Aidn's Gemlog//aidn.flounder.online/gemlogaidn[A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to b...]2024-02-12T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2024-02-12:/gemlog/2024-02-12.gmiA fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.
Schlegel[Art, in this view, redeems the catastrophe of hist...]2023-08-10T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-08-10:/gemlog/2023-08-10.gmiArt, in this view, redeems the catastrophe of history. To play this role, art must preserve what might be called a moral monumentality—a requirement which explains, I believe, much of the mistrust in the modern period of precisely those modern works which have more or less violently rejected any such edifying and petrifying functions. Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing, perhaps, is more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow do not matter.
Leo Bersani, Culture of Redemption
Social ineffectuality stands revealed as the essence of art in bourgeois society, and thus provokes the self-criticism of art.
Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde[ian watt was so smart. also sexist...]2023-08-09T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-08-09:/gemlog/2023-08-09.gmiian watt was so smart. also sexist
urbanisation provided its own antidote, the suburb, which offered an escape from the thronged streets, and whose very different mode of life symbolised the difference between the multifarious but casual relationships depicted in Defoe's novels and the fewer but more intense and introverted ones which Richardson portrayed. (185)
The suburb is perhaps the most significant aspect of the segregation of classes in the new urban pattern. Both the very rich and the very poor are excluded, and so the middle-class pattern can develop unmolested, safe both from the glittering immorality of the fashionable end of town and from the equally affronting misery and shiftlessness of the poor -- the word 'Mob' is a significant late seventeenth-century coinage which reflects a growing distaste and at times even fear of the urban masses. [...] The privacy of the suburb is essentially feminine because it reflects the increasing tendency already discussed to regard the modesty of womanhood as highly vulnerable and therefore in need of a defensive seclusion; and the seclusion of the suburb was increased by two other developments of the period -- the greater privacy afforded by Georgian housing, and the new pattern of personal relationships made possible by familiar letter-writing, a pattern which, of course, involves a private and personal relationship rather than a social one, and which could be carried on without leaving the safety of the home. (186-7)
The main problem in portraying the inner life is essentially one of the time-scale. The daily experience of the individual is composed of a ceaseless flow of thought, feeling and sensation; but most literary forms -- biography and even autobiography for instance -- tend to be of too gross a temporal mesh to retain its actuality; and so, for the most part, is memory. Yet it is this minute-by-minute content of consciousness which constitutes what the individual's personality really is, and dictates his relationship to others: it is only by contact with this consciousness that a reader can participate fully in the life of a fictional character. (190-1)
Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding[Fraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi. Capitalism: A Con...]2023-08-08T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-08-08:/gemlog/2023-08-08.gmiFraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Polity, 2018 (Verso, 2023).
social reproduction as “the creation, socialization, and subjectivation of human beings more generally, in all their aspects. It also includes the making and remaking of culture, of the various swaths of intersubjectivity that human beings inhabit – the solidarities, social meanings, and value horizons in and through which they live and breathe.” (32)
Historically, the split between “productive” waged labor and “reproductive” unwaged labor has underpinned modern capitalist forms of women’s subordination. (33)
all capitalist societies entrench a tendency to social-reproductive crisis – over and above the tendency to economic crisis theorized by Marx. ... this strand of crisis is grounded in a structural contradiction – in the fact that the capitalist economy simultaneously relies on and tends to destabilize its own social-reproductive conditions of possibility. (35)
The structure of social reproduction in relation to capitalism is division, dependence, and disavowal (154).
social reproduction activities are situated in relation to capitalism’s constitutive institutional separations. In which institutional arenas of society are these activities located? Are they situated primarily in households or neighborhoods or extended kinship networks? Are they commodified or organized or regulated by states? And how are the people who engage in social-reproductive activities positioned: as family members, as paid domestics working in private households, as employees of profit-making firms, as community activists or “volunteers” in civil-society associations, as salaried civil servants? For each phase of capitalism, these questions receive different answers, and the boundary between social reproduction and production is differently drawn. And because of that, the social contradiction of capitalist society takes a different form in each phase, as do the struggles surrounding it. (82)
There is the trend, over the longue durée, to reduce household size, to nuclearize the family, to construct it as a unit specializing in social reproduction, to emphasize gender difference, and to cast reproduction as women’s work. All of that flows from capitalism’s institutional separation of production from reproduction. Insofar as it constitutes reproduction as a female-centered hidden abode that enables accumulation by replenishing labor, capitalism creates “the family” as the complementary counterpart to “the market.” (88)
[Nieland, Justus. Happiness by Design: Modernism an...]2023-07-25T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-07-25:/gemlog/2023-07-25.gmiNieland, Justus. Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era. U of Minnesota P, 2020.
“modernism at midcentury” (1): “the midcentury has often been viewed as the moment of modernism’s institutionalization and the domestication of its utopian demands on the senses.” (1-2) against this view, this book offers a “midcentury modernism that used film and moving-image technologies as the defining media of postwar happiness. For the designers at the heart of this book—experts in the stuff and style of the postwar ‘good life’—happiness was both a technical and an ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things, but also vanguard approaches to work and play…namely, communication, as a crucial Cold War shibboleth. Happiness, in short, required technique and fueled designers’ media experiemtnation. Assuming public roles worldwide as the face of the American Century’s exuberant material culture, Cold War designers increasingly engaged in creative activity that spanned disciplines…. An era that understood multimedia communication…as the very lifeblood of happiness.” (2)
this is a good book to read alongside sara danius's senses of modernism.
Eames era (2): “the postwar paradigms and institutional sites that remade modernism’s sensory politics and its designs on happiness at midcentury” (2). “human-scale modernism” (2). A pedagogy of “how to be happy in media and disciplining the sensorium, preparing it for life in the culture of informatic abundance” (2).
“for [eames and fuller and kenner] 1943 marked a decisive moment in a broader shift from wartime production to the anticipation of the postwar good life” (3). Note about the war as the “engine of … design innovation” then wielded to this good life production (5). Kenner and the imbrication of modernist studies with design theory (5).
A revision to the account of “the consolidation of a modernist doctrine of medium specificity at midcentury” (6). Instead, “a media environment defined by flows of information” required new “technologies of theories of communication” (7). The punchline is that “Beginning in the late 1930s, escalating through the war with the rise of state- and foundation-funded communications research . . . designers’ film and media practice was one of the period’s most powerful manifestations of a modernism remade through a sweeping communications paradigm. … a familiar modernism of formal difficulty and communicative intransigence was challenge and reconfigured by a program of communicative clarity and transparency, information processing” (8). “the simultaneous postwar institutionalization of modernist aesthetics and communication studies” (8).
!!! “Organized in the late 1930s . . . the Rockefeller Foundation-funded ‘Communications Groups,’ whose aims and key personnel also intersected, fitfully at times, with the Frankfurt School, then in exile from the United States. … the Communications Group’s explorations of the problems of ‘mass influence,’ the dynamics of fascist propaganda … joined humanists, critical theorists, and social scientists” (9).
“the communication boom” (9)
“everyday living” in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. In context Nieland is paraphrasing Marcuse’s argument as a “death-by-communication” (11) argument from which he departs.
“as modernism confronted, and often abetted, the communicative capacities of the postwar corporation, it repositioned the designer as a manager of epochal change, a culture administrator, and an experimental media practitioner across familiar forms and tidy disciplinary boundaries” (11). Pamela Lee: “Cold War semiosphere” (qtd 12). Douglas Mao paraphrase on 15 is amazing (modernism’s solid object/”respite from the violence of instrumental reason” as “neither a Good nor a God” 15.) The object is pressured at midcentury from every angle, including the circulation of images and changes in production and ideals of communication information new sciences etc, and thus possibility retreats to “enthusiastic functionalism, an insistence on usefulness and service, and a seriousness of purpose regarding the range of human problems that might be solved by good design.” (15) To Eames and the midcentury modernists, “happiness requires relentless making, and making in media. It is both a media effect and a way of being at home in mediation” (15). Eames’s “sensory pedagogy” (19).
Dutch philosophy book Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) translated into English 1949.
“freedom to play” / the “ludic impulse” (24) (sounds like Schiller’s play drive)
“blurred boundaries between work, play, and knowledge work” (25)
“the ludic-productivist happy” (25)
keyword of “adjustment” (26): a problem answered by “techniques of happiness” (26)
“1948 formation of the World Federation for Mental Health” (27)
- lmao UNESCO conference on psychic problems that lead to war
“a lifeworld in which the constitutive antagonism of the political has been subsumed into consumption, personalization, and the commodification of lifestyles, which we display and perform through the circulation of messages in a nonstop data stream.” (37)
“the fragile fiction of everyday life as ‘unadministered life’ [Crary] would begin to collapse” (37).
The “postindustrial reorganization of work and leisure” (37).
Little reading list of modernism / design / communication studies
- Justus Nieland, Happiness by Design
- Mark Goble, Mediated Circuits
- John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air
- Kate Marshall, Julian Murphet, et al
[[magic mountain, remembrance of things past, and u...]2023-06-26T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-06-26:/gemlog/2023-06-26.gmi[magic mountain, remembrance of things past, and ulysses] describe a general transition from technological prosthesis to technological aisthesis, thus moving from externalization to internalization.
sara danius, senses of modernism
it is one thing for the poet, or even the poet-critic, to claim that his art exists in a universe of its own and bears no relation to the society in which he and his readers live. it is quite another for the literary analyst to unquestioningly accept such a view as the basis for a theory of literature. the poet's declaration that he no longer wishes his work to be associated with 'society' or 'reality' or 'commerce' or 'the masses' is hardly grounds for the critic to decide that the associations have in fact ceased to exist or ceased to pertain to the critical enterprise.
mary louise pratt, toward a speech act theory of literary discourse[The deep movements of political and social history...]2023-06-23T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-06-23:/gemlog/2023-06-23.gmiThe deep movements of political and social history have long been seen to operate in cycles that more properly begin in the late 1920s to early 1930s, as the decade of economic crises and imperial decline that fermented not only the Second World War, but also the long Fordist-Keynesian hegemony that followed – what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the ‘apotheosis of liberalism’ – stretching right up to the crises of the 1970s and the inauguration of neoliberalism as a dominant global polity. Indeed, it might be suggested – admittedly rather polemically – that geopolitically speaking, the 1930s stretched from the Wall Street Crash to the Oil Crisis of 1973 – parallel crises that provide one reason why, for instance, leftist interest in the 1930s surged during the 1970s and 1980s. This is not to say, of course, that literary history charts in any simple manner such cycles of world economic systems, but rather to assert that any attempt to revisit the 1930s must surely pay attention to these large-scale movements. Indeed, such a long stretch taken merely as a continuity would fail to attend to the marked similarities between post-Fordism and the 1930s (or indeed the interwar period more broadly) as periods of protracted, even normalised crisis. Thinking of periodisation in these terms offers … a pressing reason for rereading the thirties in our present moment, as a prolepsis of what Lauren Berlant has termed neoliberalism’s ‘crisis ordinariness.’
Leo Mellor and Glyn Salton-Cox, “The Long 1930s: Introduction.” Critical Quarterly.
Underlying most modern readings of the American canon is a common wish. These interpreters need to assign value to the independence of a present moment from past moments because they identify this independence with the cultural motion of modernity. Their commentaries assign value to the passing moment, the sheer appearance of the new, by associating it with the Revolutionary moment in America's past.
Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts and the Cold War Consensus[x...]2023-06-20T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-06-20:/gemlog/2023-06-20.gmix[She was just like anybody else, clinging on, think...]2023-05-29T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-29:/gemlog/2023-05-29.gmiShe was just like anybody else, clinging on, thinking she’d have a thought she hadn’t thought yet that would make all the difference.
joy williams, harrow
We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine.
john ashbery, ‘untitled’[The depressive disorder of the contemporary achiev...]2023-05-19T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-19:/gemlog/2023-05-19.gmiThe depressive disorder of the contemporary achievement-subject does not follow upon a conflicted, ambivalent relation to the Other that now has gone missing. No dimension of alterity is involved. Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.
Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society 42
Melancholy people . . . live within a skewed time sense. It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it from a past toward a goal. Massive, weighty, doubtless traumatic because laden with too much sorrow or too much joy, a moment blocks the horizon of depressive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective. . . . No revolution is possible, there is no future . . . An overinflated, hyperbolic past fills all the dimensions of psychic continuity. . . . A dweller in truncated time, the depressed person is necessarily a dweller in the imaginary realm.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun 60-61[Critical concern with death—admittedly an overde...]2023-05-17T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-17:/gemlog/2023-05-17.gmiCritical concern with death—admittedly an overdetermined concept in Party Going, which famously begins with the death of a pigeon and is fraught with deathly imagery—is, however, undermined by Green’s later dismissal of symbolism as “essentially a childish, comic, and often ludicrous process of conferring significance on something that has no business meaning anything of the sort” (qtd. in North 89). The refusal of depth has been noted of other Green novels: David Brauner reads in Nothing and Doting (1952) a “profound investment in boredom, banality, and bathos” (186). It is my contention, following from Brauner, that banality, bathos, and boredom rule Party Going, which first creates, and then undoes, affective dread through the experience of fungible language. By using the catchall term things, Green’s narrator and characters defuse the high modernist Eliotian potential of the novel’s plot, replacing it within amore quotidian late modernist spectrum of repetitious banality.
Naomi Milthrope, "Things and Nothings: Henry Green and the Late Modernist Banal," Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 50.1, 2017, p99 (this 1's for you emilye)
This presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently, depending on one’s position in society. On the one hand there is the time of flows and acceleration, and of a valued and valorizing mobility, and on the other what the sociologist Robert Castel calls the “status of casual workers [le précariat],” whose present is languishing before their very eyes, who have no past except in a complicated way (especially in the case of immigrants, exiles, and migrants), and no real future either (the temporality of plans and projects is denied them). Today’s presentism can thus be experienced as emancipation or enclosure: ever greater speed and mobility or living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present. Not to forget a further aspect of our present: that the future is perceived as a threat not a promise. The future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves.
Francois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity (xviii)[The nineteenth-century rationalization of leisure ...]2023-05-15T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-15:/gemlog/2023-05-15.gmiThe nineteenth-century rationalization of leisure time and the related boom of amusement parks, cinemas, and other mass-cultural sites of leisure activities are directly related to the contemporary rationalization of labor time. Time spent away from work had the double benefit of pleasing social reformers and scientific managers who promoted leisure as part of a productive system of work, rest, and play.
Audrey Anable, from Time: A Vocabulary for the Present, 196
What is at stake here is not the right to idleness but the dream of another kind of work: that is, a gentle movement of the hand, slowly following the eyes, on a polished surface. It is also a matter of producing something other than the wrought objects in which the philosophy of the future sees the essence of man-the-producer being realized, at the price of losing some time in the ownership of capital.
Rancière, Proletarian Nights[The primacy of the metaphoric process in the liter...]2023-05-12T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-12:/gemlog/2023-05-12.gmiThe primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realised that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called 'realistic' trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details.
Roman Jakobson, "The metaphoric and metonymic poles," 43
Modernism is to be grasped as a culture of incomplete modernization and links that situation to the proposition about modernism’s temporal dominant. The argument was suggested by Arno Mayer’s Persistence of the Old Regime, which documents a counterintuitive lag in the modernization of Europe, where, even at the turn of the last century and the putative heyday of high modernism, only a minute percentage of the social and physical space of the West could be considered either fully modern in technology or production or substantially bourgeois in its class culture. ... The sensitivity to deep time in the moderns then registers this comparatist perception of the two socioeconomic temporalities, which the first modernists had to negotiate in their own lived experience. By the same token, when the premodern vanishes, when the peasantry shrinks to a picturesque remnant, when suburbs replace the villages and modernity reigns triumphant and homogeneous over all space, then the very sense of an alternate temporality disappears as well, and postmodern generations are dispossessed (without even knowing it) of any differential sense of that deep time the first moderns sought to inscribe in their writing.
Fredric Jameson, "The End of Temporality," 699[In the eyes of modernization theorists, the past t...]2023-05-11T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-11:/gemlog/2023-05-11.gmiIn the eyes of modernization theorists, the past tends to harden into the form of an 'almost automatic reaction,' a one-off break will not suffice: what is needed is a continual breaking from it. In such acts of break or rupture, cultural goods must be permanently filtered out of the present, discarded, and declared irrelevant. This repeated dropping of ballast takes place through a performative "relegation to the past" of that which, up to that point, had continued to exert a claim on the present and so was still considered relevant. A particularly striking rhetorical strategy used to produce such hiatus-experiences within the continuum of time is the repeated declaration of the "death" of every possible cultural institution or value.
Aleida Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint? 100-101
Personal identity itself came to seem problematic. Part of the difficulty was the individual will and action were hemmed in by the emerging iron cage of a bureaucratic market economy. But the trouble ran deeper: the rationalization of urban culture and the decline of religion into sentimental religiosity further undermined a sense of self. For many, individual identities began to seem fragmented, diffuse, perhaps even unreal.
T J Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, 32[Being a subject, unlike an object, is a rather emb...]2023-05-10T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-10:/gemlog/2023-05-10.gmiBeing a subject, unlike an object, is a rather embarrassing affair, for reasons inseparable from its occasional moments of glory.
Jennifer Fleissner, Maladies of the Will 13
Against the elite notion of the ‘continuous present,’ which positions time as an unvarying and unchanging natural phenomenon impervious to human action, the crowd gathers to restore time as a site of contestation and struggle; a moving continuum with a past, present and future that they can call their own. The crowd is both proof that their time sense cannot be entirely killed – they still hold memories of time past, hopes to a different future – and an attempt to puncture that present. They gather to demand that something, someone, must break this intolerable settlement.
Rebecca Liu, “John Berger, Time Traveller,” Critical Quarterly 65.1, p60
“Everyday life,” properly speaking, first comes into being only at the moment, midway through the nineteenth century, when European cities began to swell with the arrival of large numbers of newcomers, the moment—and this is crucial—when Marx conceptualized and systematized the “work day” of the wage laborer. When the lived experience of those new urban dwellers became organized, channeled, and codified into a set of repetitive and hence visible patterns, when markets became common between the provinces and the capital, when everything—work hours, money, miles, calories, minutes—became calculated and calculable, and when objects, people, and the relations between them changed under the onslaught of such quantification, then and only then and only there, in large Western metropolises, did the world, in Lefebvre’s words, “turn to prose.”
Kristin Ross, Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, 98-99
The Novel is a Death; it transforms life into a destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into an orientated and meaningful time. But this transformation can be accomplished only in full view of society. It is society which imposes the Novel, that is, a complex of signs, as a transcendence and as the History of a duration.
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 39
Of all the gifts it offers, this is the most certain: the end. The novel certainly does not need to say it. And yet, the novel is not important because it portrays the fate of a stranger for us, but because the flame that consumes that stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to the novel again and again is its mysterious ability to warm a shivering life with death.
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
[We need to talk about what kind of data literature...]2023-05-09T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-09:/gemlog/2023-05-09.gmiWe need to talk about what kind of data literature is, to recognize that it may in fact be multiple kinds of data, each of which operates differently in relation to different scales of historical determination (the moment, the event, the month, the century, the era).
Eric Hayot, Persistent Forms, x
To grasp [the] discontinuity [between style and narrative] . . . requires us to radically historicize the gap between style and narrative, which then may be seen as an event in the history of form. The name of Flaubert is a useful marker for this development, in which the two "levels" of the narrative text begin to drift apart and acquire their own relative autonomy; in which the rhetorical and instrumental subordination of narrative language to narrative representation can no longer be taken for granted. The plotless art novel and the styleless bestseller can then be seen as the end products of this tendency ....
Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist, 7[virginia woolf, between the acts...]2023-05-08T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-08:/gemlog/2023-05-08.gmivirginia woolf, between the acts
There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud. Under the thick plate of green water, glazed in their self-centred world, fish swam—gold, splashes with white, streaked with black or silver. Silently they manoeuvred in their water world, poised in the blue patch made by the sky, or shot silently to the edge where the grass, trembling, made a fringe of nodding shadow.
virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway
Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise, the battered woman . . . stood singing of love—love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who has been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for the pageant of the universe would be over.
fernand braudel, on history
Life, the history of the world, and all individual histories present themselves to us as a series of events, in other words of brief and dramatic acts. A battle, an encounter between statesmen, an important speech, a crucial letter are instants in history. I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.[robert pippin, philosophy by other means...]2023-05-05T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-05:/gemlog/2023-05-05.gmirobert pippin, philosophy by other means
Interpretation is simply identical to fully experiencing a work as a work of art; everybody does it, must do it.4 It has nothing to do with merely “translating” the work into another version of content or finding something hidden. If there is something to understand, something that raises a question, demands something of us beyond what a first experience reveals, it is “right there.” It simply needs to be understood. A second or third or fourth reading or viewing is not boring deeper until something hidden is found; it is appreciating better and better what is simply “present.”5 The fact that we feel the need for rereading or re-viewing is interesting in itself. It means that we sense that the novel, say, “knows something,” and that by having read the novel, we now know something we did not, but we cannot yet say what it is and we know that another look or viewing or reading is necessary. That deeply felt and often deeply gratifying moment of insight when it becomes clear what it is we know but could not say is not something we can offer to another simply by formulating and saying it. We have to help another see it, feel that moment as well in the experience of the work.
jacques ranciere, future of the image
According to this logic, it is impossible to delimit a specific sphere of presence isolating artistic operations and products from forms of circulation of social and commercial imagery and from operations interpreting this imagery. The images of art possess no peculiar nature of their own that separates them in stable fashion from the negotiation of resemblances and the discursiveness of symptoms. The labour of art thus involves playing on the ambiguity of resemblances and the instability of dissemblances, bringing about a local reorganization, a singular rearrangement of circulating images.[hi emilye--here is my long promised, long deferred...]2023-05-04T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2023-05-04:/gemlog/2023-05-04.gmihi emilye--here is my long promised, long deferred post. first, i'm going to post the section in mark mcgurl's book everything and less: the novel in the age of amazon that talks about megan boyle's liveblog:
The convergence of contemporary fiction and social media is also visible in some works of the small-press avant-garde. As what David Wells aptly calls “a fiction of the Internet—a representation of an infinitely extending and seemingly available world,” Megan Boyle’s Liveblog: A Novel (2018) presents a less pulpy but no less symptomatic instance.24 In the tradition of Andy Warhol’s a: a Novel (1968) and Goldsmith’s Soliloquy (2001), Boyle’s project began as an experiment in exhaustive self-surveillance, this time conceived as auto-therapy. Keeping more or less continuous track of her actions by blogging about them in real time on her own Tumblr site, Boyle would correct a chronic “failure to follow through with tasks I said I’d do,” taking ownership of her life and prospects for happiness. Warding off misunderstanding in assertive all caps, she warns her readers at the outset that
**THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING** **I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME OR THINK ABOUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS OR ENJOYING READING THIS, IT’S JUST GOING TO BE WHAT IT IS: A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME FEEL MORE LIKE IMPROVING MYSELF.**25
It was self-publication as self-discipline as self-improvement, and on one level it sits squarely within the conception of fiction-as-therapy we have been tracking throughout this book. But in this case it is a therapy of writing—the original modality of “narrative therapy” in fact—not reading.26 The irony was her assumption—as she later concluded was a mistake —that drug use (or abuse) was crucial to sustaining that writing. The flaw in this thinking is visible even in her disavowal, as shared above, of her desire to be interesting, where the writing is not an act of self-improvement in itself but something she does in hopes of feeling like working toward that end in the future. It makes sense, then, when 640-some closely printed pages later, we find the author recording how she has been “hearing voice of [omitted] in my head saying, ‘is the liveblog getting in the way of other ways you could be being productive?’”27 Here, then, is the specter of writing as wasting time, as expense rather than virtuous production.
What’s interesting about this particular waste of time is how it registers, as on a photographic negative, the “real job” this writer does not have. Entries in the blog are rigorously time-stamped and littered with to-do lists and super-egoic expectations for productivity such as we might hear them from any young professional knocking out some emails before heading to the gym. Productivity, for Boyle, is difficult to manage in ways more ordinary to her demographic cohort—she does a lot of hanging around, surfing the internet, doing drugs, driving her car to the mini-mart, drinking smoothies and diet Red Bull, and does not even do much reading—but its shadow is visible in the form of a prodigious accumulation of words, in the work of art or proto-art that is her blog. Far from a litany of pleasures taken, as the more defiantly countercultural version of the project might have been, the novel’s catalog of casual acts of transgression and wasteful slackerdom are tinged with a kind of pre-professional masochism. My favorite instance comes near the beginning, when, finding herself listening to a very bad song, Boyle decides that “I kind of like how awful listening to it feels.”28
The question is: am I really wasting time if I am writing in real time about the time I am wasting? Liveblog makes the question intriguingly difficult to answer, layering function and dysfunction one upon the other in a palimpsest. And how about someone reading about someone wasting time? Is that expense of time in any sense productive? Boyle declares her independence from the reader’s needs at the outset, but something obviously changes when, three years later, a long series of blog posts are gathered up and published with the subtitle “a novel” by the small press Tyrant Books. That form of publication would appear to be an affirmation of the novel’s potential interest to readers even absent anything in it we could confidently call a plot or other completed narrative form. Rather, it is the serial presentation of the thoughts and actions of a depressed person, a young woman, an individual. Sometimes it is crazily witty and charming, though often enough (and by design!) it is dead on the page, a despair-inducing slog. It is not a “good novel.” It isn’t trying to be. The principle of its unity as an artwork is not internal but external, not organic but conceptual. One could similarly pronounce that the entire internet, in all its infinite ongoing blab, shall henceforth be considered her artwork.
And yet, despite its all but utter lack of properly “political” content beyond the sexual politics latent everywhere in it, Boyle’s waste of time manages to articulate, or at least to perform, and maybe even to monumentalize, a desire for fundamental change. The state of being it calls forth would not be the life of yuppie efficiency its author never does achieve, but a breakthrough to some new, wholly other state of being on the far side of a bonfire of our vanities.
ok and then here's kristin ross, in the politics and poetics of everyday life, on roland barthes's mythologies, a small part of a longer chapter that i might add more from later:
Reading Mythologies today, we encounter words on every page that are as unfamiliar to us as the contours of the Citroen Deesse: "bourgeois art," "proletarianization," "expropriation," "our bourgeois readers," "the proletariat and the poor," "petit bourgeois ideology." Of course, fifty years ago, when Barthes published his attempt to reflect on some of the myths of French daily life, these words were part of common parlance. Why should the intellectual landscape made up of words from the recent past, words that we are no longer accustomed to reading, matter to us today? What importance could a text like Mythologies--little journalistic pieces, written mostly as responses to current events and faits divers--have for our present? ... What French theorists and social critics as different from each other as Henri Lefebvre, Edgar Morin, and Roland Barthes provided in a set of magisterial analyses written in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the vision of their own time as turning point--the moment when even the most remote rural villages in France had been touched by the arrival of large-scale consumer durables. What these works registered with a startling clarity was that de Gaulle comes to power and the Fifth Republic is founded precisely at the moment when "the consumer era" begins in France in earnest. This was the moment--after electricity but before electronics--when the groundwork was laid for a full-scale disruption of older popular culture and its replacement with the rhythms and habits of an American-style capitalist or "mass" culture. Even more significant than the automobiles and laundry detergent was the discourse surrounding them: the endless background noise of advertising insinuating their advantages.
hayden white fun2022-07-12T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-07-12:/gemlog/2022-07-12.gmi##hayden white fun
going to try to make this page for notes about deconstructionist historian hayden white i think. white is my new pet fixation so i want to have a home for his ideas as i understand them.
###White, Hayden. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
white is famous in literary theory circles for his concept of emplotment. emplotment is the “endowment of a chronicle of events with a plot structure." the point of specifying emplotment rather than just narration is that emplotment is "carried out by discursive techniques that are more tropological than logical in nature” (20). that is, no historian just discovers history as such: “while events may occur in time, the chronological codes used to order them into specific temporal units are culture specific, not natural; and moreover, must be filled with their specific contents by the historian if he is to constitute them as phases of a continuous process of historical development” (21). emplotment is about how the narration of history requires selecting (specific, culturally determined) fictional techniques at the level of the event being described and at the level of the overarching narrative into which this event is being inserted or emplotted. this is a useful concept, imo, because it undoes any association of the historical with the neutral, the natural, or the given. "history, in the sense of both events and accounts of events, does not just happen but is made" (25).
white's preferred term for the study of the means available to the historian for shaping raw data into historical events is tropology, and he compartmentalizes tropes into four basic discursive functions: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. the implication of tropological theory is that the study of literature is as important (if not more important) than the study of history, because "historical discourse utilizes structures of meaning-production found in their purest forms in literary fictions" (31). i'd certainly like to think so! while there might be an element of wish fulfillment in this, i do find very persuasive white's point that the principle structure used by the historian--i.e., narrative--develops first elsewhere.
if literature first shapes the stories that history can tell, white locates in modernist literature a sea change in the tropes of historical discourse. this is not because modernist literature supposedly destroys the model of the nineteenth-century realist novel with its stable characters, linear plots, and narrative resolutions. rather, modernist literature takes aim at history's most fundamental "building block": "the event as a basic unit of temporal occurence" (76). the modernist critique of the event is twofold: "the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite; and ... the context of any singular event is infinitely extensive or at least is not objectively determinable" (80). in its critique of the event, modernism turns to "the intervals between" events--white cites woolf as an example here (87). white's claim here is higher stakes than it might seem, as he is arguing against the commonplace that the holocaust is a singular historical trauma which escapes narrative representation; white argues that the holocaust can only be construed this way if it is in fact already emplotted in a modernist form.
modernist tropes of emplotment rely on a "figural," rather than a "representative," relationship between discourse and its object. counterintuitively, white locates this figural logic in the work of the literary critic most strongly associated with representation, erich auerbach. a german philologist, auerbach wrote the book on representation with mimesis. in that book, auerbach extends the counter-enlightenment argument of philosopher giambattista vico that language and culture reflect the history of human community. white argues, however, that through the figural trope of fulfillment, auerbach "historicizes historicism" (109). fulfillment here is a christian trope: the idea of "a real event ... complete in itself and full its meaning at the moment of its happening but ... at the same time the bearer of a meaning ... revealed only in a different and equally complete event at a later time" (105). by figural realism, then, white means a simultaneity of present reference (a content) and teleological fulfillment (a form). later events supply earlier events with different meanings, just as when, in the eighteen brumaire, marx describes the 1848 french revolution's rhetoric of finishing the 1789 revolution. in this sense, figuration is the time of history--the history of history--and mimesis "the story of how western literature came to grasp historicity as humanity's distinctive mode of being in the world" (109).
white's archetypal example of figural realism is proust. proust's novel of consciousness is "an allegory of figuration itself", in effect an illustration of how emplotment happens (156). in this reading, proust's novel is less an object to be interpreted than the drama of interpretation itself: the emplotment plot. proust offers white an example of how modernist figuration is prior to, and places critical pressure on, the tropes of historical discourse. white's point is not that history is downstream from or only accessible through literature, but that the conflict over historical interpretation is articulated first in literature. contrary to vico's claim that we might read literature for the trace of history therein, then, white suggests that we already participate in literature whenever we contest the meaning of history in the present (as in, say, the 1619 project or michelle wright's critique thereof). we contest the meaning of history in the present whenever we act in such a way as to bring a prior historical event to completion or to emplot a historical event within a narrative. modernism is the discovery that the present figures the past in its image.
the payoff here, i guess, is that history is complicated and contested (which i don't think will be that controversial to anyone), that historical meaning can be changed by and through what we do in the present, that the plausibility of the stories and interpretations we apply to historical events depend on the literature in which tropes of emplotment first develop. this seems important because we live in a very philistine culture in which literature is either an insignificant entertainment or a didactic imitation of history. white's reversal--to see history as parasitic of literature--offers a justification for taking literature seriously in the present, and taking literature seriously as literature rather than as the shadow of history. as well, the way that history is narrated--what is allowed to be narrated, who is allowed to narrate it--remains a crucial terrain of struggle: see saidiya hartman's critique of the archive in wayward lives, beautiful experiments; or michel-rolph trouillot's critique of historical production in silencing the past. presentist pragmatism, which seems to me ascendent in the academy, misapprehends the present force of history, not in the conventional sense--past structures endure into the present--but in the figurative sense--history exists only in and through activity in the present.
tbc with other books/essay of white's as i read them
the practice of everyday life notes (for reading group) (1)2022-06-07T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-06-07:/gemlog/2022-06-07.gmi##the practice of everyday life notes (for reading group) (1)
hi emilye & ellen. is jen on this? justice remains intractable but maybe this can help with the conversion effort.
instead of what i've been doing for other stuff i'm just going to throw some quotes and questions at the wall here. more tk.
###general intro
the practice of everyday life is the 'art of manipulating and enjoying' (xxii). michel de certeau doesn't think his framework of 'users' & 'ways of operating' is individualistic because 'each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of...relational determinations interact' (xi). sure, though i have some doubts about the methodological implications that follow.
the metaphor of 'poaching' ('everyday invents itself by poaching') is interesting, a submerged poesis 'scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of 'production'' (xii). rather than letting systems of production determine the meaning of these areas, de cereteau thinks that 'ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order' reveal a(n implicitly utopian?) subterranean set of everyday practices (xiii).
he exemplifies this through the indigenous populations who made use of the spanish culture imposed on them. de certeau's illuminating phrase for this is 'secondary production' (xiii). two concepts, for de certeau, allow access to the secondary productions that users make of a hegemonic order:
* the local, time-limited referential performances of the speech act (austin)
* the random re-combinatory scavenging of bricolage (levi-strauss)
de certeau describes his project as an inversion of foucault's 'microphysics of power' / dispotif (xiv). de certeau aims at a description of 'the network of an antidiscipline' at the local scale (xv).
de certeau's key distinction is a conceptual binary:
* strategies: 'the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power . . . can be isolated from an 'environment.' a strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it' (xix). strategy denotes a power remote from its effects; it is hierarchical and spatial.
* tactics: 'a calculus which cannot count on a . . . spatial or institutional localization . . . [nor] on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. the place of a tactic belongs to the other.' 'because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time--it is always on the watch for opportunities . . . [to] manipulate events' (xix). tactics are the improvised practices of the powerless many against a controlling force and temporal contingencies.
that's the setup. i have some issues/questions which i think could be interesting for discussion.
>marginality is today no limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive . . . marginality is becoming universal. (xvii)
if marginality is universal, there's no margin. who or what is de certeau's antagonist here? if the 'user' is both the victim of a 'system of production' and the heroic bricoleur who effects a 'secondary production' at an invisible scale, what are the power relations that define production and what are the effects of a secondary production that doesn't seem to affect these power relations?
the tactic/strategy concept lends some clarity, since it at least wants to diagnose differences in power. but one of de certeau's examples of tactics bothers me:
>in the supermarket, the housewife combines heterogeneous and mobile data--what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and their possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home, etc. (xix)
this is a heroic way to describe what is definitely an everyday tactic. but if domestic labor is a tactic, is there really political utility in tactics? in the anecdote above, the 'housewife' (defined in language that identifies her with her role as domestic laborer and sexual property) is performing a task with skills and adaptive responses, but that task is for others at least as much as it is for herself. the outcome seems to be that she will be tasked with yet more labor throughout the week, cooking for her family. is this an instance of 'secondary production'? what are the risks of celebrating tasks that seem compulsory or at least coerced by power relations that seem to go unchallenged?
both of these examples point to what i'm having the hardest time with, which is that de certeau seems to have an entirely metaphorical relationship to critical theory and an insufficiently antagonistic relationship with the world that critical theory so powerfully describes.
'for the binary set production-consumption', the marxist framework which lets you see who is free and who is compelled by necessity under the guise of freedom, de certeau wants to 'substitute its more general equivalent: writing-reading.' i do like de certeau's point that 'the activity of reading' is in fact a kind of 'silent production' and that 'the thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces' which 'makes the text habitable' and 'into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient' (xxi).
that's a nice framework. i remain anxious about the politics that result. it seems to me that de certeau just likes stuff and that's fine. what bothers me so far is that he seems to think he needs not just to like stuff but also to present it as politically liberatory, which leads to the worst kind of politics: a 'therapeutics for deteriorating social relations' (xxiv). (nb: not a /corrective/ for such relations.) but the next few chapters address my grievances here, so i'll throw up some notes when i read those.
###part 1 - a very ordinary culture - chapter 1 - a common place: ordinary language
lol i like that i said i was going to do something different and then did fine grained summary again. okay this time i will do something different. i like how you can tell that de certeau studied freud. definitely makes me well disposed toward him.
and speaking of freud, this rocks:
>freud . . . ends his reflections with a pirouette. "the complaint that i offer no consolation is justified," he writes, for he has none. (4)
lol.
and freud is a useful way into de certeau, because like freud de certeau wants to think about 'the trivial' in cultural texts not as 'the other' but 'the productive experience of the text,' a moment where we feel 'the oceanic rumble of the ordinary' (5).
another echo here is lefebvre, insofar as de certeau perceives a split between science and everyday life, in that science has 'constituted the whole as its remainder' (i.e., everyday life) and that 'this cleavage organizes modernity' (6). in these conditions, 'the expert' becomes an archetypal, 'generalized figure' (7). (this is de certeau's Theory of Podcasts.)
de certeau, like lefebvre and rancière (very french pathology i guess), thinks that there's a zero sum game of 'authority' and 'knowledge' and that authority does not rest on knowledge so much as it comes with the sacrifice of genuine familiarity with everyday reality: the specialists thus 'have been walking on air' (8).
de certeau wants to get back to the ordinary and the everyday, then, by way of wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy. i've read very little wittgenstein, but this description of his infamously anti-metaphysical thought was very appealing: 'as in the ship of fools, we are embarked, without the possibility of an aerial view or any sort of totalization' (11). de certeau makes wittgenstein sound a lot like derrida: 'there is no outside' (14).
there's no extra-textual or extra-historical position from which a truth claim can be sought. we're caught in the mire of the everyday and have to deal with the reality of that, a reality which excludes the possibility of authority as such. this chapter actually does strike me as flowing downstream into a fairly serious political position, too, especially from within an academic context.
so i liked that, most of the notes i wrote in the margin are just questions about wittgenstein.critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (4)2022-05-30T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-30:/gemlog/2022-05-30.gmi##critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (4)
the last volume, published in 1981, is a reflection on how everyday life has changed since the first two volumes. it's lefebvre's reflection on what he sees as a failure of revolutionary potential in the twentieth century, so it's a bit less hopeful and energized than the previous volumes, but it's not a totally pessimistic diagnosis either. it's divided into two sections, continuities between then and now (1946-1968/1981) and discontinuities, with an extensive intro and conclusion. you get the sense that he knows he's out of his depth with some of the changes--his attempt to reckon with the obvious importance of race and gender as analytics is a somewhat halfhearted distinction between 'difference' and 'particularity'; his reflections on communications technology feel almost reluctant--but he remains incredibly shrewd on his central preoccupations: daily life, revolutionary possibility, the relationship between theory and life, the reconstruction of a marxism contemporary with the times.
###introduction
>daily life, like language, contains manifest forms and deep structures that are implicit in its operations, yet concealed in and through them. (678)
lefebvre opens by pointing out that when he first wrote the critique, he was attempting to redeem a subject (everyday life) that was considered unremarkable and not something that merited serious consideration. the situation has changed, and now a fixation with everyday life characterizes nearly every aspect of culture and science. but lefebvre is not celebrating this development, because the new interest in the subject has not been critical, political, or pointed toward possibility (680). my favorite bits of lefebvre are when he ventriloquizes different povs, like when here he stages a dialogue between an 'optimist' and a 'nostalgic' on whether daily life has improved or declined over the twentieth century (683).
lefebvre then theorizes 'social time' and 'rhythmanalysis' more in depth since these concepts, he admits, were not explained in the earlier volumes after he introduced them. social time is indissoluble from his more fleshed out concept of social space, since 'use of space involves a certain use of time.' his perspective on social time is similar to adorno's writings around the same time on the topic. there's a constant interruption between the time of use (labor-time) and the time of exchange ('free' time):
>the time of non-labour forms part of social time, as compensation for the time devoted to production (sold as productive capacity to those who possess the means of reproduction). like labour, non-labour, or rather the time of non-labour, forms part of the mode of production. it impels the economy - first because it is the time of consumption, and next because vast sectors generating products and surplus-value are constructed on the basis of this non-labour: tourism, the leisure industry, show business, 'culture' and the culture industry. thus daily life encompasses these modalities of social time, the time of labour and of non-labour alike, and in particular being bound up with use. (688)
lefebvre is parsing this in this detail because, in 1946 and 1968, everyday life was undergoing a transformation, and had not established 'the relations between bodies, the relations of the corporeal to the spatial and temporal' that appear to him in 1981 (689). but this does not alter the underlying motivation of the critique: 'to bring out the implicit, unexplored content of daily life' and to see how 'everyday mundanity, its time and space, contained things that were seemingly incompatible with it - play, the festival, surprise' and thus 'to open up marxist thought to the realm of possibilities' (691).
lefebvre is playing defense here, apologetically. he says that the context in which he was writing was a marxist climate that was preoccupied with totality. if he was pushing against the particular methods that were being used, he did not mean to champion the naive empiricism that was soon to become popular: 'daily life provides a mediation between the particular and the universal, the local and the global' (692). the critique of everyday life had to be flexible, because its object was protean, but it 'imparted content to alienation' (693). that is, lefebvre was not trying to abandon the critique of political economy in marx, but extend it. he then distinguishes his approach to everyday life from heidegger and lukács (although i think he overstates his differences re the latter).
>for marx . . . the other is both alienation and disalienation (its possibility): alienation in class relations, disalienation in revolutionary potentialities. (695)
the critique of everyday life is needed because 'people in general do not know how they live' even though increasingly (1981, but i think this is true today) 'they are less and less taken in' (697). in order to bring people to critique, lefebrve 'aimed to shatter marxist orthodoxy . . . to put an end to the notion of an orthodoxy' (698). of course, he had no way of knowing that the popularity of marx would be eclipsed so quickly after he was writing, to his dismay. the split he observes--between a failed stalnism and a subversive cultural politics which had abandoned revolution--is in some way cause and in some way result of this eclipse.
he gives a capsule history of the various radical movements of the twentieth century (although he overlooks anticolonial struggle for the most part), and then points to some possibilities he sees in protest movements: 'abolishing work' and 'the social relations of domination' (701). unlike many a marxist, he's actually quite sympathetic to--and prescient about--struggle which centered pleasure and did not valorize labor:
>against an economism void of values other than those of exchange, protest stood for reuniting the festival and daily life, for transforming daily life into a site of desire and pleasure. the protesters were protesting against the fact, simultaneously obvious and ignored, that delight and joy, pleasure and desire, desert a society that is content with satisfaction. (701)
but without a marxist idea of totality (in everyday life) on its side, this was an incomplete protest. his earlier critique aimed to explore how 'daily life is insidiously programmed' so that 'people were having it explained to them how they should live . . . how they would use their time and space. these features marked society while wrecking the social.' it was thru the colonization of daily life that everyday life was depoliticized 'by disembodied images and alien voices, by the discursive and spectacular moulding' of a vast media apparatus (702).
('colonization' is lefebvre's language, as well as debord's and to be honest i don't like it very much, especially given how little consideration he gives to historical anticolonial struggle that was taking place alongside.)
lefebvre is partly cataloging his own shortcomings here, such as his neglect of 'the role of multinationals' and 'their intervention in daily life' (703). he neglected the role of middle class hegemony and mass media, and did not fully develop an 'analysis of reproduction, as concealed not under but in production' (704). and of course, there was the failure of 1968, which he both inspired and in which (to his credit, considering the role of althusser and adorno) he took part. after 1968, we have what i will somewhat jokingly term a marx/foucault split:
>revolutionaries confined themselves to the politico-economic, whereas subversives distanced themselves from it. in short, these two aspects of daily life were dissociated. failure ensued. (705)
lefebvre is much more foucauldian than many other marxists of his period: 'daily life entered into the circuits of the market and managerial practice . . . . this can extend to the 'self-management' of daily life' (707).
but lefebvre is not interested just in atoning; he has his targets, too. he is very angry at the abandonment of humanism that endures today and in particular he has no kind words for althusser:
>critical knowledge was going to spawn hypercriticism - at the extreme, sheer abstract negation of the existing order, rejection of the 'real' treated as a shadow theatre. . . . on the pretext that humanism bore the marks of bourgeois liberalism and suspect ideologies, it was blithely trampled underfoot without anything being put in its place. on the road to hypercriticism, the ultra-leftist intelligentsia demolished all values, for excellent reasons, but in the process destroyed reasons for living. (707)
on another front, though he sympathizes with the 'rejection of work' because at present people 'exercise only a tiny proportion of their potential for pleasure,' it was an organizing mistake that 'could originate only in a certain middle class and an intelligentsia undeterred by paradoxes.' for all its slogans, this utopian sect 'specified nothing about space, the use of time, social relations' (708).
rather than these thought experiments about the end of the humanist subject, attempts at reconciling neo-positivist scientism with marx, or speculative utopianisms that were alienated from everyday life, 'human rights should have been defended, illustrated, strengthened' (709). abdicating this role has led to a generalized rhetoric--by no means exclusive to leftists (and prominent today, imo)--of crisis. 'they talk about containing or controlling' crisis. but crisis is no longer crisis: 'it is becoming the mode of existence of modern societies on a world scale' (713). 'crisis is not some malady of society, but henceforth its normal, healthy state' (714). lefebvre's 'theory of permanent crisis' (715) is a critique of the very idea of crisis. this is a point that rancière has made too, which is that it is exactly the people who pounce on the word crisis who then authorize themselves to administer to the crisis indefinitely, permanent doctors and rulers of our neoliberal hell.
lefebvre wants us to return to the ruthless critique of everyday life. 'is daily life a shelter from the changes, especially when they occur abruptly? is it a fortress of resistance to great changes, or certain minor but significant changes? or, contrariwise, is it the site of the main changes, whether passively or actively?' (717)
###continuities
so, what's remained consistent in the situation across all three volumes? in a characteristically ambitious move, lefebvre doesn't just start in 1946. he starts with so-called modernity itself: 'around 1910, the main reference systems of social practice in europe disintegrated' (720). but while this happened at the scale of nation-states and scientific paradigms, 'daily life was consolidated as the site where the old reality and the old representations were preserved, bereft of reference points or surviving in practice.' to replace the old values in the wake of their collapse, three came to characterize the modern period: 'technique, labour and language' (721).
technique won out, becoming as autonomous as commodities, though labour put up a fight as the organizing principle of the socialist countries. in terms of higher values, only language was left. (it is extremely funny that his evidence includes the increased popularity of crosswords.) but language as a value in itself is merely 'uninhibited signification . . . separated from expression. meaning lies dying. . . . freed from all ties, signifiers take flight. thought disappears at the very moment thinkers believe they are thinking freely' (722).
this is a familiar story, and one that lefebvre doubts (in an echo of raymond williams): 'modernity appears as an ideology - that is to say, a series of more or less developed representations that conceal a practice. modernity was promising. what did it promise? happiness, the satisfaction of all needs' (423). 'the ideology of modernity above all masked daily life as the site of continuity, by floating the illusion of a rupture with the previous epoch.' with its promises of infinite novelty unfulfilled and nothing in its place, 'the optimism of modernity becomes tinged with nihilism,' enabling 'a clear field for the deployment of technology and the proclamation of the end of ideologies' as our new myths (724). modernity may or may not have occured; capitalism persists.
and in what forms did capitalism persist? well, the big one--and a somewhat surprising one given how many predicted its fragmentation or dissolution--is the 'consolidation of the family . . . . the family is affirmed not only as a micro-centre of consumption and occupation of a small local space . . . but as an affective group reinforced by a sense of solidarity, the moral complement of social security' (725). this was the flipside of the technological acceleration of the twentieth century, and it is in some sense an attempt to compensate for (but in fact exacerbates) how 'capitalism leads to the solitude of the individual . . . in daily life.' but the socialisms of the twentieth century could only offer an alternative of 'general mistrust and suspicion . . . internalized repression' (725).
neither of these offered much to those who 'sought to take back control of their everyday life.' this is a nice quote: ''solidarity' is neither theology nor politics in the usual sense: it is 'ordinary life' emerging into the daylight, making demands, calling for help - sometimes incautiously, for it is on the brink of despair' (726).
the forms that dominates the twentieth century, much more so than even the capitalist family, is the commodity.
>in their present form the world and planet derive, in the first instance, from the extension of the market and commodities to the entire earth, in an uneven process that has swept aside all resistance. (727)
hence the perennial importance of marx, and the commodity as a form that contains and conceals social relations in their totality. the transformation of information into a commodity in the twentieth century is pivotal, as it 'makes possible all other exchanges: all the flows in which daily life is immersed.' we live in a 'commodity-world,' a world which 'tends towards a sort of nothingness, through the abstraction of exchange.' 'it is in this way that the commodity can constitute and determine the global.' 'only knowledge of the commodity as reality-producing gives us access to the global. . . . it alone makes it possible to situate daily life in the global, and to asses the retroactive impact of international space on its own conditions, on the contradictions it contains' (730).
because 'modern society' is constituted as a system of systems of equivalence,' so does it exert a flattening pressure on daily life in which 'all moments would be equivalent.' only, 'the moments assert themselves.' this is why everyday life contains a critical charge, and why we must resist an 'everyday life managed like an enterprise within an enormous, technologically administered system.' although they are all commodities on the market, the minimal differentiation of sex, labour, and information from other commodities is useful. these are the source of 'intense instants' that can 'shatter the everydayness trapped in generalized exchange.' they connect--and can disconnect--everyday life and the abstract system of universal exchange in which we are caught (731).
there's a brief bit about identity in these environs and in an increasingly automated domestic sphere ('to be attached to objects . . . is today, as in the past, to create a shell or a bubble . . . against the assaults of a hostile world', 'domestic appliances have certainly altered daily life. . . . they have aggravated its closure, by reinforcing repetitive everydayness and linear processes' (734-735)).
he recapitulates his idiosyncratic view of language. lefebvre sounds like blanchot (who sounds like lefebvre) when he writes that 'redundancy . . . is the basis of intelligibility' (744). everyday life is both stable and fragile, owing to the fact that
>social relations have for a long time, if not always, been relations of force. . . . such relations are tolerable only when they are masked. . . . discourse and daily life cover the harshness and brutality of structural relations, the skeleton of society, with a weak but soft flesh.' (739)
>daily life is where 'we' must live; it is what has to be transformed. . . . daily life harbours the site, if not the content, of a creation which transforms it, and is to be accomplished (740).
>the everyday content of the discursive form is simultaneously and inseparably individual and social: the social is the content of the individual . . . everyday discourse performs an important function: translating into ordinary language . . . the sign systems and different codes employed in a society . . . . unbeknown to itself, everyday discourse performs this continuous, indispensable labour. (742)
he sounds like derrida here: 'a kind of venerable manichaeanism is still with us, and tends to crystallize into a system in everyday life' (743). and: 'death-in-life is the great presence-absence . . . . is this not the figure, its strangeness softened by familiarity, which forms the link between everyday life and great works?' (743).
>in daily life, time and discourse, everything, seems reversible, unlike historical time and natural time, as well as subjective duration. daily life and its discourse tend to be installed in a space that has priority over temporality. a (seeming) simultaneity obtains. this sets traps for memory and thought alike. . . . daily life would be reduced to its reversible continuity were this one-dimensionality not continually interrupted, making way for dreams, daydreams, fantasies. (745)
there's a chapter on vulgarity, which is funny but i'm going to skip because i'm being way too exhausive--i really need to start paring these down. i just think he's neat! there's a bit about the family, sex, a critique of de certeau. there's a fun schema of everyday life, which is actually really useful for fleshing out the concept of social time:
* homogeneity: 'tendency towards the same, identity, equivalence, the repetitive and their order' (757). in 'homogenous everyday time' 'the abstract measurement of time governs social practice' through 'clock-time', 'law and order,' 'the world of the commodity, ' 'linearly repetitive tasks,' etc (758). this is 'the domination of the abstract' later described by moishe postone in similar terms (759).
* fragmentation: 'the dispersion of time and space, labour and leisure alike, and ever more intense specialization' (757). 'fragmented everyday time' is 'dispersed by abrupt discontinuities, fragments of cycles and rhythms ruptured by the linearity of measurement procedures, activities that are disconnected' (758). this is 'the division of labour' and the privatization and fragmentation of space. this means 'the dilution of the contrast between high (sacred) points and low points in everyday life, and a growing multiplicity of neutral indifferent instants' (759).
* hierarchization: 'hierarchical order equally being imposed on functions - more or less significant - and objects' which 'runs from the trivial to the exceptional' (757) hierarchical everyday time means 'the unevenness of situations and moments, some regarded as highly significant and others as negligible, according to value judgements which lack justification' (758). this hierarchy also places society's 'rejects . . . at the level of infra-daily life' and 'the olympians in a supra-daily life' while everyday life as everyday life is dominated by 'the life-world of the middle classes' (761).
these are each, for lefebvre, what must be resisted and ultimately abolished along their respective axes.
next is discontinuities! we'll see if i have the energy for that.
###discontinuities
first, a radical politics organized not around but against work: 'what might daily life become from the viewpoint of not working? how can we inflect it in this direction? . . . what should we expect - an expansion of the everyday, or its decline?' (764). lefebvre remains open to the power of play, but increasingly skeptical about the potential of 'the ludic to rupture to daily life' given 'the obduracy of the system of equivalents' (767). his point is that if the commodity once stifled imagination, it can now as easily exploit and stimulate it.
the enemy is powerful and by no means limited to (though reliant on and formed in) the market: 'political power everywhere sets about obtaining by all possible means . . . the celebrated consensus, which assumes and creates stability' (769). this means as well, and lefebvre namedrops neoliberalism here, a greater 'discrepancy between the institutional level and daily life' (771). but if it's going to be a hard trek to amassing power at the everyday scale, it is also true that 'today everyone banks on daily life: politicians' as much as revolutionaries (775).
the question is then what resources are available to a critical or revolutionary project. lefebvre has no time whatsoever for keynes, the capitalist appropriation of marx, but he remains intransigent on 'human rights.' 'the fact that some dangerous forces, even imperialism, have sought to make use of them . . . cannot justify abandoning or disavowing them. . . . through a hard-fought battle they must be wrested from those who seek to use and abuse them. it was a serious political error (a) to regard these rights as political tools permanently in the service of those who are dominant; (b) peremptorily to refute the ideology that has historically supplied their envelope . . . (c) not to give them a different foundation . . . (d) not open them out by adding a multiplicity of rights' (780).
one such right would be the 'right to difference' (781). i don't want to talk about this section, honestly. it's not that it's bad or compromising--it's admirable that lefebvre really wanted to synthesize his marxist background with struggles around race and gender, and he does so in unobjectionable enough terms--i just don't think it adds anything. it's transparently lefebvre's attempt to catch up with other terrains of struggle, and that's fine. i don't think we need it from him, particularly. maybe i'll change my mind on reread. i do like--though it baffles me why it's in this section--his brief takedown of pierre bourdieu's sociology, whose positivism 'destroys potentiality' (789).
then there's a good bit about the relationship between the state and daily life, a subject on which lefebvre is always very useful. this section is notable for his coining 'normalized' before that word was annoyingly meaningless and for a brilliant connection between the functionalist obsession with state management: 'the everyday . . . unfolds, or rather stagnates, under this dominion, with functionalism and official formalism disguising the enterprises of the will to power' (796). 'the state manages daily life directly or indirectly.' in contrast to foucault (who is namechecked), 'today, everything that is not permitted is prohibited.' but the state does not simply rule over everyday life with an iron fist because 'it chiefly relies on the world of commodities, an active form in everyday life' (798). the relationship is mutual: one of control (of the everyday by the state) and vulnerability (of the state at the site of the everyday).
then there is an extended treatment of 'social time and space' (800). lefebvre's emphasis here is as ever on the plurality of social rhythms, the 'sudden mutual interference between rhythmical vital processes and linear operations' that characterize industrial capitalism (801). his 'new science' is 'rhythmanalysis' which attends to 'the progressive crushing of rhythms and cycles by linear repetition' (802). 'time is projected into space through measurement, by being homogenized, appearing in things and products. . . . memory-objects, these palpable, immediate traces of the past, seem to say in daily life that the past is never past. not explicitly but implicitly, it signifies the reversibility of time' (805).
okay, then there's the chapter on information technology. to be honest, it's a lot better than it could be! it's certainly not as silly as baudrillard, nor is it as uncritical as mcluhan (whom he explicitly critiques). i'm not going to go step by step but i like this description of a kind of circuit sublime:
>enormous networks, channels, circuits thus start out from daily life, pass through various levels to the planetary . . . and then return towards daily life. (816)
lefebvre clearly wants to give information a central place in a reconstructed marxist theory, putting it on even terrain with production. that's laudable insofar as it's taking the problem seriously, and he's more serious about doing so than so many handwaving theories of 'immaterial labor.' but i don't think it's a highlight of the book, and i do think lefebvre knows he's out of his depth, both here and in the 'right to difference' stuff. that's fine. he was almost 90 years old! he was trying!
###conclusion
>if there is a reconciliation, or at least a compromise, between first and second natures, it will occur not in the name of an anthropological or historical positive knowledge, but in and through daily life transformed from within by tragic knowledge. . . . daily life has served as a refuge from the tragic, and still does: above all else, people seek, and find, security there. to traverse daily life under the lightning flash of tragic knowledge is already to transform it - through thought.critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (3)2022-05-29T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-29:/gemlog/2022-05-29.gmi##critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (3)
ok, i got the dates wrong. the first volume was 1947, *this* volume was 1968. and the third volume is 1981. which is pretty wild to think about, considering that this is a work of philosophy (or 'anti-philosophy,' yeah yeah yeah) that spans almost half the twentieth century. i think that more than justifies lefebvre's claim to opening marxist theory up to everyday life in motion. i finished the whole thing yesterday, so i'm gonna try to catch these notes up over the next few days.
###clearing the ground
the second volume is by far the longest, and it is an attempt to ground a methodology for a critique of the everyday, that is, a scientific approach for talking about everyday life. because of this, it gets in the weeds sometimes, but it is full to bursting with incredibly useful and well developed concepts.
'historical drift' (297) is lefebvre's term for 'the gap between intentions, actions and results' (314), or the slow separation of everyday life from history. a revolution might install a temporary government to organize the transition from capitalism to socialism, but over time this government might come to serve an entirely different function. it's in this way that in the modern world 'everyday life and historical event' become partially 'dissociated' (315).
isn't that great? what a good concept, what a great term for it. he has a real gift.
more broadly, lefebvre is trying to develop a 'theory of needs' (299) that illuminates the relationship between nature and culture in everyday life. he does so by suggesting that we think dialectically about need and desire: 'there is a transfer from need to desire which crosses the social and society in its entirety' (305). this quote should make it clear that he's not arguing for a naive account of nature or essence, since 'the circuit from need to desire and from desire to need is constantly being interrupted or distorted' (305).
which brings us to lefebvre on gender. lefebvre often expresses himself in awkward terms on the subject, but i think it would be a misreading to chalk up quotes like this to sexist dismissal:
>'women' in general bear all the weight of everyday life; they are subjected to it much more than men, in spite of very significant differences according to social classes and groups. (305-306)
lefebvre is particularly interested in texts that target a female demographic--specifically, horoscopes--for how they preserve 'the permanence of cyclic time scales of biological and cosmic origin at the heart of the (intermittent or continuous) linear time scales imposed by technology and industrial labor' (308).
lefebvre wants to study 'the persistence of rhythmic time scales within the linear time of modern industrial society' and their mutual interaction (343). one thing this study illuminates is class hierarchy: 'in the everyday experience of the people . . . cyclic time scales and rhythms predominate, but broken up, fragmented, eviscerated so to speak . . . . in the 'upper sphere' . . . linear time scales predominate, pointing in a single direction, but disconnected from one another' (347). to be on the bottom of the hierarchy is to 'live inside a narrow time scale' whereas the upper class anxiously live in 'the rational and abstract kind of time implied by money and credit' (348).
there's a funny bit where lefebvre pretends to be his critics so he can argue back and forth, usually making fun of various schools of thought along the way, which i won't summarize. but an important emphasis here is that lefebvre's concept of everyday life is not a one-sided account of how we are always alienated and confined to banality in capitalist life. rather, it is through alienation that human creation is confirmed (since that is what is alienated in the first place), the human creativity that can be reactivated to open possibility.
so what is everyday life? it is two things together: 'the residual deposit and . . . the product' of human totality (351). it's what's left over from all the activities that have a name and it's the cumulative form of those activities in day-to-day life. it's both a remainder--what's left out--and everything that isn't left out. the everyday is 'doubly determined . . . as unformed, and as what forms contain' (358).
because it's a residual deposit and product (both after-effects), this means that there's a lag (a drift, even!) between history and everyday life, which lefebvre cleverly compares to the marxist concept of uneven development:
>in our history, the uneven development of sectors is also a consequence of history. indeed, in uneven development the everyday defines itself as what legs behind history, but not as what eludes history, events, development and human power. in history, in development, the everyday is also a product. (352)
the everyday is then social. lefebvre coins the term 'social individual' and describes three layers through which consciousness forms within the social:
* first layer: 'a kind of membrane through which the osmoses between 'the individual' and 'society' occur.'
* second layer: this is where 'the hierarchic attitudes and behaviour patterns of whatever groups' to which the individual belongs offer 'ready-formed choices.'
* third layer: 'an affective nucleus' that is 'the sphere of non-adaptation' (353). this is the realm of unconscious fantasy, displacement, fulfillment/dissatisfaction, alienation, repression, 'the most internal sphere' and yet the one 'where the history of the individual reveals itself in the history of society' (354).
i don't need to belabor this further, but the point is that each layer has social representations. each layer is social, historical, ideological in some way.
lefebvre seems to me on less sturdy ground when he tries to deal with technology, in this case household products that save time on domestic labor. he makes a few claims about these. this is the only one that really struck me, since it's also what adorno thought:
>a reduction in the time devoted to productive actions and gestures which are now carried out by technical objects has raised the question of time itself, and already this is a very urgent problem. if we examine time as it is experienced by many of today's men and women, we will see that is chock-a-block full and completely empty. on the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom. (369)
like adorno (and jonathan crary), lefebvre believes that time is all but perfectly synchronized to the demands of capital:
>controlled by signals, paradoxically dissociated, everyday time becomes both homogenous and dispersed. work time falls into line with family-time and leisure time, if not vice versa. (373)
um, there's more attempts to reckon with gender, which i don't know that i understand well enough to summarize. i suppose the argument that the return to 'worn-out symbolisms' (377) to valorize traditional gender roles in the absence of alternatives seems useful, and there's certainly compatibility with what i understand kristeva's argument about 'women's time' to be. but i am a little uncomfortable by how easy it is for lefebvre to dismiss the 'pseudo-world' of gendered everyday life.
that said, lefebvre is quite sharp--ahead of his time and ours--on the question of the family, which demonstrates the simultaneous speeding up of history and strengthening of residual forms of privatization and reproduction, 'substituting the small family group in place of the individual' (386). recourse to private life is a defensive measure, and it is a sacrifice of the social: 'private life remains privation' (384). but while the private may seem 'an alibi for escaping from history, from failures, from risks and from threats . . . to run away from the historical and from the problems of society as a whole (in other words to run away from politics), is nevertheless one of the ways history is lived' (388).
what's interesting about lefebvre, i think, is that he's equally influenced by nietzsche and marx. so unlike nietzsche's anti-humanist descendants, he is a very committed humanist who believes in collective history and class struggle. and unlike the marxist hardliners, whose emphasis on political economy is one of the targets of this critique, he wants to activate the potential in cultural subversion.
>to know the everyday is to want to transform it. . . . it is to understand the real by seeing it in terms of what is possible. (393)
and that's the first chapter.
###the formal implements
>the everyday is made up of . . . partial systems, juxtaposed without any rational links, and each one with its own implications and consequences: temporality, rhythms, periodicity, recurrences and repetitions, specific works and symbolizations. these systems are distinct and disconnected. some of them reproduce or prolong former dominant 'systems.' (469)
this chapter is theoretically abstract to such a degree that it's difficult to even try to summarize. partly lefebvre is justifying his approach. if you're interested in everyday life, why not just interview randos on the street? or perhaps record the happenings of an average day in a specific area? because this would not tell us anything about what lefebvre's actually interested in, which is 'the field of possibilities' (405). 'a mass of facts can only prove anything in cases where reality is static' (411). so instead of deduction or induction, lefebvre proposes a method of sociological transduction to describe the loop 'from the present to the virtual and from the given to the possible in a never-ending prospective operation' (412). he doesn't really come back to this tho.
more important to his theory the idea of everyday life as a level. a level is not simply a description of a static reality but a relational concept which contains 'the idea of differences between levels' because 'wherever there is a level there are several levels, and consequently gaps, (relatively) sudden transitions, and imbalances or potential imbalances'--'levels can interact and become telescoped'--while at the same time levels 'remain as units within a larger whole' (413). 'realities rise to the surface, emerge, and take on substance momentarily at a certain level' (414). what this means, at the same time, is that (between, for instance, the levels of everyday life and history) 'there will always be an interval' (416). then there are some bonkers charts.
he talks about continuty/discontinuity, micro/macro, indexes/criteria/variables, dimension...to be honest, i don't think these are particularly illuminating sections, though perhaps on rereading they will help shore up the logic of the overall work. the one section that did seem useful is on structure. i did not know that marx's use of structure predates its introduction into mathematics, nor that popular use started around 1930.
structure is, paradoxically, 'the process of becoming into immobility.' lefebvre points out that the popularization of structure likely has to do with 'a certain stabilization of the world round about 1930 (with capitalism its ground, and socialism becoming frozen in the face of this persistence)' (451). structure is 'a system of coherent relations . . . located on a certain level above phenomena' (452). lefebvre maintains that structure is not stasis but 'a temporary balance', and 'structures conceal forces which modify them in a perpetual movement.' structure is something like an emergent form: 'structure forms itself in the course of a history' (453).
lefebvre finds the structuralism of levi-strauss and saussure unhelpful in understanding totality. at the same time, lefebvre is not counterposing the everyday as 'a pure, unconditional spontaneity' of the 'astructural' (457). rather, structure is the dialectical counterpart of the conjuncture, the 'pressure on structure from the process of becoming' (459).
and because he is absurdly thorough, lefebvre follows through on the implications of rejecting structuralism: he has to draw up an entirely new linguistics which meets his criteria for dialectical thought. so: 'language is a social fact, and plays a part in all social facts. . . . once it has been constituted, it becomes active. it creates individuals.' however, this isn't the pressure of an external language constructing a consciousness, but a dialectical process, where language 'enables works' and individuals must 'create their way of expression' (464). it's not the furthest thing from structuralism, but he expands on the differences in more detail later on.
###the specific categories
lefebvre is still defining concepts here.
so, we've got totality. lefebvre is hardline on the need for totality: 'for an empiricism without concepts, one fact is as food as another. when we try to particularize knowledge, we destroy it from within. . . . if there is no insistence upon totality, theory and practice accept the 'real' just as it is, and 'things' just as they are' (475).
and yet: 'how can we determine a totality from inside?' (480). so we can't do without totality but we also can't really have totality either. lefebvre solves this kind of brilliantly by the idea of 'the will for totality' (481):
>once it has taken a definite shape in social practice, each human activity wants the universal. it aspires to universality. it wants to be total. it tends effectively towards totality. therefore it comes into confrontation with other activities. . . . it makes itself real through works, and each work is the result of a momentary totalization. (476)
a totality of the human world can be understood, for lefebvre, through 'three determinations . . . need, labour, pleasure' (485), all of which are of course related and mediated by one another. the shape of their relation--and it's a shape he returns to later--is 'an ascending spiral' (486). i think that image is useful for thinking about dialectics, although he doesn't say that this is a dialectical relation. but if you think about needing food, labouring to produce food, and then establishing a pleasure-relation to food that exceeds the need for it, you can see the spiral as it builds upward.
next, lefebvre deals with reality, mostly to make fun of philosophers who are obsessed with the real. lefebvre doesn't care about the real except insofar as 'the possible enters the real' (489). 'it is in the everyday and its ambiguous depths that possibilities are born and the present lives out its relation with the future' (490). this could be a verbatim quote from lukács:
>'all consciousness is consciousness of a possibility'; this is what gives it its acuity, its good luck and its misfortune. without possibility there can be no consciousness, and what is more, no life. presence implies what is possible in the present, and for the present; the future is an indispensable horizon and guiding light. consciousness can never be at home in the real. (491)
and this should make clear that lefebvre's consciousness is not an isolated subjectivity but a hegelian 'self-consciousness . . . born in the other, of the other and by the other' (492).
then he talks about the relationship of function to reality, which he's much more skeptical about as a category. an alternative to function is play, 'rediscovered spontaneity,' perhaps the only 'activity which is not subjected to the division of labour and the social hierarchies.' 'with play another reality is born, not a separate one, but one which is 'lived' in the everyday, alongside the functional . . . play is a lavish provider of presence and presences. one cannot do without it. austerity has no time for it and social order is afraid of it' (497). play is not without function but many possible functions: 'play is momentary transfunctionality which consists of its own unfolding' (500).
ok, now the big one: alienation. this is lefebvre's skeleton key to everyday life, and his big contribution to marxist theory: the emphasis on alienation as a concept in marx.
when ''man' is alienated,' he is 'torn from his self and changed into a thing, along with his freedom' (500). 'alienation is not a 'state'' but a constant movement which both implies disalienation and new alienations in 'a perpetual dialectical movement' (501). 'alienation is the result of a relation with 'otherness', and this relation makes us 'other', i.e., it changes us, tears us from our self and transforms an activity (be it conscious or not) into something else, quite simply, into a thing' (508). lefebvre is clear that otherness is not the other here. the other is what makes consciousness possible; otherness is what distances consciousness from itself (i.e., alienation).
lefebvre draws a distinction between lived and living as concepts. i don't understand it so i'm moving on. same with spontaneity, challenge, mistrust, although a brief note on his concept of ambiguity: ambiguity is a state of ambivalence about a choice or situation where the decision is not yet vital. it's a kind of suspended time, one which (lefebvre says) women are perpetually forced to occupy, and one which is opposed to action. this means that ambiguity 'has a time limit' after which 'the sword of decision' (lol) 'cleaves continuous time into a before and after. true time - many-sided, continuous, and discontinuous, waymarked by the forks in its paths, mapped out by decisions and options - is revealed' (519).
okay, two more really big ones. in some ways his legacy. social space and social time. frustratingly, the latter doesn't really get a clear definition (yet), but social space--which has had a long afterlife, including in abolitionist scholarship--'is the environment of the group and of the individual within the group; it is the horizon at the centre of which they place themselves and in which they live. . . . social space is made up of a relatively dense fabric of networks and channels. this fabric is an integral part of the everyday' (525).
as for social time, lefebvre just says that he's going to propose a 'rhythmanalysis' for understanding the different 'tempos' of 'social time scales' (526). he doesn't really do this, but he does talk a bit more about it later on.
praxis. lefebvre is very committed to the idea of praxis, by which the human subject 'forms his own abilities' (526). 'production produces man. so-called 'world history' or 'the history of the world' is nothing but the history of man producing himself, of man producing both the human world and the other man, the (alienated) man of otherness, and his self (his self-consciousness)' (531).
this is where lefebvre says that within alienation are the seeds of revolutionary praxis. 'beneath an apparent immobility, analysis discovers a hidden mobility.' 'praxis produces the human 'world,' our world, the world of objects and goods, the world our senses perceive and which therefore seems a gift of nature' (532).
of course, if praxis is productive activity, it doesn't just mean revolutionary activity, it means repetitive labour as well. 'a large part of everyday life is made up of stereotyped and repeated actions. this repetitive praxis keeps the human world going, and helps to produce it over and over again. it underlies the human world and constitutes its stability' (533).
but at the same time 'praxis is creative' (534). 'the idea of total praxis . . . is both utopian and realist.' it draws no distinction between action and (critical) knowledge, either, since both are human activity (535).
praxis is the escape hatch from everyday 'empirical thought . . . with its belief in commodities and money as things' (537). commodities and money are the alienated forms of human activity and social relations--what brings them together again is praxis.
ok, next he talks logos/logic/dialectic. mostly what's interesting here is his attempt to derive a social science of everyday life from (then-current) developments in the science of physics. this is not a descriptive project: 'rather than exploring 'being,' we must explore what is possible. . . . ontology is worn out' (549). instead of fixing things as they are, thought should aim at 'the possible impossible' (555).
next, logic/characterology. this is more of his theory of the social individual. it's extremely funny, too, because he goes through a typology of people he doesn't like, an exhausive catalog of types of guys. my favorite is 'the thinker' who 'effortlessly combines the inactivity of the [utopian] with the lack of awareness of the [man of action]'. examples include 'the embittered cuckold' (562). i also like 'the pompous idiot': 'pompous idiots are so stupid that they seem harmless' (565). (among these are 'the avid reader', lmao (566)).
the total field: this is an important one. lefebvre's total field concept is meant to make continuity and discontinuity dialectical. 'everything is in everything and everything is total - and yet nothing it is, is in anything other than itself' (567). this is lefebvre's license to contradict himself as many times as he wants, which is annoying but useful. totality is the goal, but totality never rests. new data modify the whole.
###theory of the semantic field
this is where lefebvre draws up an entire philosophy of linguistics to work within his system. that gives a sense of the scale of his ambition here.
lefebvre's 'semantemes', which is such a bad coinage that he never even repeats it, are divided into: signals, signs, symbols, and images.
the signal is binary, automatic, repetitive, and static in signification. it's a stop sign, a red light, etc. it's functional, a closed system.
the sign is where lefebvre tries to diverge, not entirely successfully imo, from saussure. the sign is signifier/signified/sign w/an internal, arbitrary difference. sure. 'to speak is to act', 'discourse is an event and an act' (576). 'because discourses have continuity we are forced into their network and, as a consequence, into the network of the social actions they refract and specify: this action is permitted, that one is forbidden. but discourses are also discontinuous, and their discrete terms act like a sieve, straining the things which rise up from our inner depths. . . . for this reason, it really is a kind of being, a way of being' (577). this is not foucault's discourse which speaks being into existence: language manifests in 'the everyday, not as its loom, but as threads woven into its fabric' (578).
the symbol is the most interesting concept here. it's treated as metonymic, but also a displacement. symbols are also historical, for lefebvre, and much more about collective associations than, say, intentional puns.
the image is like the extreme end of the symbol, 'it overloads . . . signs with its emotional (expressive) content, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time' (581). there is 'a permanent lag between the invention of images and their use, and between the situation of whoever employs them and whoever is influenced by their action' (583). imagination is the dialectical preservation/cancellation of magic, says lefebvre, and the image revives this association.
all of which serves to ground this point: 'the human world is made up of objects, products and human works, not of things. it is also made up other human beings and of the language which links them together' (584). lefebvre is critiquing scientific materialism on the one hand and linguistic structuralism on the other. honestly i wonder what he would have made of bakhtin's work, had it been available sooner.
he theorizes the relationship of consciousness to the semantic field, arguing again for a dialectical understanding and the presence of the extralinguistic while also arguing against what he describes as a kind of phenomenlogical enclosure (592). then he historicizes the signal as the privileged form of signification in industrial life.
>in 'industrial society', urban life becomes peopled by innumerable signallings. each one programmes a routine, exactly like a calculator, regulating patterns of conduct and behaviour. we may well ask ourselves whether one day the entire set of signals will not consitute a sort of gigantic machine which will not need to be built . . . . this colossal mechanism will have already regulated society and its everyday life. (594)
then he moves to the role of signs (largely practical) and symbols in everyday life. the symbols of everyday life stage a conflict of times:
>every revolution destroys a set of symbols. or else, in attempting to destroy them, it destroys itself. it cannot but try to destroy them, because, as now know, such symbols play a structural or 'structuring' role which is all the more effective for being hidden. as a consequence, every revolution makes enormous efforts to replace the old symbols it has destroyed with new ones. . . . we know how violently the french revolution 'desecrated' space, putting stipulations made by previous scientific knowledge about praxis and social consciousness into effect. it was in this naked, empty social space stripped bare of symbols that the everyday life of the bourgeois was to set up of home. . . . political symbols (such as the flag, etc.) could not replace and eliminate cosmic symbols. henceforth, the symbolisms associated with lived (affective and emotional) time persisted, so to speak, beneath a social space which had been occupied first by signs, and then by signals. . . . the everyday life of bourgeois society was never to become established in a tranquil manner, although tranquility was precisely what it was aiming for. not only would it be forever shaken by insecurity, crises and wars, but the field upon which it was built was shifting, agitated, apparently on the surface, but undermined by forces from below. (599)
language, here, is more conflict-riven than in the structuralist model, but more hierarchical than the post-structuralist model. lefebvre does come close to a foucauldian or derridean perspective when he writes that 'we are all part of a social text. . . . we are all there indissolubly as object and subject . . . since the social text encompasses us and we must see ourselves thus encompassed; then subject, since we see ourselves within the text, and decypher and read it from inside, and never completely from outside' (601).
there's a good about monuments as urban symbols and streets as the last refuge of social life in the modern city ('like the everyday, the street is constantly changing and always repeats itself' (604)). this leads in a more extended discussion of the relationship between everyday life and commodity fetishism.
lefebvre elevates commodity fetishism to pride of place in his critical theory. 'the spectacle of the street stimulates our desire to see things and forms our way of seeing them . . . paradise lost is rediscovered in the form of a parody; at every step original unity is restored in caricature. good, things, and objects are on display . . . there are goods and desires for everyone, democratically, even for children, even for people who are not very rich, but there are a lot more - all of them - for people who are' (605).
this is a very french street we're talking about here.
the street is an intermediary between human lives, and its commodities are exchange values elevated to sovereign heights. raised to its zenith, fetishism attains a kind of splendour. . . . here . . . the specific beauty of our society is accomplished . . . behind the trasparent windows which parody the transparency of human relations. . . . through all the possible and impossible physical delights, all the dreams, all the frustrations, money claims its kingdom, its empire, its pontificate' (606).
elsewhere, 'everything is functional or is intended as such; everything is a signal . . . the repetitive gestures by which the labour force keeps on going in its everyday life...' (606).
###the theory of accumulative and non-accumulative processes
anyone who says that marxism is necessarily a developmental teleology or stageist theory of history should read this chapter (and, of course, benjamin). the one downside of this chapter is that i think lefebvre's use of uneven development to draw an analogy between colonized nations and the everyday monotony of life in developed/industrial nations is...risky. but this is a very useful summary of marx's ideas about primitive accumulation and uneven development. the simultaneity of accumulative and non-accumulative social processes is 'a process resembling a rising spiral' in which 'society as a whole continues to reproduces its relations and conditions of existence, but the socio-economic proportions inherent to simple reproduction are modified by the proportions necessary for accumulation on an extended scale' (617).
what we call modernity is the moment in which, because of accumulative processes, 'the economic sphere becomes predominant and determining. the history is made by individuals and groups, but blindly' (618). it is worth stressing just how much explanatory power accumulation has as a framework for understanding modern history. of particular interest is how accumulation develops markets prior to the state in england, france, and the u.s., how states emerge alongside accumulation in germany, italy, and tsarist russia, how states organize accumulation in the socialist states, and how the state forms prior to accumulation in postcolonial nations (619). it's got its limitations, but that's a pretty compelling map of the nineteenth and twentieth century as far as nation-states go.
less interesting is lefebvre's generalization of accumulation as a concept--so that knowledge and rationality are accumulative, e.g. but! very important is the fact that accumulation is in fact the principle of the sovereign individual of civic philosophy. it's well established that legally the individual has 'first and foremost the essential right to own property.' the state can turn on a citizen at any time--we all know this because it happens everyday--because what matters to the state is not the citizen but his right to accumulate: 'each individual can contribute to accumulation' (623). then he applies accumulation to life, which i think is a mistake.
he then turns to non-accumulative processes, which he associates with time (and accumulative processes with space). 'everyday life lies at the ill-defined, cutting edge where the accumulative and the non-accumulative intersect. this is ill-defined and dangerous border territory , particularly because its symbols give the illusory impression of controlling spontaneous nature, while the techniques which really do control it are increasingly hidden from view' (629).
###the theory of moments
this is the best part of the entire thing i m o.
>the moment is a higher form of repetition, renewal and reappearance, and of the recognition of certain determinable relations with otherness (or the other) and with the self. (638)
>the moment is constituted by a choice which singles it out and separates it from a muddle or a confusion, i.e., from an initial ambiguity. (638)
>the moment has a certain specific duration. relatively durable, it stands out from the continuum of transitories within the amorphous realm of the psyche. it wants to endure. it cannot endure (at least, not for very long). yet this inner contradiction gives its intensity, which reaches crisis point when the inevitability of its own demise becomes fully apparent. ... essentially present (an essential modality of presence), the moment has a beginning, a fulfillment and an end, a relatively well-defined start and finish. it has a history: its own... (639)
is that not...kind of moving? this is a really beautiful part of the book i think. i guess it helps that his primary example is love.
the moment is not an event in the badiou sense: 'rather than tearing it, it weaves itself into the fabric of the everyday, and transforms it' (640).
the moment is not an assemblage in the deleuze sense: 'the moment has its form . . . this form imposes itself in time and in space. it creates a time and a space which are both objective (socially governed) and subjective (individual and interindividual). (640)
and what is the relationship of the moment to a philosophy of possibility? 'the moment proposes itself as the impossible' (640).
>the moment is passion and the inexorable destruction and self-destruction of that passion. the moment is an impossible possibility, aimed at, desired and chosen as such. then what is impossible in the everyday becomes what is possible, even the rule of impossibility. (641)
which means that the moment is dialectical, it 'has its specific negativity':
>negativity operates at the heart of whatever tries to structure and constitute itself into a definitive whole, and to come to a halt. (641)
in other words, a moment is 'the attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility. . . . the moment wants to be freely total; it exhausts itself in the act of being lived' (642). in lukács's language, the moment is a failed totality.
>moments are mortal too, and as such, they are born, they lived and they pass away. there is room not only for freedom, a limited freedom but a real one (which comes into being by structuring, destructuring or restructuring everyday life), but for inventiveness and discovery. in this day and age we are witnessing the formation of a moment: rest. with many ambiguities (non-work, leisure) and many ideologies and techniques (such as 'relaxation,' or 'autogenic training'), modern man - because he needs to - is making an effort to live rest as a totality in itself, i.e., as a moment. (648)
>moments make a critique - by their actions - of everyday life, and the everyday makes a critique - by its factuality - of paroxysmal moments. (650)
the moment 'gives the everyday a certain shape, but taken per se and extrapolated from that context, this shape is empty. the moment imposes order on the chaos of ambiguity.' the moment is a kind of doubling: 'moments present themselves as duplicates of everyday life, magnified to tragic dimensions' (650). what appears in the moment is 'perhaps . . . the slow stages by which need becomes desire, deep below everyday life, and on its surface' (652).
i almost cried reading this. and that's the end of the second volume.
-fin-modern times by jacques rancière2022-05-26T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-26:/gemlog/2022-05-26.gmi##modern times by jacques rancière
i reread this last night. it's a series of recent lectures by rancière which he worked into a short book that i think is one of his most accessible and interesting, as well as summarizing his recent work (since aesthesis, the book that permanently broke my brain).
the basic idea is that 'there is no one modern times, only a plurality of them' and 'this interlacing, and these clashes of temporalities' is at the same time 'a conflict over the distribution of life forms' (x). put simply it's an argument for thinking about politics as a fundamental conflict at the level of time.
###time, narrative, politics
rancière's project is an attempt to reinterpret the 'fictional rationality' of all narrative (including historical/political narrative) from the time of aristotle (2). this rationality is 'a choice between two temporalities': 'a rational time of fiction, where things are connected by casual links' and 'a time of ordinary reality, where they simply happen one after the other.' fiction is organized around movements and reversals from one into the other (from fortune to misfortune, from ignorance to knowledge). this is hierarchical:
>the hierarchy of times that grounds the rationality of human action corresponds to a hierarchy of places separating two categories of human being. there are those who live in the time of events that might happen, the time of action and its ends, which is also the time of knowledge and leisure. . . . and then there are those who inhabit the time of things that happen one after another - the circumscribed, repetitive time of those dubbed passive or mechanical men, because they live in the universe of mere means . . . . the horizontal unfolding of time is based on a vertical hierarchy that separates two forms of life, two ways of being in time - as we might simply put, the way of those who have time and the way of those who do not. (7-8)
rancière's point is that this hierarchy informs both the 'rational time of the global process of capitalist production and distribution of wealth' (12), i.e. 'a whole system of domination identified with an order of rational time management' (17), and the marxist critique of same, both oscillating between 'a time of eternal repetition and a time of decline and catastrophe' (15).
rancière's target here is the technocratic management which affirms itself by crisis, since crisis is now 'the regular functioning of an economic and social system' (16) and crisis legitimates 'the capacity of science not to cure but to manage it' (17). i think science, here, might also be understand as neoliberal governance. the problem, for rancière, is that both defer justice to a future time, affirming 'the gap between the form of life of scientists who master the time of ends and that of the ignorant imprisoned in the time of the everyday' (17).
what's rancière's alternative? to conceive of 'time as a form of life.' the 'hierarchical distribution of times' enables 'a recapture of time, a different way of inhabiting it' for working class beings (in rancière's terms). he cites the 19th century french carpenter gabriel gauny, who wrote 'a narrative of his working day.' the lesson of gauny is, in rancière's interpretation:
>the working day is not merely the fragment of the capitalist process of exploitation that can be divided into the time of the reproduction of labour-power and the time of production of surplus-value. it also the daily reproduction of the way of being of those who 'do not have' time. now, this time is in principle excluded from the universe of narrative: nothing normally happens in it other than the repetition of the same gestures. to recapture time is to transform this succession of hours where nothing is ever going to happen into a time characterized by a multitude of events. (19)
gauny's decision to narrate his work is a decision 'to change the way a worker is supposed to use their hands and words', 'to take time he did not have' (20). the 'supposedly homogenous continuum' of time 'is at once the point through which the reproduction of the hierarchy of time passes and the point of a gap, a break', enabling 'a different temporality by redistributing the weights on the scales of the fates meted out to humans in accordance with time they inhabit' (21). if the stakes here seem elusive, rancière clarifies that gauny's writing--in the interval between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848--is a question of the 'time which doesn't wait' (21). the obvious influence here is walter benjamin, and the dream of 'a different common time,' a time for rancière that 'is scanned differently, imparts a different weight to some instant, links it to another moment' (22).
rancière contrasts 'the marxist revolutioanry tradition . . . of spontaneous, ephemeral revolt and future utopias' with the so-called modernist literary tradition of virginia woolf, 'those atoms of time that continually fall on our minds' (24).
>modern literary fiction has put at its centre this time where, at every instant, a battle is being waged between the misfortune that is servitude renewed and the fortune that is freedom gained: a time composed of a multiplicity of manifest micro-events whose coexistence and interpenetration are counterposed to the time of subordination specific to traditional fiction. (25)
rancière is rehabilitating a literary tradition often dismissed by orthodox marxist criticism as ideologically compromised, arguing instead that the 'intertwining of several heterogeneous temporalities' is the only way to understand the present. 'we can describe this time as composed of intervals' (27). he turns then to 'the forms of collective protest that marked the 2010s, from the arab spring to the occupy moment in madrid, new york, instanbul, athens, paris, and a number of other cities' (28), which to him indicate protest at the level 'of employing time' (29).
finally, rancière argues that he's not making a normative or evaluative argument but a descriptive one, as well as critique of 'the way we narrate time' to determine the efficacy of political protest. for rancière, the marxist framework of 'historical necessity' reproduces 'the time of domination' and so tautologically excludes the possibility of alternative forms of life. rancière suggests that we might rethink time through 'the singularity of moments when this hierarchy [of times] finds itself suspended, halted or diverted in the individual experience of a working day, in the novel in moments of inactivity, or in assemblies of crowds that interrupt the normal course of things' (31).
it's a big argument, and it makes sense that he's spent a lot of time trying to flesh it out. i certainly like the idea of breaking from narratives whereby, say, standing rock or the floyd protests are 'ineffective' because they didn't lead to some governmental policy. and i think, descriptively, rancière is best equipped to think our present political moment. certainly no one has taken walter benjamin's history essay as much to heart as rancière seems to have. i do worry a bit about the utility of rethinking time, and especially how individualistic this seems to be at times, but i also like how rancière is less concerned with people than the activities to which people are allowed to engage. it's a good chapter. i'll write about the rest...later.
okay need to procrastinate so back to it.
###modernity revisited
this is rancière's critique of the concept of modernism/modernity--what he sarcastically calls 'the modernist doxa'--condensed, which is nice. rancière is right to point out that the typical story, in which art was once mimetic but then became modern when it turned to autonomy and medium/form, relies on an absolutely absurd story about the history of art prior to modernity.
rather, 'art is itself a determinate historical configuration' (33). it is a 'regime of experience' that 'makes it possible for words, narrative forms, colours, sounds, movements, or rhythms to be perceived and conceived 'art'' (34). which is not to say that rancière's story is necessarily less absurd, since he immediately makes the claim that art 'in the singular, with a capital' as 'a common sphere of existence' 'has only existed the western world since the end of the eighteenth century' (34).
>the modernist doxa is based on a simplistic idea equating representation with the servile imitation of reality, the better to contrast it with the modern emancipation of an art exclusively devoted to exploring its own medium. but representation was something quite different. it was legislation regarding imitation, subjecting artistic practices to a set of rules that determined which subjects were suitable for artistic treatment and which form suited them, depending on their high or low character. (35)
rather than a move from the figurative to the abstract, what is called modernism is a result of 'the destruction of a hierarchal order inscribed in the very forms of the perceptible and conceivable.' this may seem needlessly rehabilitative. however, rancière points out that partisans of the modernist doxa commit two giant errors: 'they translate the slow, impersonal changes of a regime of experience into the decisions of conscious artistic volition' and 'they connect these decisions with an attempt to coincide with a temporal mutation' (36).
so, rancière's alternative is this: a 'montage of times' (40), 'an interlacing of different temporalities, a complex interplay of relations between anticipation and belatedness, fragmentation and continuity, motion and immobility' (37). he establishes this through a critique of clement greenberg's hegelian art history in the 'avant-garde & kitsch' essay that established the logic of the avant-garde. he then quotes, quite weirdly, emerson alongside marx, both as thinkers who figure 'modern time' as 'a time that it not yet contemporaneous with itself.' emerson asks for the poet who can articulate american life, while marx argues that germany's apparent underdeveloped state actually enables it to skip the bourgeois political transitions of france. both use 'anticipation derived from the backwardness of the present to construct an unprecedented future' (46). if 'we are not yet modern,' art is 'an articulation of contradictory temporalities' (43), 'the belatedness of modernity' (45).
he then turns to a reading of dziga vertov's 1929 movie man with a movie camera, which attempted to construct 'a new fabric of sensible experience.' it is a montage of a single day, like ulysses or mrs dalloway: 'the day is not so much a stretch of time as a paradigm of temporality.
>the time of the day day in the big city is a time of coexistence where the same kind of miniscule events happen to all those who cross paths in the street, while following different trajectories, or contribute from afar, without seeing each other, to the same anonymous existence. (48)
vertov 'constructs a communist day' 'by making all the activities equivalent and simultaneous' (50). rather than a celebration of the modern machine or taylorist/fordist division of labor, vertov's 'montage of activities is, in reality, an extended parataxis' that 'mingles heterogeneous temporalities' (52). the film ends with dance, in which
>continuous movement, which incessantly generates another movement, abolishes the very contrast between work and rest. the equality of movement and rest has a long history in the aesthetic regime of art. it already characterized the aesthetic condition as defined by schiller as a state of equilibrium between activity and passivity. (56)
rancière is very cleverly synthesizing marx's communist philosophy with both schiller's & kant's aesthetic philosophy, since both ultimately do not distinguish 'between the end and means of activity' (58). the play drive and purposiveness without purpose are, after all, other ways of describing free association between men.
he turns to the implications this has for a communist politics. there are two temporalities for two communisms: the time of party-state, which must first establish the conditions for communism; and there is 'an aesthetic communism' which wants to establish in the present 'a common sensorium of equality' (60-61). he turns back to greenberg's art history, pointing out that the marxist greenberg's entire theory ironically rests (and quite explicitly) on the premise that it's bad for the working class to have access to leisure time.
and then, there's the dance chapter.
###the moment of dance
dance is 'a paradigm of art.' a paradigm of art is a 'relationship between what pertains to art and what does not pertain to it: for example, being a painting in a museum and a commodity in a shop' and a 'relationship between thought and that which is not thought: the light of a picture, the development of a melody, or the movement of a body in space.' it is in effect a 'system of relations between thought, space, sight, light, sound and movement' (66-67).
returning to the dancer scene in vertov's man with a movie camera, this dance 'tells no story. it expresses no invisible truth of human emotions. nor does it express unconscious forces moving bodies. it expresses nothing but movement: movement for movement's sake, free from any goal to be attained and from any particular sentiment to be expressed or any unconscious force expressing itself through it' (73).
rancière leads us through reconsiderations of the identity of inactivity and activity in aesthetics, movement and reverie, isadora duncan, kant, marx, 'the free movement of the dancing body' (76):
>the fundamental identity of the aesthetic mode of experience and the communist mode of being receives adequate expression when the movements of dance . . . come to synthesize and symbolize the movements of the communist day, those equal movements that construct a new common world. (77)
dance is not about things in common so much as 'a paradigm of relationality' that 's invariably linked materially, or referred symbolically, to something other than itself' (78). reading mallarme on dance, rancière points out the 'play of metonymies' that dance activates (80), 'a general economy of displacements, analogies and translations' that 'exists only for a potential translator,' 'only as the translation of them made by the spectator's reverie' (81).
a simple example can suffice: certain movements of dance are meant to evoke the movement of waves, hence not a human body but a body of water, but this is only accomplished if the audience translates the one into the other. yet this translation can't be constrained by artistic intention, because the very fact that it can happen means it can happen infinitely (this sounds like derrida imo), so what dance signifies is something other than itself that is in fact /anything other than itself./
which means that dance expresses an equality 'where all activities are images that translate one another interminably' (82). in other words, 'one form of movement, must translate the equivalence of all the movements, thereby creating a gap' (84) with the help of 'the invisible labour of the spectator's reverie' (85). rancière turns to montage, the filmic form 'that puts together things that do not go together' (84), although he unconvincingly argues that montage does rely on a principle of selection while, for reasons that go unexplained, dance does not. then we go back to kant, 'aesthetic ideas', etc (87).
rancière ultimately wants to refuse the priority of the artist over the worker in representing community life: 'an emancipated man or woman is a person capable of speaking about the activity they perform, capable of conceiving this activity as a form of language. . . . it is not a system of signs, but a power of address that aims to weave a certain form of community' (92).
if vertov tries to create an egalitarian montage, i guess, dance expresses the capacity of anyone to be anything more effectively, is the idea. so that's dance done: the final chapter tackles cinema.
###cinematic moments
cinema is the art with the 'capacity to put several times in a single time' through its 'different modes of temporal articulation: between continuity and fragmentation, sequence and repetition, succession and coexistence' (96). vertov, once again, makes an appearance, as someone whose cinematic 'communication is not a way of talking about the reality of the communism being constructed in the soviet union' but 'a way of constructing it' since the purpose of cinematic language is 'not to transmit information, but to link activities' (97).
film is 'a way of connecting times' and here we return to the unit of 'an ordinary day', 'a fictional structure characteristic of the age' (98). rancière summarizes the earlier arguments of the book, emphatically arguing that 'fragmentation is not a form of separation signalling a loss of meaning. on the contrary, it is the formation of a new common sense' (100-101). 'fragmentation is not a way of separating' but 'a way of uniting' that 'perceptibly constructs the common time of the new life' (101). the film relies not on the time of the chronicle or the time of myth but 'the time of pure performance, which unfolds itself before withdrawing into itself' (103). rancière contrasts vertov with eisenstein's 'desynchronization of times' (104) before switching to american cinema.
rancière's american example is, bizarrely, john ford's 1940 adaptation of the grapes of wrath. but i will say this is probably the best reading in the book, especially with the accompanying images, and probably the most convincing example of his argument. it's hard to summarize so i'll quote: with 'a moment detached from the plot,' 'the relationship between story and history splits in two' (109). within the conventional story and its 'path from obscurity to clarity' there is 'the time of an inscription of the irreparable' (111). 'it is through this split that it bears witness to history - that is to say, what capitalism does to human beings' (112).
then he does a reading of pedro costa's colossal youth, which i haven't seen and don't really understand but sounds cool. this film bears witness 'to what colonization and immigration have done to human beings' 'situated in a kind of extra-temporality' (117). rancière's argument is, again, benjaminian, an argument against progressivist models, even marxist ones, that rely on a 'time of progress, which is merely the time of the progress of exploitation' (119). finally, he points out the irony of elitist, highbrow associations that confine to museums the films that reject the aristotlean narrative hierarchy.
and that's the book! it's good. it's weird. i'll probably read it a few more times in my life i guess. i find rancière to be a very compelling writer, stylistically. i think his arguments against orthodox marxism have to some extent been addressed within marxist debates but i know that rancière's whole schtick is being-more-marxist-than-the-marxists so that's fine.
i do wonder...well, i saw sianne ngai give a talk once and it fucking ruled. but in the q&a, someone asked: why situate your project within aesthetic philosophy? which is to say that ngai was maybe shadow boxing with an obsolete tradition. i don't think that's quite true, but it is an interesting point. maybe the reason rancière's argument has such force when faced with greenberg et al is because aesthetics is stuck in a moment in the past, and maybe to move outside of aesthetics would mean confronting a more complex set of questions. i mean, greenberg wrote that essay in 1939. but i like aesthetics and i like marx, so i'm glad both ngai and rancière have stuck around.
-fin-critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (2)2022-05-25T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-25:/gemlog/2022-05-25.gmi##critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (2)
the development of marxist thought
this section is about the importance of marxism and dialectical materialism as a 'dynamic, living science' about 'thought in movement and about movement in things' (196). a lot of it is fairly basic marxist theory and i don't want to rehash it here, although it's a good place to get the fundamentals from for those unfamiliar. lefebvre is very good at describing alienation, fetishism, and mystification. it's important to lefebvre that dialectical materialism is a means of 'reintegrating the humbler reality of everyday life into thought and consciousness' since 'consciousness cannot free itself from existing illusions by its own strength alone' i.e. 'without the 'demystifying' influence of action' (201); 'men are what they do, and think according to what they are' (200). we can only know what our activity has allowed us to know. i like how humanist this philosophy is.
a lot of this is specific to a midcentury french marxist milieu, which is to say that a lot of this is just lefebvre doing owns on sartre, which gets a little boring. lefebvre argues that sartre's committed intellectual is a chimera, and that the task for today (today being 1968, lol) is 'becoming decommitted from a singularly ambiguous, confused and equivocal era' (205). lefebvre's priority is alienation: 'we need to gain control' (205). 'we do not know how we live' (215). 'during a day at work or a holiday, we each enter into relations with a certain number of social 'things' whose nature we do not understand, but which we support by our active participation; without realizing it we are caught up in a certain number of social mechanisms' (217).
he's funny when he's bashing on literature, which 'does deserve to be held in excessively high esteem. . . . whatever its 'function' may be - testimony or aesthetic pleasure, or something else again - it has only one' (205).
notes written one sunday in the french countryside
an interesting chapter, a deviation in aesthetic from the others written in a very evocative style to describe the community life of premodern france. 'festivals contrasted violently with everyday life, but they were not separate from it. they were like everyday life, but more intense, and the moments of that life . . . were reunited, amplified, magnified in the festival' (227).
as natural disaster and the formation of class rule made previous life untenable, 'the social process was now masked by its own conditions. how was it possible not to attribute it to 'mysterious' causes, external to everyday life . . . . the developing social mystery - the reality which escaped men's consciousness, although they were it authors and actors - was destined to become a religious mystery' (228). social life became subordinate to hierarchical 'realized abstractions' while human action was deprived of 'living substance in favour of 'meanings'' (229).
lefebvre walks back some of the postlapsarian tone but you can see the influence of nietzsche on his thought: [re the church and christianity's cannibalization of older rituals] 'by appearing to stand up for the weak you ended up being the strongest of all' (237). lefebvre's theory of religion is that it is the accumulated form of human alienation (245).
>we spend each day of our lives crawling along at ground level, while the 'superior' moments fly away into the far reaches of the stratosphere. religion 'snowballs' as a result of all the practical helplessness of human beings, constituting an immense obstacle; it is there in life's most infinitesimal detail, knowing the weaknesses and provoking them, breathing in the positive substance of everyday life and concentrating its negative aspects. at each everyday event, at each emotive, disturbing moment when something begins or something ends, religion will raise its head; it reassures, consoles, and above all supplies an attitude, a way to behave. (246)
i like that quote because it shows how theatrical a writer lefebvre is (which i really admire). and as always, he concludes: 'the end, the aim, is to make thought . . . intervene in life in its humblest detail. . . . to recreate everyday life.' 'marxism alone' can do this (247).
what is possible
>everyday life is not unchangeable; it can decline, therefore it changes. and moreover the only genuine, profound human changes are those which cut into this substance and make their mark upon it. (248)
this is the last chapter of the first volume. it's an elegant synthesis of what's come before, arguing for a dialectic of 'material progress, 'moral' progress' and 'the deprivation, the alienation of life' in modern human history (249). hence, 'life is lagging behind what is possible' (250). (this is really useful to understand the weird delayed time that seems to follow the concepts of everyday life and modernity around.)
lefebvre's work is more rehabilitative here, arguing that critics of bourgeois life need also to see the greatness embedded in alienated forms. uh, then, he goes off about how american literature is so much better than french literature again, which is funny but boring also. he returns to the point that there's 'no substitute for participation' (257) and this is why so many intellectuals have an atrophied view of human possibility, which i agree with: 'abstract culture places an almost opaque screen . . . between the cultivated man and everyday life' (258) and so leads the intellectual 'forgets the social foundations of 'his' thought' (259). lefebvre wants instead 'to attain a consciousness of life in its movement' (259).
>the myth of the triviality of everyday life is dispelled whenever what seems to be mysterious turns out to be really trivial, and what seems exceptional is exposed as manifestly banal. (259)
lefebvre turns here, surprisingly but persuasively, to the holocaust, quoting from numerous survivor testimonies. here 'human reason appears only as a terrifying, distant, dehumanized reason: scientific barbarity' (263). he calls auschwitz a 'capitalist housing estate' (265), arguing - similar to cesaire or adorno - that 'fascism represents the most extreme form of capitalism' and 'the concentration camp . . . the most extreme and paroxysmal form of a modern housing estate, or an industrial town' (265). i'm not really qualified to touch this stuff but i was surprised by how extensively he quotes from the testimonies in an otherwise quite monologic book.
then he returns to his central theme in the chapter of untapped human possibility, the total man, the unification of subject and object, and how it becomes individualized at the ideological level:
>the contrast between the possible and the real, which is historical and social in character, is thus shifted (within) the most gifted individuals; it becomes the more-or-less conscious conflict between theory and practice, dream and reality; and this conflict results in disquiet and anguish, like any contradiction which remains unresolved or appears unresolvable. (267)
instead of keeping these as metaphysical aporia, the critique of everyday life is directed toward actualizing this potential:
>the total problem of man (the problem of total man) is posed and is resolved on the level of everyday life - by a new consciousness of that life, by the transformation of that life. (270)
marxism is thus the philosophical and practical redemption of 'the human masses, a mere accumulation of moments in time, fog-bound marshy plains, 'enormous, stupid' crowds' (270).
and that's where the first volume ends, polemically arguing for the necessity of a dialectical materialism which is grounded in and attentive to everyday activity over and against histories of the few or philosophies of the metaphysical. in the next volume, he lays out the groundwork for a precise scientific method, which is the foundation of marxist sociology. not sure if i'm gonna read that immediately or break for something else though.
-fin-critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (1)2022-05-18T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-18:/gemlog/2022-05-18.gmi##critique of everyday life by henri lefebvre (1)
peter osborne inspired me to tackle this again, which i was supposed to do forever ago.
i think this is a very clever connection: the turn of the twentieth century, in which 'writers and artists began to find life more beautiful, more 'free,'' coincides with 'the era of finance capitalism . . . characterized by the extreme abundance of unfixed capital on the move, seeking investments - or avoiding them in a series of exoduses' (124).
from here, lefebvre turns to the theme of nineteenth century literature, 'the marvellous,' through which 'nineteenth-century literature mounted a sustained attack on everyday life which has continued unabated up to the present day' (125). the signal figure is baudelaire (lol: 'a little buffoon, a second empire bourgeois ham' (142)), who 'abandons the metaphysical and moral plane to immerse himself in the everday, which . . . he will deprecate, corrode and attack, but on its own level and as if from within' (126).
this is lefebvre's reading of the painter of modern life, baudelaire's essay in which he demands the artist 'perceive the eternal in the transitory' and so 'confront the everyday' and 'tear through it,' a gift granted only to the genius: 'the power of seeing the mystery traced like a watermark beneath the transparent surface of the familiar world is only granted to the visionary' (127). (maybe just my fixation but i hear a lot of rancière here.) lefebvre traces this hostility to everyday life through most of the major artistic movements of the 20th c.
lefebvre reads this as a symptom of a modern neurosis, an 'ambivalent infantilism' which refuses to adapt to/conceptualize an unbearable reality (140), 'a 'spiritual' inability to live' (143). this ironic stance--i think we could call it depersonalization--leads to 'a perpetual expectation of something extraordinary' which is in fact 'a dissatisfaction which seeps into the humblest details of day-to-day existence' (141). so artists 'try to reanimate the old category of mystery, but on the level to which it had declined, on the level of the perceptible and the everyday' (142). the great irony is that, rather than rejecting the world, this stance accepts it, 'since it is transposed, instead of being transformed' (143).
the venom of lefebvre is perhaps due to the elitism he perceives here: 'average life is repudiated; human life is relegated to the rank of the 'enormous and stupid' masses' (145). because 'life must be 'made nothingness'', 'poets now only like beings for the forms in which they can be expressed' (145). against this almost ascetic view, lefebvre wants to 'reaffirm the certainties of human community' (146).
so, what to do about the 'great conspiracy against man's everyday life' (147)? 'the true critique of everyday life will have as its prime objective the separation between the human (real and possible) and bourgeois decadence, and will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life. . . . to rehabilitate the masses - the masses of instants that philosophers condemn to 'triviality' as well as the peoples that poets relegate to the shadows - are related tasks' (147).
uh, and that's the first chapter. i'm gonna have to condense these notes a bit more i think.
lefebvre continues the idea of valorizing the everyday through 'a scientific theory of social labour,' 'this totality of labour' which 'has modified and transformed the face of the world' (154). in this there is nothing hidden but that which does often go unperceived. and further, there is no need to look for an internal reality: 'since words and gestures produce direct results, they must be harnessed not to pure 'internal consciousness' but to consciousness in movement, active, directed toward specific goals' (155). he coins the clunky 'thought-action' for this, but i think the basic concept here anticipates the use of 'performative' in austin, derrida, butler, etc. he (abruptly) extends this to a critique of the great men theory of history, advocating for a synthesis of everyday life with history.
alright that's all i'm gonna read for now.the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde by peter osborne (1995) (continued)2022-05-17T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-17:/gemlog/2022-05-17.gmi## the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde by peter osborne (1995) (continued)
last time on the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde by peter osborne (1995) blog post:
> our project - the development of a post-hegelian philosophy of historical time in the form of a critical hermeneutics of historical existence - aims to hold true to the situation and dilemmas of a secular modernity. (114)
> modernity contains a range of possible temporalizations of history within its fundamental, most abstract temporal form. it is the idea of a competition or struggle between these different forms of temporalization, within everyday life, which leads to a politics of time. (116)
what would constitute a politics of everyday time?
for osborne, the good answer is walter benjamin, and the bad answer is heidegger. i'll do the good answer first.
benjamin's 'on the concept of history' is famously a marxist critique of marxist histories, 'an economy of violence dissembling as progress' (141). in place of this, benjamin draws on the messianic tradition to invoke a now-time, an attempt to condense into an explosive, revolutionary moment 'the presence of history as a whole, refracted through the prism of the historical present': 'benjamin's now-time historicizes the structure of instantaneity, to produce it as interruption' (145). but how does this work, if--as osborne painstakingly shows in the first part of this book--historical totality and phenomenological presence miss each other by definition, ships in the night?
osborne's solution is another of benjamin's concepts, the dialectical image. really, osborne's solution is metonymy. the dialectical image of the now-time is metonymic, 'with the part (the now of a specific recognizability) imaging the whole (history as a redemptive totality)' (147). this is where the avant-garde of the title comes in, since what benjamin's after is 'where the truly new first makes itself felt' (i must've glazed over this part in the theses on history before, but it lends a lot of credence to osborne). osborne goes even further, suggesting that benjamin has a radically different theory of mediation, 'a switch between circuits' (151). for messianic time to occur, as osborne points out, is an apocalyptic desire, and should be read as such: 'benjamin wanted to restore the finality of the original version of apocalypse in a new form, freed from the logical constraints of having to posit a narrative completion of history' (157). in a very clever move, it is not the end but the phenomenological present that the apocalypse brings to possibility. to put this another way, the present becomes metonymic for historical totality, on condition of a redemptive interruption.
so that's the good politics of time: bring into the present the possibility of historical totality as redemption. the bad politics of time is heidegger.
osborne rigorously reconstructs heidegger's philosophy, very rarely resorting to a mere historicist association that would contradict his entire method. rather, osborne reads heidegger through the lens of modernity, not tradition, on the grounds of what i'll call the trad paradox:
> radical reaction cannot but reproduce, and thereby performatively affirm, the temporal form of the very thing against which it is pitted (modernity). hence the necessity for it to misrepresent its temporal structure to itself as some kind of 'recovery' or 'return.' (167)
heidegger 'turns the temporality of modernity against itself' in just this way (169). heidegger 'narrativizes resoluteness as repetition: the repetition of the heritage of a people' (172). into the very structure of existence, heidegger inscribes 'a specific national (and nationalistic) narrative of originary meaning' (173). osborne in this way establishes the direct continuity between this philosophy and a politics of 'the organic unity of the german people' (174). importantly, this isn't just a conservative regression: 'the destiny of the german people' is for heidegger 'not merely to repeat, but thereby to appropriate, its heritage,' since heidegger--like benjamin--understands the fundamental role of the present in narrativizing the past (177).
how, then, is this different from benjamin? both theorize a complex interplay of new and old that articulates a critique of the present from the standpoint of the past. the key here is a distinction osborne makes between the 'after' time of benjamin (redemption) and the 'again' time of heidegger (repetition). unlike heidegger, benjamin is candid about the simulation of the past, a student of nietzsche's 'on the use and abuse of history':
> the 'after' of the after-life marks a temporal difference across which the object must be produced anew in the present, through the destruction of the illusion of its continuity with the past, on the basis of the present itself. only thus can the past be 'put to work' in the present as remembrance. benjamin's remembrance, like the present in which it is produced, is a constructive one. history needs to be constructed, not made through experience. (179)
from here, osborne makes his final, climactic turn to henri lefebvre, the philosopher of everyday life. osborne's politics of time are a politics of everyday life.
'the main mystery in the everyday world of modern capitalism is, of course, the commodity' (182). the commodity is a complex temporal matrix, which hides in its appearance 'the constitutive power of labour, and hence the social relations of mutual dependence'--that is, abstract labor-time--and denies in its mass production 'the corrosive effects of time'--obsolescence and death (184). the ruse of commodities is that their novelty cannot be negated, 'by virtue of their very redundancy' (184).
everyday life, on the other hand, is characterized by a perpetually self-negating novelty, or self-differentiation: every moment different from the next, threatened by familiarity. everyday life is remainder: 'it is 'what is left over' after all distinct, superior, specialised, structured activities' (lefebvre 191). this establishes the link between everyday life, capitalism, and modernity: 'only in the context of the . . . an intensification in the social division of labour - that what lefebvre calls the 'residue' of such activities achieves a distinct social reality . . . capable of investment with utopian force' (192). hence, 'romantic anticapitalism' emerges from 'the disruption of previous life-forms' by which 'the retrospective construction of images in the integrity is the past' is now possible (192), and 'these images become criteria for a critique of the present' (193). (nietzsche and foucault come to mind here.) 'in the past,' for lefebvre, 'the everyday was offset by the interruptive break of the religious holiday, the festival, or the carnival. in capitalist societies, on the other hand, the break from work becomes increasingly routinized within the everyday .... in its everyday form leisure loses its ruptural force' and instead serves as social reproduction or valorization of capital (193).
side note: rita felski butchers lefebvre in her chapter on everyday life in doing time, and i didn't know how badly until i read this. felski suggests that lefebvre's critique of the everyday encodes a misogynistic dismissal of the repetitive time symbolically associated with femininity. here's lefebvre:
> the everyday imposes its monotony. it is the invariable constant of the variations it envelops. the days follow one another and resemble one another, and yet - and here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness - everything changes. but the change is programmed: obsolescence is planned. production anticipates reproduction; production produces change in such a way as to superimpose the impression of speed on that of monotony. some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation. they're both right. (196)
here osborne concludes. 'everyday life is lived in the medium of cultural form' (197), where the progression from older literary forms to the novel and finally image and montage increasingly privileges the present (197). osborne is not a hardline marxist critiquing cultural studies: 'the everyday is no more opposed to history than history can be reduced to war' (198). nor is he a poststructuralist critiquing materialism: 'material processes of socialization . . . cannot be reduced the temporal logic of the sign' (199). his argument is more synthetic, framing 'all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time' (200). this book is a call to interrogate 'temporal structures about the possibilities they encode or foreclose' as well as to work toward 'the social production of possibility at the level of historical time', 'a possibility that must nonetheless by produced as experience' (200-201).
this book is rich. it offers a lot of resources to any project attempting to reintroduce temporality at an existential scale to marxism, especially in its readings of benjamin and lefebvre. it is also an interesting contribution to the debates over 'modernity' as a periodization, and specifically as a temporal form with a function. like the commodity, modernity shows and hides its history at once, fashioning history as a mere sequence of indistinct events and suppressing historical possibility through the narrative of progress. contra bruno latour, then, modernity is not the triumphalist celebration of an artificially severed culture over and against nature, but the mediation of culture and nature by time. i wish there was more here engaging with the postcolonial side of the question, although osborne does engage and critique with thinkers there. more specifically, i wonder what this argument looks like in conversation with sylvia wynter.
good book!the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde by peter osborne (1995)2022-05-16T00:00:00Ztag:aidn.flounder.online,2022-05-16:/gemlog/2022-05-16.gmi##the politics of time: modernity and avant-garde by peter osborne (1995)
osborne is after the big q: 'what kind of time does 'modernity' inscribe?' (5). however, osborne is not interested in a naive historicist account of modernity, since 'there is a tension between the use of modernity as an empirical category of historical sociology and its inherent self-referentiality, whereby it necessarily denotes the times of its utterance, whenever the question of change within the present is at issue' (4). osborne is trying to do two things: to historicize temporality and to temporalize history.
a number of factors make the concept of the modern possible. the usual suspects: 'the temporality of capital accumulation' (13), 'the temporalization of the founding geopolitical difference of colonialism' (21), etc. osborne points out, however, that modernity ('neuzeit' or 'new-time' comes into usage in 1870) is the result of the obsolescence and residual structure of christian eschatology. that is, modernity--'an abstract temporality of qualitative newness which could be of an epochal significance, because it could now be extrapolated into an otherwise empty future, without end'--is, in effect, 'a combination of the christian conception of time as irreversible with criticism of its corresponding concept of eternity' (11). more pointedly, modernity is the secular version of a 'historical sublime' (11).
that phrase invokes 'the identity of duration and eternity' that so concerned the modernists: 'that 'now' which is not so much a gap 'in' time as a gap 'of' time' (14). so much is familiar, as is the idea that 'modernity is permanent transition' (14), the 'differential temporality' of the modern (15), and the colonial 'development which defines 'progress' in terms of the projection of certain people's presents as other people's futures' (17). modernity 'is a form of historical consciousness, an abstract temporal structure which, in totalizing history from the standpoint of an ever-vanishing, an ever-present, embraces a conflict plurality of projects, of possible futures' (23). sure.
but what of temporality? osborne's book is about this problem: when you provide a historical account of the modern, you lose the standpoint of the present; when you provide a phenomenological account of the present, you lose sight of historical totality.
[i'm skipping a lot of the fine grain of his engagements with althusser, kristeva, fukuyama, heidegger, lacan, especially ricoeur, etc. bc i don't want to get into it. the hegel stuff though is worth reading.]
'with capitalism came the homogenization of labour-time: the time of abstract labour (money, the universal equivalent), the time of the clock' and the 'generalized social imposition of a single standard of time.' yet if 'capitalism has 'universalized' history, in the sense that it has established systematic relations of social interdependence on a planetary scale,' homogenous empty time remains merely an 'abstract form of quantification, external and indifferent to the concrete multiplicity of the rhythms of different social practices' (24). 'chronological time is a relative historical novelty as the dominant form of social time consciousness' (67).
against empty time, the phenomenological tradition 'attempts to ground the understanding of historical time in an account of the temporality of human existence' by turning to its 'narrative mediation' (45): 'a narrative mediation grounded, ontologically, in a temporal structure of action for which each interpretive closure opens out, simultaneously, onto the radical indeterminacy of a new beginning' (53).
side note: what the fuck is up with heidegger? 'when dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the being of its there' (57). 'all 'historizing' is a historizing of history, just as all temporalizing is a temporalizing of temporality.' (59) shut up!
okay, back to osborne. osborne thinks he can synthesize the phenomenological side of the coin with historical totality. osborne quotes derrida, 'history keeps to the difference between totality and infinity,' to which osborne adds: 'history is the very movement of this difference' (61).
we go from here to an extended consideration of death as the productive limit of time from which osborne draws an analogy to history. i'm not going to reconstruct the argument here, but i am going to say that osborne is a great reader of both hegel and freud. the heidegger bit drags, but the hegel stuff is riveting. the payoff is basically a defense of osborne's theory of mediation: 'the death drive marks a difference between the temporal registers of nature and history within the psychic economy of the individual at the same time that it establishes a connection between them, via the social: the sphere of that always partial identification with an (imaginary) other' through which time comes into being in the play of 'identity and difference' (111).
ok, i'll talk about benjamin tomorrow. this is fun.
haha i lied i'm back.
ok, so osborne turns to two signal categories: modernity and tradition. he points out that (as benjamin showed) modernity always entails the double time of modernity/tradition as self/other. but this means a dialectical dependency: modernity always depends on tradition to reconstitute its essential continuity by a distinction which keeps in the serial historical frame that lends tradition its power. that is, ironically, modernity preserves tradition in their shared narrative of progress.
benjamin's famous essay on history is read as an attempt 'to refigure the interruptive temporality of modernity as the standpoint of redemption and thereby to perform a dialectical redemption of the destruction of tradition by the new' (115). hence his shift from 'narrative forms of historical totalization to montage: from story to image' (115).
tradition, in contrast, relies on the serial integration of interruptive moments. (the etymology here is again interesting, in that tradere meant to surrender or hand over--to pass along tradition, then, but also how christians referred to those who handed their holy texts over to unbelivers. tradition has always been defined as much by the anxieties of the present as any root in the past.)
there's more here, but the knotted paradoxes of the previous paragraph point up a turn to the promise of the title: 'modernity contains a range of possible temporalizations of history within its fundamental, most abstract temporal form. it is the idea of a competition or struggle between these different forms of temporalization, within everyday life, which leads to the idea of a politics of time' (116). (i think, in this sense, osborne's work is very much aligned with the recent work of jacques rancière, my philosophical bf.) if the stakes here seem ambiguous, osborne shows his hand a little when he criticizes the 'crisis in historical thought, in which the desire for ethics overwhelms the necessity of politics' (118).
as such, osborne has no time for a naive ethics of radical alterity. the necessity of politics is the necessity of history: 'history is the conflict of desires' (125). if this sounds familiar to fredric jameson heads, the next line is a direct quote from the political unconscious. which means we're back at mediation: 'at the level of social experience, modernity is a form of forgetting, or, at least, the repression of history into the cultural unconscious' (137).
memory as narrative form is intriguingly linked to the embodied labor-time of the commodity as well as an excellent reading of benjamin's the storyteller which famously observes the 'crisis in the communication of experience' that the rise of the novel parallels (135). here we return to the theses on history, which reacts against a historicism in which 'historical events appear indifferently as 'mass-produced articles': each one new, within its own time, yet in terms of the nature of the time that it occupies, and hence its relation to the present, 'ever-always-the-same'' (140).
to be continued...