Discrepancy, Surplus and Rhythm

Johnson’s rebuttal of Berkley’s immaterialism was material enough: he stubbed his toe, a demonstration that reality and what Berkley thought about reality were discrepant.

But what about the hurt that stubbing causes? Why do toddlers complain (about, say, a bump on the knee) when the hurt itself has faded? Perhaps they’re inventing memory, developing a sense of time in all its passing and perdurance: the hurt received back then versus the remedy just now delivered; what you thought was there versus what actually is there, and so on.

I quoted this from Scurati once before:

‘Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn’t matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

This variant comes from Wu Ming:

‘We are on the summit of time, where the answer precedes the question, the effect precedes the cause, death precedes birth.

‘You had to climb this hill to understand the journey you had taken.’
(Wu Ming: Manituana)

But time is also rhythm.

Lazzarato describes (in Videofilosofia) how Bergson distinguishes between, on the one hand, time as perceived by the senses and, on the other, time as conceived by the intellect. There is more ‘reality’ in sensation, according to Bergson, and that ‘surplus’ of reality in perception is to be sought, according to Nietzsche, within the body. He then traces the whole thing back to an Aristotelian sense of time extensively measuring the movement that is in Nature (in other words a cosmology) versus a neo-Platonic view of time as intension, as measuring out the movement of the soul.

In Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno the breathing of Zeno’s dying father has a fretful quality which Zeno imitates ‘almost unconsciously’, before affording himself pauses which he hopes to pass on to his patient. The rhythm of the father’s dying breaths seems to become part of the room ‘from that point and for a long, long time after that.’ In fact what Svevo seems to be describing here is the sort of entrainment whereby memory develops as a sort of felt persistence.

In a related passage Zeno plays the violin:

‘Even the lowest sort of being, once he knows what three, four and six note figures are, knows how to pass between them with the same rhythmical exactness as his eye knows how to pass from one set of notes to the next. With me, though, once I’ve played one of these figures, it sticks to me and will not let me go again, so that it gets mixed up with the figure following and deforms it. In order to put the notes in the right place I have to mark time both with my feet and with my head, and so much for nonchalance, for serenity, so much for music. Music that comes from an organism that’s in balance both is itself the time that it both creates and exhausts.’
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

And here, finally, for good measure, are some quotations from Sapienza in Onda, the Rome  section of the Anomalous Wave, 18 March 2009:

‘We have entered a new era. Today we can say this unambiguously, without prevarication. The recession is concrete reality: the government doesn’t doubt it: police against the students, police against dissenters, police and baton charges against those who won’t pay for this crisis!

‘The Wave isn’t dead. The Wave isn’t some memory of youth. The Wave is alive and it doesn’t intend to stop. The Wave causes fear.’

Privatising Despair

 In Imaginary Insurrections I tried to show how Gordon Brown co-opted the idea of insurrection into the rhetoric of New Labour during his Washington speech, how he tamed it: first by putting it into the past (the insurrectionary thought which preceded what’s since been achieved); then by making the crowd, the opposition, the insurrectionary multitude part of the ruling, undemocratic elite which is what New Labour actually is (22% of the voting population as of 2005; though now it is probably worse).

In Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo I tried to highlight a closely related trick, to show how Ms Harman pointedly conflated the coercive violence of the lynch mob with conventional models of legality to produce what she called ‘the Court of Public Opinion’ in a piece of rhetoric which showed up disturbingly (as the assault on Civil Liberties also does) New Labour’s quasi fascist inclinations.

Not that there is anything very new in this technique: New Labour has employed it from the beginning. Before his translation to Cardinal Blair of Baghdad, for example, Bishop Tony used quite regularly to jump the barrier between, say, the providers of a central service (for which he was broadly responsible) and those who found themselves victims of its delivery, co-opting their complaints.

And now, in New Labour’s plans, announced by Alan Johnson and James Purnell, that the unemployed should all be offered counselling, preferably CBT, the managerial version of the ‘talking cures’, we have the latest policy counterpart of that same principle.

In 1936, 200 people marched from Jarrow to Westminster to protest against unemployment; not an insurrection, to be sure, though it was something.

In 1981 Norman Tebbit mischievously rewrote that episode to attack the riots then taking place in Handsworth and in Brixton.  A good example of the jam tomorrow version of reality upon which capitalism relies:

‘I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.’

Unsurprisingly, what New Labour now propose, at a cost of £13m in freshly invented money, is no more helpful than Mr Tebbit’s plucky memorial and very much more despairing even as rhetoric: not merely the diversion of political anger into sturdiness and self help along the lines of Samuel Smiles but actually the full privatisation of social discontent through its elimination from the social and collective (ie political) sphere and its extrusion into the private, the personal and the ‘mental’.

Should there be mass unemployment and consequential anger and despair, in other words, and this seems by no means unlikely, then the fault will lie not with the depredations wrought by neoliberalism, of which New Labour is a part. Rather it will have come about through individual failures to perceive exactly how half full the glass is. And should there be a solution in New Labour’s terms then this will come about not through the emergence of some new social subject already present in potential, through the ballot box or across the barricades, but simply through getting used to how things are.

Which is a gloss on political impotence, of course: the dissipation of political energy and  endeavour and how they come about through Bourdieu’s social suffering into the ‘symptoms’ of ‘disturbed’ individuals.