The Rector of St Chav’s

Here is Archbishop Tutu commenting wryly upon Africa and the Church:

‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’
(Steven Gish: Desmond Tutu: A Biography)

This sort of joke makes several thing explicit in a useful way. It’s clear, for example, that colonialism was really a form of theft, with the Church being fully complicit. And that the colonised for their part were naïve in allowing the swindle to happen. So there’s a critique here, arising out of indignation, that’s overt.

On the other hand, it’s equally clear that as an Anglican archbishop Tutu is part of the Church and its success is therefore his. So is he part of the problem? Although as an African he is a victim, what’s also strongly implied is that by stealing the land the colonising North may in fact have lost its soul whereas he and his compatriots are having their revenge: they have ‘colonised’ the Church. By wittily nesting the positive within the context of the negative Dr Tutu’s emotionally complex strategy allows the oppressed to become subjects again and thus (morally at least) to gain the upper hand.

*

And now here by contrast is Archbishop Rowan Williams making various interview points about the state of Britain’s finances. There has, apparently, been a bit of financial trouble up at St Chav’s. Several of the younger boys have lost their iPhones. The school tuck-shop, after a run in with what the school caretaker likes to call the school’s Collateralised Doughnut Obligations, has needed a sub from parents. In the meantime a number of pupils have made complaints that the Economics teacher keeps talking over their heads. They can’t understand a word of what he says. An air of unreality is hanging over St Chav’s…

Dr Williams dislikes unreality. What he wants is repentance good and strong:

‘There hasn’t been what I as a Christian would call repentance. We haven’t heard people say, “Well actually, you know, we got it wrong and the fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty. […] I’m talking about bankers but also about all of us. We should all, I think, look back and say, “Well we were hypnotised into that sense of unreality.”’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

Which is why there are now lines to be written. Why boys who lost their iPhones are writing, ‘I must look after my iPhone.’ Why boys who have taken iPhones are writing, ‘I must not steal people’s iPhones.’ Why Dr Williams himself is earnestly scribbling on the blackboard, ‘I must take playground duty much more seriously and look out for stolen iPhones.’ The school tuck-shop has given up CDOs. It now sells proper doughnuts filled with jam…

But alas the Economics master still seems to be in post. A horrid example of boffinry. An indefatigable presenter of unintelligible graphs who makes up strange equations and uses the school computer. In short, a nasty chap. This puts a damper on things. In the corridors boys keep finding their pockets empty and administering Chinese burns. Dr Williams has been getting quite upset. ‘There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year,’ he declares at one point during Assembly. He detects ‘a quite strong sense of diffused resentment’  in and around the school. But fortunately he has a solution for this as well. We should all ignore the Economics master, who is nothing but a bully and a windbag, and start reading Keynes instead:

‘We felt intimidated by expertise [… Experts] convinced the rest of us because I think we’ve most of us grown up with the idea that economics is an exact science and that suggests that we haven’t actually read Keynes in the first place because Keynes’s stress on uncertainty as something utterly unavoidable in economic activity beyond a certain level, that again seems to have vanished.’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

*

The differences here are striking.

Firstly what Dr Williams appears to want is actually to shut down in the name of ‘closure’ the very sort of opposition (‘they’ versus ‘we’) which Dr Tutu seeks to redeem and then keep open. The key is positionality. Thus Dr Tutu’s joke is radically ambivalent. As the individual he is he straddles the division between two personal pronouns, between two separate actors. Each of the elements associating him with either ‘they’ or ‘we’ prompts an interpretation which disturbs interpretation of the other. But when, by contrast, Dr Williams refers to what ‘a Christian would call repentance’ he conflates four different things which differ morally as they do in terms of deixis: regret (‘What a pity about those crooked deals he made us enter into’), blame (‘What about those crooked deals you made us enter into’), contrition (‘I’m sorry about those crooked deals I made you enter into’) and forgiveness leading to closure (‘That’s OK’). He seems to find no moral inequivalence between, say, Bernard Madoff and one of Madoff’s clients. And, though he would hardly have meant it as such, by saying, in effect, ‘We’re all to blame and now I want the whole class to stay behind after school,’ he merely varies the thesis used by prejudiced judges down the ages that rapists’ victims were asking for it: ‘We girls should try to dress more discreetly.’

Secondly, whereas Dr Tutu’s ‘we’ is a pronoun which owns up (‘I am a member too’) what Dr Williams does is to manipulate to his own advantage the difference between the ‘we’ of individuation and the ‘we’ of collective belonging. Again positionality is the key. Whilst, for example, Dr Williams emphasises that ‘we’ are all collectively to blame, he nonetheless permits himself an individuating ‘we’ whenever it really matters. Thus when he declares that treating economics as science suggests that ‘we’ haven’t read Keynes (And where exactly is our essay on J M Keynes, Master Romer?’) he applies a stricture to others that he seems not to apply to himself. That’s dishonest.

Whereas Dr Tutu simplifies a complex history to bring out certain essentials, Dr Williams merely fudges. Thus he claims to want a closer relationship between financial products and the creation of socially desirable goods and services, which he terms ‘wealth as wellbeing’. But instead of addressing those who created dodgy products in the first place he blames economists, who are already one step removed.

*

There was, of course, an opportunity (ducked by Dr Williams) to consider things rather more fully. For a start, it simply isn’t the case that everyone in Britain had somehow been ‘hypnotised’ by the unrealities of an economics modelled on the sciences any more than Dr Tutu was literally present at the snatching away of land and handing out of bibles. Neither was a bargain freely entered into. Both were about fraud, and powerlessness, and loss. That would be one possible point of entry. But instead Dr Williams merely paraphrases Thatcher’s reference to people who:

‘live by illusions, the illusion that you can spend money you haven’t earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors.’
(Margaret Thatcher: Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 1978)

Whereas modernising capitalism captured past experience (the skills of the artisan) and absorbed them into mechanised production, postfordist capitalism seems to be capturing future experience (how the world may be interpreted and re-formed) partly through the mediations of ICT; partly through the substitution of personal knowledge by various kinds of expert system; partly through the privatisation of an intellectual commons as new sorts of property; partly through the privileging of rule based behaviours over individual good sense, and partly through the institution of immaterial labour, of an often precarious workforce of information providers and creators whose links with one another are increasingly virtual and transindividual and thus lack the intersubjectivity of communities, workplaces, what used to be called solidarity. This is the wider context in which the financial crisis appears to have begun. It’s one in which what Marx called general intellect, within which Virno includes ‘formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and language games’ is being steadily substituted by a technology which now (in)forms and creates us more and more rather than vice versa. And since ‘solidarity’ is now in pawn to multinationals, political elites, to the enactors of globalization, ‘we’ need to redeem it through a new sort of subjectivity; through constituting in ‘our’ behaviours a new social subject; through our anger, directed and direct.

So that would be another point of entry. To view the credit crunch not simplistically, as a single issue, but as a symptom of something wider, of which the crisis in Britain’s parliamentary system (MPs’ expense, distaste for the major parties) is another. To look towards the context and the cause. And with a different aim. Not to stop being ‘hypnotised’, supposedly, by money and/or clever economics but to attempt to recover ourselves: ‘Sikhalela izwe lethu (We cry for our land) / Elathathwa ngabamhlophe (That was taken by the white people’); we cry for that latest part of our humanity, of our subjectivity, that is being taken from us by another colonising process.

Hi/story

Marshall McLuhan is said to have quipped (he may even have done so) that, ‘We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.’

It’s not just a matter of watching the past play out behind one like so much length of road or even of using that past experience, rightly or wrongly, in dealing with the present and the future. In a car one lives time linearly, privately. One excerpts oneself from the flux and multifocality of what goes on, locking the door on community and all that lies outside one’s chosen focus.

In Travesty, for example, John Hawkes catches a car and its occupants in the act of moving towards catastrophe and death, which lie beyond the novel’s ending. The experience of the present is all inside their metal box. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi starts and ends with ‘a parking lot’ as the paving over of ‘paradise’. Its emotional centre speaks of being excluded from a within:

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

But could one not perhaps live history in a more open way through being part of the molar and molecular arrangement, that flux, by which communities are made up?

When Dante meets up with Virgil, for instance, it’s after the famously ‘dark wood’ and during a sleep akin to death. Virgil is part of the past: ‘I’m not a man. I was a man before’. He leads Dante into a series of possible futures which are the present for those who find themselves there: a more social and more dimensioned sense of time. However, when Dante enters Purgatory he is warned against looking back, a reversal of the Eurydice principle, because ‘anyone who does look back returns outside’.

And now here is Enrico Palandri in a 2006 conference paper, delivered in English, exploring Time & Literature. First he asks whether time appears in ‘our culture’ along with the written word:

‘[W]e distinguish History from Pre-historic time precisely along the border marked by the invention of the written word. From that moment onwards we will have things and their linguistic and symbolic representation. I shall give a simple example of this separation: God will appear in the Bible as Ya-ve-he, I am what is, but the word which indicates what is cannot be written as it makes it past.’

So writing is looking back. And the US Constitution is a written one, a closing out of the past.

*

Palandri develops his thesis in a very particular way. He asserts, for example, that nowadays we orient ourselves in ‘our time’ by reference to its precedents. We use the rearview mirror, keeping that metaphor, through psychological relativism expressing itself chronologically. An objectifying process. Its effect on usefulness and presence isn’t a good one:

‘When Romanticism begins to describe the individual reading as ‘subjective’ interpretation, History begins to separate us from the past. We look at these books today and ask ourselves what did they mean for them, rather than what do they mean for us.

[...]

‘Our time separates generation from generation through a severe objectivity, a material grasp of the meaning of words which dissipates any ambiguity, but possibly also any real proximity.’

His own take on Dante is as follows:

The development of this historical view of the past, mainly through philology, has given us reliable texts and a scientific attitude towards the study of our tradition [...] but it is worth stopping a moment and wondering whether it is not because of this further historicization of time that we cannot really imagine, like Dante, to have as a guide to the other world a poet born 1300 years before, and to meet all those poets and philosophers we would like to confer with in Limbo.’

Another Palandri text feels like background for this. His 2003 novel, L’altra sera sets the personal experience of a broken family attempting (or not) to meet up within the public experience of a rioting, multicultural Paris during the 1998 World Cup. It’s a short but complex book which can also be read as a dialectic between two competing times: the time of the job and the car, and the time of affiliation. (Close to the end of the novel there’s a scene which embodies this dialectic quite precisely: Gilles, whose impatience is quotidian, attempts to chivvy Francesca, his wistful, delaying wife. And it’s through her interruption of quotidian time that some kind of real reunion comes about.)

The emotional substance of the novel arises out of words but it forms a sort of surplus which words alone cannot capture. (A young victim of a knife attack is not the father’s unknown son. So things don’t ever quite come into balance.) Blanchot called death ‘merely the side of life which isn’t turned towards us.’ Here it’s night which provides the frame, at either end of the book. This is the side of death which remains as possibility, of construction as well as destruction: ‘Night will come. Black night. Bare night. My night,’ the repository of fear. Either the sky has been stripped of its constellations or else it’s waiting to be (re)populated with new stars: a prelude to conversation. Later on these possibilities are reconstructed, through memory:

‘In the evening the peasants called the animals into their quarters and the countryside was filled with cries that lasted for ages, cadenced and repetitive like songs [...] that seemed the calling of the stars, one by one, until night was made complete. In the perfect darkness, after supper, they turned off the lights in the kitchen to look at the constellations and to chatter a bit in the cool air.’

And within the body of the novel, there is indeed (ostensibly) precisely that bringing in, or bringing out. The procedures of desire (positive and negative; its indefinableness is often evoked by smells) as they are articulated in all their different tenses and their moods. The communitas (in Turner’s sense) of the football, which is also the communitas of the rioters. The proposed family meeting disrupted by the riots. Affinities both real (a grandfather, an unborn child, furtive sex between cultures) and implied (a potential lover, a potential child and so forth). How Gianni, the student son, is subject to ‘the irresponsibility of desire’, as he attempts to construct a new present out of the theorised future, as he joins up with a group of Kurds and they attempt to destroy a car; though not Gilles’ car, which gets through it all unscathed. How Giacomo, the father, seeks the (re)construction of a new present out of the legally separated past, whose own desire is more cautious:

‘Superstition has taken up space again within me, that marvellous caution that accompanies us when a desire is so intense that it seems to produce reality directly out of hope, and then we endeavour not to break the spell, not to disturb the surfaces of things

‘In order to be present,’ as Simondon puts it using soul and body as an analogy (L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumiere des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité), ‘the present needs the future and the past; through these two [...] the soul reaches the body. The body is what-isn’t-present; it’s not the material of some animating form. The present rises up from the body and returns to it; the ‘anima’ crystallises the body. The present is a work of individuation. The present isn’t a permanent form; it’s a form in operation. It finds its form in individuation.’

The novel ends as follows, more or less:

‘Here it is. Night. Bare night. My night. [...] One shouts in its face, Don’t scare me, Night. But actually you please me with the infinitude of your time which isn’t beaten out by commerce and by the ordered living of families, of schools, of traffic. Your time is totally free, open to irregularities, to the tentative search for someone with whom to cross the darkness and come out on the other side.

‘[...]

‘I still wait for the night like a child, like a boy, like a man, and like someone who’s grown old. That the day might come to an end…’

Interpretation as Performance

‘You’ve often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.’ This is Frost, according to Louis Untermeyer (Robert Frost: A Backward Look). So why interpret? Why translate?

Here is Wittgenstein, in a letter to Paul Engelmann:

‘[I]f only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered.’

Here is Wittgenstein again, in a letter to Ludwig Picker:

‘I once meant to include [...] a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here. What I meant to write then was this. My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’

And here is Guy Debord in Critique de la séparation:

‘The sectors of a city…are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.’

So what is lost is fugitive in the way that the connotative is, that qualia are fugitive. It runs away with the writer, leading him into alleyways in which what happens simply can’t be spoken of or said. And it runs away from the reader, leaving him with alleyways in which something unknown presumably must have happened, in which what is possible is either happening or may be going to happen but is possibly not the same set of experiences but another. In which talking about what is visible, publicly available, is at once necessary and rather beside the point. In which interpretation and/or translation is in one sense like Tennyson’s views on love. In which it’s better to try and fail than never to try in the first place. ‘In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,’ as Sontag puts it in Against Interpretation, as though undressing a virgin text for which undressing itself is the point:

‘A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces

An airline ticket to romantic places

Still my heart has wings

These foolish things remind me of you.’

(Billie Holliday: These Foolish Things)

However, there is another aspect which concerns both the nature and the ownership of those alleyways (or cigarette or airline ticket; or stockings, in the version by Ella Fitzgerald, or whatever) and how they come about. And it isn’t at all about applying (say) Rachel Whiteread’s approach to the negative space of what’s not there or can’t be reached. As though the artwork or the poem had, by definition, to be about containment or capture (or its failure) within form, or about apparent form and content and about the transcendence either of the structure as Platonic form or of what’s within some ‘visible’ structure as the content that goes beyond obvious ‘content’ and which is something that cannot be grasped. This is one version (the wrong one) of Wittgenstein’s view that ‘An aphorism doesn’t need to be true,’ that ‘it should go beyond truth. It should, as it were, go beyond it with one satz.‘

And so here, as an alternative, is Simondon (L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumiere des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité). What’s important, in this view of how things work, is ‘to know about the individual through individuation’, not the other way around. Moreover:

‘In the process of individuation the living human being is both the actor and the theatre. His becoming is a permanent individuation, or rather a series of bouts of individuation that proceed from one state of temporary equilibrium to another.’

All of which is probably the other and very much better sense of Wittgenstein’s assertion. Or as the Bible puts it (John, I: 14)  language is being created as a living thing:

‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us [...] full of grace and truth.’

(Significantly the title of Paolo Virno’s Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana  turns ‘word’ back into ‘verb’, into individuation and the process of becoming.)

And as Dickinson puts it also:

‘A Word that breathes distinctly 

Has not the power to die 

 Cohesive as the Spirit 

 It may expire if He - 

‘Made Flesh and dwelt among us’ 

 Could condescension be 

Like this consent of Language

This loved Philology.’

Or as de Gregori puts it in La storia siamo noi:

Well history doesn’t really stop outside some great front door

History enters into the rooms and burns them up

[...]

[...] it’s us, these waves upon the sea

this noise that breaks the silence,

[...]

History: that’s us, it’s us that write the letters,

it’s us for whom there’s all to win and all to lose.

Or as unknown Greek demonstrators interviewed by the Observer put it:

‘When they killed Alexis, everyone felt it could have been any of us, so we made it all of us.

[...]

‘Above all, this revolt was an assertion of dignity and a statement of presence. Of all the slogans, our most important was We are here.

[...]

‘This uprising has given people who were never part of our movement a new understanding of what it means to be who they are.’

Now what’s important, of course, is to avoid any slippage whatsoever either into mere aspiration or nostalgia or into assertions of bogus causality or (worse still) deterministic cynicism.

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ according to Philip Larkin. So don’t be a parent yourself. A dystopic reading of Darwin and an abject determinism in which people are as separate and as imperviously solid as atoms used to be and humanity is envisaged as a collection of disparate individuals through whom faults are passed on down through the generations and to whom accrete further faults, apparently through mutation. The group has ceased to exist. So too has the individual, except as the consequence of the actions of individual others who are themselves the consequence of individual others in an infinite recursion in which subjectivity is kept all too firmly offstage. Whoever the actor may be, in other words, he is never ever the speaker. So choose childlessness instead.

And here too are The Who in 1971 (Won’t Get Fooled Again from Who’s Next) rejecting transcendent ideals (and rejecting music as exemplary act, as though it were blowing up bridges) in favour of a cynicism as corrosive as that of Larkin (or New Labour) about a history to which they have allowed themselves no access and so can provide no answer:

‘The change, it had to come

We knew it all along

We were liberated from the fold, that’s all

And the world looks just the same

And history ain’t changed

[...]

There’s nothing in the streets

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye

And the parting on the left

Are now parting on the right

And the beards have all grown longer overnight.’

Because what Simondon offers is useful. Because the trick in the dynamic and aspectual approach to History of which he is a part is to substitute for what is fugitive and/or omitted the idea of a surplus, of something that’s not included, which always exceeds the taking: ‘The concept does not exhaust the thing conceived,’ according to Adorno (Negative Dialectics). Except that in this context the interpretable meaning of a poem, say, which is in no way subsumable under the rubric of concept, constitutes itself. It is brought into being not by the writer, not by the reader nor even in the interstitial space between the two as though it were something subordinate, but as performance: as language acting in the theatre of writer, poem and reader (because performative language always performs that trick of bringing into being, or it attempts to) and, simultaneously, as writer, reader and poem acting in the theatre of language, inherited and to come. And it always leaves something behind.