitalist realism keeps attention on the ephemeral plenitude of wealth and social status, containing the nullity of ecological catastrophe as an anamorphic blot at the edge of vision. It has the advantage that such an operation is already routinely at the level of individual psychology in respect of death, whose repression no doubt one of the ‘falsities’ that, according to Nietzsche, is necessary for life.

So one tactic is to stop imagining eco-catastrophe and Realise it – which is not to say bring it about, but to act as if it has already happened. This is the intriguing suggestion from Jean-Pierre Dupuy which Zizek takes up, most recently in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. The only way to prevent the catastrophe, Zizek and Dupuy suggest, is to project ourselves into the post-apocalyptic situation and think what we would have done to have avoided it. In other words, we must act as if what is in fact the case – the inevitability of catastrophe – is the case. The simulation, the as-if, is necessary in part because the Real, here as elsewhere, cannot be confronted directly, and can only emerge in the form of a fiction. The shift to the question of ‘what would we have done’ has the benefit of circumventing the capitalist realist/ postmodernist foreclosure of the old modernist-Leninist question, ‘What is to be done.’ An anti-capitalism need not be imagined any more than the end of the world has to be: it is Realized in the encounter with the fictional-virtual-Real of inevitable apocalypse.

Here we can turn to a rather less august example of fictional apocalypse than either Children Of Men or Atwood’s novels – the much derided Terminator: Salvation.

more via k-punk.

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See also here for video of Pippin discussing Henry James and moral life with Richard Rorty and others.

Waking the dead

Terry Eagleton

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority – the story of human history to date, in fact – can never be recompensed for their wretched plight.

What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

More at:

New Statesman – Waking the dead.

Read more here:

The enemies of reason: Hmm… remember this?.

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Hollywood Today:
Report from an Ideological Frontline
Slavoj Zizek

Ideology in Hollywood? Let’s begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001, scenario by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by Tom Jericho, a troubled working class mathematical genius who is back after a period of recuperation brought on by overwork and an unhappy love affair with Claire, the easygoing fatal beauty, which led to his psychic breakdown. Jericho immediately tries to see Claire again and finds she has mysteriously disappeared. He enlists the help of Claire’s housemate Hester to follow the trail of clues and learn what has happened to her; the two repeatedly break the rules of the Bletchley Park establishment and the law as their hunt gets more intense. Jericho is closely watched by Wigram, an upper class MI5 agent, who plays cat and mouse with him throughout the film. Jericho is tolerated at the Park, despite his transgressions, because of the brilliant plan he invents for uncovering the new key. Tom and Hester at the same time uncover a British government plot to bury the intelligence information of the Katyn massacre for fear it might weaken American willingness to remain in the war on the same side as the Soviet Union. This in turn leads to their discovery that a Polish cryptanalyst Jozef Pukowski was so incensed by his own learning of the massacre that he is prepared to betray Bletchley’s secrets to the Nazis in order to take revenge on Stalin. The fate of Clair remains unclear to the end: was she killed or just disappeared? All we learn is that she was in reality also a MI5 agent under Wigram’s control.

The film was criticized for its manipulation of historical facts:..

From Lacanian Ink. Read more here

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