Avant-Nostalgia: An Excuse to Pause

AVANT-NOSTALGIA An excuse to pause Ï by the same authors: John Baldacchino Easels of Utopia. Art’s Fact Returned (Ashgate 1998) Post-Marxist Marxism. Questioning the Answer (Avebury 1996) Jeremy Diggle Ò Forthcoming: John Baldacchino, Jeremy Diggle, Reliquaries. Wittgenstein’s Fragment (2003) AVANT-NOSTALGIA an excuse to pause John Baldacchino Jeremy Diggle textual narrative visual narrative UNIT FOR THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHY IN ART © John Baldacchino (text) Jeremy Diggle (images) 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. This book is published under the auspices of the European League of Institutes of the Arts. Published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by the Robert Gordon University, Gray’s School of Art www.bestartschool.co.uk ISBN 1 901 085 708 Contents I. Knowledge II. Memory III. Touch IV. Involution V. Returns page 7 page 31 page 49 page 65 page 81 Avant-nostalgia brings together textual and visual narratives scattered around five themes: knowledge, memory, touch, involution and return. The text starts where the image ends. The image originates where the text is fulfilled. These are afterimages of a reading of the arts on the grounds of polity, history and geography. The narratives that emerge within the arts chart the grounds of polity. Such grounds manifest a history that is ‘contemporary’ — in that it takes serious account of ‘our’ time — where democracy and freedom must be regarded as moral imperatives. The discussion retains a ‘fragmentary’ format by way of excusing the discussant from epistemological compartments. I Knowledge 1. Culture Culture is a biographical act. Biographies imply identity as a perception of the self, where the self inhabits its own spectacles.1 The spectacle’s inhabited space is a relational possibility where the self gives structure to representation in language, in the grammars of beauty, and in matters of polity. In the circumstantial outlines of culture, individuals learn the story as they learn to make (and inhabit) their historical spectacles. 1. cf. MerleauPonty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.), (Routledge, London 1989), pp. 250ff. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 8 | KNOWLEDGE 2. Form, Sum The making of culture presumes an underlying tension between learning as an individual concern (— a formative relation of person and freedom), and culture as a circumstantial story (— a summative modality of society and hegemony). As formation and summation, learning and culture are exchangeable categories according to a ratio of emphasis — i.e., as a relation of priority and meaning. 3. Story Individual stories are pragmatic forms of meaning that give purpose to individuals and groups. They are inherited, fostered, invented and re-invented, because in their individuality they create a composite social group, while as social constructs they retain a plurality of individual origins. Stories regale the storyteller with social legitimacy and a means of identity. They presume a beginning, middle and an end. They aspire to a structure that ‘stands on its own’. Stories presume the creation of autonomy and the invention of tradition. As a means of identity, stories are learnt to have a beginning and end, an origin and fulfilment. As origins they assume a beginning (a time), a site (location), and an identity (a genealogy) that justify and legitimise them as social constructs. As fulfilments, stories progressively construct ends (historical objectives), totalities (cultural, religious, political), and boundaries (geographical, linguistic, national), locating themselves within the practices of knowledge and a moral imagination. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 9 | KNOWLEDGE 4. Epic Epics are stories that enfold within the conventions of a larger magnitude — i.e., as vehicles of individual stories in their collective practice. Epics give individual stories a legislative framework where individual stories could claim a history, an identity and a hegemonic ground. The epic emerges from a desire to reconstruct time. As a hegemonic structure the epic is an expression of aesthetic magnitude and teleological ambition. As a form, the epic reorders and reinvents history by accumulating social consensus over a period of time. Accordingly epics change and adjust themselves, keeping abreast with real time while retaining their hegemony by relating to a collective need. Epics may thrive on myth but their stories are no less real or commonplace. The figures of Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Aeneas do not pertain to a truthful rendition of history, yet the body of knowledge by which their stories impart a moral imagination is made of the same stuff that remains commonplace to us all. The divinity of Ishtar, Calypso and Dido inhabits the realm of the fictive, yet their love for Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Aeneas is no less real — i.e. human — than everyone else’s. 5. Spectacle Within the epic, any distinction between ideal realities and commonplace forms of existence become irrelevant. This is because the relationship between the promise of the individual story (as an origin) and the collective enactment of the AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 10 | KNOWLEDGE epic (as an end) sustains a further modality — that of the spectacle. While the story and the epic enunciate a community of interpretations and act as reference-points of tradition by providing a legislative context for (an individual) language and its signifying (epical) space, the resulting image (as imagination, sign, or representation) gives expression to the spectacle. The spectacle holds a speciality of its own because it embodies a kind of perception that is credited with both myth and commonplace. In this way spectacles are representations of the modality between everyday acts and universal events. 6. Exchange 2. On the notion of empty signifiers, cf. Laclau, Ernesto, Emancipation(s), (Verso, London 1996), pp. 36ff. A collective epic often replaces individual stories, and acts as history’s spectacle — i.e., as a ground for history’s narratives. In this way, the spectacle stands for the very praxis of representation — whose pragmatic is that of figuration. As such, the spectacle’s polity operates on forms of cultural and moral consumption where the ideal and the commonplace are exchanged. History has taught us that spectacles are benign and malignant in equal measure. Spectacles are empty signifiers. 2 To this effect the spectacle is neither emancipatory nor discriminatory, but both. In this dual AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 11 | KNOWLEDGE role the spectacle partakes of a magnitude, where, to use Bachelard’s words ‘the onset of the image in an individual consciousness’ restores the ‘subjectivity of images’, and measures ‘their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity’.3 This restored measure of the image does not confine itself to the poetic imagination, but carries the transsubjective nature of cultural signification into the space bequeathed by individuality as a signifier of plurality. It follows that the individual inhabits the spectacle because the spectacle inhabits the individual as its originator. 7. Life’s epical sphere The young Lukács argues that like tragedy, the epic creates distance as it isolates the characters that it depicts by revealing their specificity. However unlike tragedy, the epic defines distance as a sign of freedom. [I]n the sphere of the epic (which is the sphere of life) distance means happiness and lightness, a loosening of the bonds that tie men and objects to the ground, a lifting of the heaviness, the dullness, which are integral to life and which are dispersed only in scattered happy moments. The created distances of epic verse transform such moments into the true level of life. (...) Heaviness 3. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.), (Beacon Press, Boston 1994) p. xix. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 12 | KNOWLEDGE 4. Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, A historicophilosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature (Merlin Press, London 1988), pp. 57-8. 5. Lukács, ibid. is trivial in the sphere of life — the epic — just as lightness is trivial in tragedy.4 Distance is specific to a construct by which reality takes form as a ‘heaviness of situations’. Reality is a riddle of atypical biographies whose isolation is all but ‘natural’. The self emerges as a ground of reality whose particularised definitions refrain from entertaining any one generalised meaning. In life, however, heaviness means the absence of present meaning, a hopeless entanglement in senseless casual connections, a withered sterile existence too close to the earth and too far from heaven, a plodding on, an inability to liberate oneself from the bonds of sheer brutal materiality, everything that, for the finest immanent forces of life, represents a challenge which must be constantly overcome — it is, in terms of formal value judgement, triviality. A pre-established harmony decrees that epic verse should sing of the blessedly existent totality of life; the pre-poetic process of embracing all life in a mythology had liberated existence from all trivial heaviness; in Homer, the spring buds were only just opening, ready to blossom.5 The epic presents us with the problem of language as a narrative that continues to be said, until at some point it becomes textual. The event of being said initiates the epical re-invention of reality. Within the epic the distance AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 13 | KNOWLEDGE between the specificity of the individual and the general praxis of reality is represented as a tradition that is painstakingly reconstructed by generations of storytellers. Storytelling is a fundamental structure of tradition. Yet, there is no place for the private in performance, perpetuity or tradition. Performance, perpetuity and tradition are the expression of a confluence of narratives in the public domain . When storytellers disappear — because storytelling is either privatised or totalised — the spectacles by which stories convey truth become norms of tyranny. 8. Two illusions The murderers of the storyteller are criminals moved by what Nietzsche calls the fundamental errors by which it is argued that for human beings to experience ‘any sort of physical pleasure or displeasure’ they must succumb to one of two illusions: the identitarian cycle of a factual world, or the belief in an assumed free will.6 Hardly do we realise that in assuming an inconsequential, faith-full freedom or a predictable continuity, we murder the very narratives by whose inconclusiveness we could preclude the moralist tyranny of proto-fascist criminals. 6. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Wanderer and his Shadow, §12, (subsequently published as 2nd supplement to Human, All too Human), cf. The Nietszche Reader, R. Hollingdale (ed.) (Penguin Classics, 1981) p. 198. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 14 | KNOWLEDGE 9. Beyond the ‘idiocy of space and shape’ 7. Inglis, Fred, Ideology and the Imagination (Cambridge University Press, London 1975), p. 175. (my emphasis) 8. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (Chatto & Windus, London 1993), p. xxviii. The definition of culture as a convergence of storytelling pronounces the distinction between private truism and the truth of individuality. Inglis advances this distinction when he states that ‘if a definition of idiocy is insistence on the validity of an utterly private, self-fulfilling and circular moral universe (circular because there is no point of insertion for contradiction), then we are idiots of space and shape’.7 The case arises when the claim for a universal value of circumstance is imaged as a ‘state of origin’. This also assumes a pedagogic moment when knowledge is localised on parochial grounds where even sites of privacy or region have long become irrelevant. Like Inglis, Edward Said grows impatient with acts of pedagogical compartmentalisation where the reversal of history is often mistaken for a form of cultural freedom: I have no patience with the position that ‘we’ should only or mainly be concerned with what is ‘ours’; any more than I can condone reactions to such a view that require Arabs to read Arab books, use Arab methods, and the like.8 In privatising history, the post-colonial attempt to reach some kind of fictitious origin mistakes freedom with the idiocy of space and shape. Knowledge is compartmentalised in a mythical notion of cultural purity, AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 15 | KNOWLEDGE where, supposedly, history is eradicated and reversed to its points of departure. Here, the cultural imagination is reduced to a privately consumed myth, bereft of circumstance and biography. If there is a way forward for a pedagogic understanding of culture, then culture and learning must come together as non-private and nontotalised entities of understanding, where spatiomorphological insularity will be precluded. 10. ‘Being situated’ As a making of spectacles, knowledge constructs tradition by the force of its storytelling. Storytellers substitute formal types by the diversity bequeathed to us by the spectacle. Spectacles could stand outside the idiocy of space and shape once the private-public dichotomy is rendered irrelevant. In Merleau Ponty’s words ‘perceptual experience shows that (...) being is synonymous with being situated’.9 The spectacle is the virtual possibility of situation as an act of permanence. As cultural categories, situations are preceded by the conventions of phenomenal signification — which means that they pertain, amongst other, to the self as body. As active ‘makers’ of reality, spectacles are categories of learning. As categories of learning they are often difficult to define if not in terms of space and shape. They are partly space and shape, and remain subject to 9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 252. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 16 | KNOWLEDGE the idiocy of such cultural compartments. Given they are pragmatic narratives that express a polity and pedagogy, spectacles in turn situate the self as a category of reality. This confirms how space and shape bear strongly on the knowledge of ‘cultural privacy’. One also gets an indication of how the spectacle is a space and shape that we appropriate and transform (as learning beings) into an inclusive sphere of individuality. In this inclusive sphere, the transsubjectivity of the spectacle’s corporeal character could facilitate the mediating function of individual formation vis-à-vis the organisational nature of those spectacles through which persons exchange knowledge and understanding as ‘virtual bodies’. 10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 250. (my emphasis). The virtual body ousts the real one to such an extent that the subject no longer has the feeling of being in the world where he actually is, and that instead of his real legs and arms, he feels that he has the legs and arms he would need to walk and act in the reflected room: He inhabits the spectacle.10 The virtual nature of the spectacle provides a ground for the exchange of images, where the expectancy of freedom within personal formation — as an inclusive sphere of individuality — encounters the hegemony of organisation. This presents us with an incongruent relationship between the inclusive sphere of individuality and the public-private dichotomy within the makings of space and shape. This is an existent relationship, in that it AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 17 | KNOWLEDGE is not merely hypostatised or theorised on a narrative plain, but is felt in the frustrations of the individual’s confrontation with a personal and cultural identity. This is where individuals resort to the mechanisms of a ‘virtual body’ provided by the spectacles that we all inhabit. This is no different from the process of learning, where formation amounts to a negotiation between individual ambitions and organisational ‘needs’. Within the parameters of this formative negotiation, the individual would actively seek a mechanism of mediation by which the antinomies of learning are bridged. One could argue that the virtual body is a locus that no longer defers the notion of mediation to restricted discourse, but extends it to wider forms of representation. 11. Popular culture While the dialectical relationship between formation and organisation provides us with a context for cultural identity, popular culture embodies the collective experience of the spectacle and its ability to change, discard, and re-create those forms of knowledge that were originally formed as spectacles. But history also records popular culture’s dual nature — as both an organic conductor of change as well as a vehicle for chauvinism. Yet beyond its volatile metamorphosis, popular culture has a redeeming factor within its own constituency, which often surfaces as a mixture between active submission and passive defiance. Inglis seems to cope with the dilemma as follows: [A] popular culture is the product of human decisions. An adequate description of what we have now is necessarily a matter of choosing, of saying AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 18 | KNOWLEDGE 11. Inglis, Ideology and the Imagination, p. 183. ‘here, this is dead; there, that is what we must nourish’. Such choice is therefore a part of a continuing historical action.11 12. Wittgenstein’s picture 12. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 243. 13. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, C. K. Ogden (trans.) (Routledge, London 1992 rpnt.), § 2.1. 14. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 2.12. Re-considering Merleau Ponty through the lens of analytical philosophy, culture may be read from a relational structure, where ‘[s]pace is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible’.12 Seen in this way positioning redeems space from the constraints of shape, and accommodates formative freedom and cultural confluence by re-negotiating form as a series of pictures that provide us with ‘models of reality’. Such models are formative because they function in two directions — (a) as an externalised sign of position, and (b) as an internalised process of continuous removal. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus demonstrates how within the logic of a relational space ‘[w]e make to ourselves pictures of facts’13 where the picture acts as ‘a model of reality’.14 Kenny clarifies this connection between representation and reality as follows: Pictures can be more or less abstract, more or less like what they picture: their pictorial form can be more or less rich. But there is a minimum which must be AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 19 | KNOWLEDGE common between reality and picture if the picture is to be able to portray even incorrectly: this minimum, Wittgenstein says, is logical form (...). What this amounts to is that the elements of the picture must be capable of some combination with each other in a pattern corresponding to the relationship of the elements of what is pictured.15 The issue of positional relationship touches on the definition of the spectacle. In this sense, the statement ‘we inhabit the spectacle’, means: ‘we inhabit the pictures that we make as models of our reality’. The relationship between the spectacle and the real is blurred by the fact that in a normative context, what is real consists of a set of relations that we seek to understand by means of our (ethical, pedagogic, and cultural) models. While seeking a ‘common minimum’, we also negotiate the position and removal of our diverse spectacles. Given that the positioning is primarily cultural, our ‘models of reality’ are prone to be accumulated (and often appropriated) by a ‘common maximum’.16 This is because culture tends to inflate or deflate its ground according to a maximalised language. Likewise, prevalent cultural hegemonies partly emerge from the alternate directions of formative movement where the same logical forms that yield our plural spectacles become instruments of consent. This is where the axis between knowledge and freedom becomes problematic. If the instrument of consent is to 15. Kenny, Anthony, Wittgenstein (Penguin Books, London 1973), p. 57. 16. Moral majorities are one such case where democracy is turned into the tyranny of an assumed greater number. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 20 | KNOWLEDGE 17. Here I remain attendant to the Gramscian discussion of the conducive relationship between consent and coercion; and more particularly to his discussion of the organic grounds of hegemony. cf. Gramsci, Antonio, ‘La formazione degli intellettuali’ and ‘L’organizzazione della scuola e della cultura’ in Gramsci, Antonio, Gli Intellettuali (Editori Riuniti, Torino 1975), pp. 3ff and 125ff. remain within the gift of free individuals, then it is necessary that any form of cultural positioning is ‘emancipatory’ by pertaining to an identifiable ground of minimal consent. 17 It is within this structure of ‘knowledge-with-a-minimal-consent’ that formative freedom is possible. Pedagogically speaking, a minimal consent is necessary to access that larger quantity called ‘knowledge’. In turn, as a larger quantity, knowledge is textualised by the epics of a polity whose sameness of being we would partake of — ideally — as individuals. The onus lies on pedagogy as confluence where culture and learning emerge as intrinsically equivalent — with the more important implication of them both mediating social emancipation and individual freedom on one common ground. This epistemological axis could be better understood if knowledge were to be presented in its cultural investiture as a plural participation of biographies, and not as some unaccountable accumulation of maximum (and absolute) consensus. 13. In search of a neutral constant In The Problems of Philosophy Russell contends that in the definition of objects (or rather, in our attempts to establish the ‘truth’ about the objective world) there is a need to identify a ground for ‘public neutral objects’. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 21 | KNOWLEDGE [I]f there are to be public neutral objects, which can be in some sense known to many different people, there must be something over and above the private and particular sense-data which appear to various people.18 The issue of a neutral objectivity recalls the other core argument of Russell’s theory of knowledge — that of the knowledge of acquaintance and that of truth. In turn this conveys a further distinction between the knowledge of acquaintance and the knowledge of description. The word ‘know’ is here used in two different senses (1) In its first use it is applicable to the sort of knowledge which is opposed to error, the sense in which what we know is true, the sense which applies to our beliefs and convictions, i.e. to what are called judgements. In this sense of the word we know that something is the case. This sort of knowledge may be described as knowledge of truths. (2) In the second use of the word ‘know’ (...) the word applies to our knowledge of things, which we may call acquaintance. This is the sense in which we know sense-data. (The distinction involved is roughly that between savoir and connaître in French [...]).19 In making a distinction between acquaintance and description he defines the former as follows: [W]e have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths.20 18. Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, London 1968), p. 9. 19. Russell, ibid., p. 23. 20. Russell, ibid., p. 25. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 22 | KNOWLEDGE 21. Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic and other essays (Penguin Books, London 1953) p. 197. 22. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, p. 25. 23. Russell, Mysticism and Logic, p. 202. And, as he puts it elsewhere: I say I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e. when I am directly aware of the object itself.21 On the other hand, description presents another state of affairs: Knowledge of things by description, on the contrary, always involves (...) some knowledge of truths as its source and ground.22 And: [A]n object is ‘known by description’ when we know that it is ‘the so-and-so’, i.e. when we know that there is one object, and no more, having a certain property; and it will be generally implied that we do not have knowledge of the same object by acquaintance. We know that the man with the iron mask existed, and many propositions are known about him; but we do not know who he was.23 Russell’s distinction provides a viable analysis of knowledge with regards to the dialectical play implied by formation and organisation. In Russell’s analysis, the distinction between knowledge as savoir and knowledge as connaître could provide a model that shows how culture as a form of knowing determines, and is in turn determined, by the construction of an identity for AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 23 | KNOWLEDGE everyday ‘real life’ in the form of the commonplace. It is also because ‘real life’ is what makes learning a reality that this form of cultural positioning of the commonplace becomes central to wider issues of learning. 14. The commonplace as a compromised neutrality The identification of the ‘neutral objects’ that underpin everyday life takes the form of stories where the imperatives of sustenance — the need to survive — is expressed as a structure for cultural re-production (read: hegemony). In On Living in an Old Country, Patrick Wright argues that: Everyday life is the historically conditioned framework in which the imperatives of natural sustenance (eating, sleeping ...) come to be socially determined: it is in the intersubjectivity of everyday life that human selfreproduction is welded to the wider process of social reproduction. Thus while everyday life may well be naturalised and taken for granted — indeed, while it may form a kind of second nature in which people orientate themselves without deliberate reflection — it is in reality socially formed and complex. At the heart of everyday life, therefore, is the interdependency of person and society. The social world always exists to confront the people who are born into it, and it places demands which must be met if people are to make their way. There are values and norms to be appropriated and internalised, institutions and things to be understood, language and customs with which to come to terms. But if subjectivity is socially determined in this way, society also needs to be lived and put into action: its reproduction is AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 24 | KNOWLEDGE 24. Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country (Verso, London 1985), p. 7. dependent on a constitutive subjectivity, and determination can therefore be said to cut both ways.24 In terms of knowledge, what makes the commonplace an identity for everyday ‘real life’ is the coming together of description and acquaintance, but this time their conventions forfeit their distinction. This is where the grammar of description is transformed into the grammar of acquaintance, while what is usually seen as acquaintance is in actual fact description. Conversely, the ‘source and ground’ of knowledge by description, which Russell sees as a ‘knowledge of truths’, becomes a ‘knowledge of acquaintance’. In this state of affairs, acquaintance comes to subvert meaning and its supposed ‘common neutrality’, by giving way to the contingencies by which everyday life operates (and becomes) meaning. This is what happens in everyday life where we do not preclude or ignore the law of the neutrality of a common objectivity, but rather, we actively ‘compromise’ it by our need to survive. 15. A figural terrain A discussion of knowledge and the commonplace must be followed by a discussion of how acquaintance becomes a body of local forms of knowledge. One could suggest that as a construct of collective acquaintances, local AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 25 | KNOWLEDGE knowledge could be perceived as a fact, a set of categories assumed as givens of knowledge as description. If the notion of a given were to be distanced from metaphysical concepts with the result that one could still retain the right to transcend immediacy, then one would still discuss the possibility of a universal knowledge. However there is also a caveat to any discussion of a local and universal knowledge, which Geertz presents as follows: (…) the opposition, if we must have one (and I am not persuaded an opposition—another opposition—is what we need or ought to want, rather than a shifting focus of particularity), is not one between ‘local’ knowledge and ‘universal’, but between one sort of local knowledge (say, neurology) and another (say, ethnography). As all politics, however consequential, is local, so, however ambitious, is all understanding. No one knows everything, because there is no everything to know.25 In the particular context of learning an indetermined number of ‘local’ forms of knowledge, a ‘universal’ form of knowledge could entertain a figural terrain that transcends mere immediacy. 26 By a ‘figural terrain’ one suggests moments of non-textual awareness where as a way of life, the transsubjective consciousness of the image (cf. §6), informs knowledge in its description of the 25. Geertz, Clifford, Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton University Press, New Jersey 2000), p. 134. 26. Further to Geertz’s proviso, we ought to remind ourselves that this is discussed from within the grounds of epistemology and the theory of culture, which are themselves ‘local’ forms of knowledge. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 26 | KNOWLEDGE objective world. This plays a major part in the makings of a cultural identity, where what often determines a culture that is identifiable with a positioned set of local forms of knowledge, assumes a mood for universality. 16. In lieu of Empire Cultural identity is characterised by a number of variant relations, verging from vindication to nostalgia in the forms of a re-designation (otherwise claimed to be a demystification) of the past. In the establishment and definition of an ‘identity’ (or even a ‘nation’), there are many possible results, ranging from cultural frustration resulting from a confused and inarticulate cultural development, to the construction of a narrative that is sustained by partisan rhetoric. The post-colonial organisation of culture is often reminiscent of the same colonial expressions it vowed to reject. Whether it is a question of independence, or an issue of recognition within a greater identity, cultural organisation is never severed from the politics of heritage. The makings of new spectacles in the attempts to cast a series of post-colonial storytelling(s) with the intent to rename and perhaps resurrect other cultural epics may be different (but no less rhetorical and distorted) than those of Empire or ‘Motherland’. After more than forty years since major colonies won independence, and in the light of the most recent creation of new Balkan states, it has become evident that the restoration of nationhood (albeit inevitable and necessary) offers no steadfast guarantee against the creation of cultural ‘identity’ as a closed retropatriotic narrative. Neither are we ensured against the desire or move towards the creation of autarchic national identities, where the organisation of culture AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 27 | KNOWLEDGE creates epistemological structures that exclude ‘other’ communities of opinion, of circumstance, inclination, migration, belief, et cetera. Even though initially informed by a reaction to universalised knowledge, retro-patriotism continues to emerge in new forms of cultural estrangement where the quest for an identity within a greater diversity, obliterates local diversity. 17. Beyond ‘pure particularism’ Closed cultural formations have created what Laclau equates to an unbridgeable chasm between universal and particular — ‘which is the same as saying that the universal is no more than a particular that at some moment has become dominant, that there is no way of reaching a reconciled society’.27 Both the retro-nationalist as well as the would-be progressive argument for autonomy is prone to a ‘pure particularism’ that rejects the continuous necessity of cultural pluralism. ‘Pure particularism’ is characteristic of what happened in the tragic practice of cultural homogeneity: better exemplified in the relocation of people in countries like Bosnia and Palestine, where the practice of occupation echoes the fascist definition of harmony. Indeed: These principles can be progressive in our appreciation, such as the right of peoples to self-determination — or 27. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 26. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 28 | KNOWLEDGE 28. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 26. reactionary, such as social Darwinism or the right to Lebensraum — but they are always there, and for essential reasons.28 For humanity to avoid repeating genocide — cultural and corporeal — it is necessary that these paradoxes are assessed and recognised as realities that cannot be buried in the past. Laclau’s conclusion is very pertinent to this argument: universality and particularity require each other’s legislation, even if they stand on a permanent asymmetrical relationship. 29. Laclau, ibid., p. 35. The universal is incommensurable with the particular, but cannot however exist without the latter. How is this possible? My answer is that this paradox cannot be solved, but that its no solution is the very precondition of democracy.29 18. Paradox as democracy Like identity, democracy hides unforeseen shortcomings. Nevertheless, the projection of a democratic process based on paradox is worth thinking of as a guarded sign of teleological optimism. Individuality, as the source of stories and epics, is neither a typification nor a universalization of particulars. In theory it could accommodate paradox as its underlying ‘culture’. This AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 29 | KNOWLEDGE recalls Norberto Bobbio’s remarks on democracy and pluralism: If the two concepts of democracy and pluralism do not coincide, the dispute over their inter-relationship is not only far from futile but is a step taken in the necessary direction if we were to give an exact account of the development or decline of the democratic process under discussion. It is a fact that unlike the ancient polis, our societies have more than one power base. One simple consequence is that unlike ancient democracies, modern democracies have to face up to pluralism. Before it becomes a theory, pluralism is an objective situation in which we are absorbed.30 In looking at divergence as individuality and biography, the paradox of difference is possible as a democratic agenda. Intrinsically antinomic, pluralism would recognise knowledge as a common minimal ground between acquaintance and the truths it resolves to purport in its differential nature. Without paradox, culture floats knowledge away from the boundaries of duty. Such abandonment would subvert knowledge’s cultural-biographical grammar to the extents of incommunicability, and would formalise and render irrelevant the biographical basis of meaning. In both cases, knowledge would be estranged from our cultural responsibilities, with the consequence of an alienation 30. Bobbio, Norberto, Il Futuro della Democrazia, (Einaudi, Torino 1984) pp. 55-56. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 30 | KNOWLEDGE from one’s own life-experience. Like ‘ethnic cleansing’, there is, on the democratic plane, the risk of ‘cultural cleansing’ where the individual’s life is displaced and dispossessed. What precludes dispossession is the reappropriation of time and knowledge in the form of memory. II Memory 19. Curves Genealogy is neither a fact of epistemological production nor an object of economic consumption. Time’s curve reveals genealogy as a pilgrim seeking sanctuary within the solace of wonderment. In failing to acknowledge wonderment, the culture of production and the industry of consumption enforced their logic of amnesia where the self lost its legitimacy and history was presumed ‘dead’. Before attempting to assess this state of affairs one needs to question, or establish, the nature of genealogy. Should genealogy imply a line and a lineage? Do line and lineage necessarily assume genealogies? In terms of lineage, for one ‘to be’ is taken as something given from a before with an after that partakes of a genealogy. In terms of progression, genealogy is a lineage of sorts. Yet unlike AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 1. Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F. Bouchard, Simon Sherry (trans), Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Blackwells; reprinted in Rabinow, Paul (ed.) The Foucault Reader (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1986), p. 76. 32 | MEMORY production, genealogy would not recognise consumption as its ultimate fulfilment. In genealogies there are no fixed or pre-assumed ‘straight lines’. Rather, genealogical ‘lines’ tend to bend. Genealogies constitute bent times where the direction is accidental. They operate ‘on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’.1 Bending (backwards, as inwards, as outwards and sideways) does not necessarily reflect a productive end. Any production is contingent to the scratching and the form that emerges as a tangible record. It is a script on paper, a eulogy to history that was reproduced as an end that was borrowed for the sake of a temporal form of coherence.2 The curvature of a bent time raises the prospect of wonderment. Outside production’s ‘straightened’ concept of time, wonder is the only grammar by which time retains contingency; by which in turn it is one with memory where any fixedness is inherently temporary, and only ‘necessary’ by dint of the accident (and not vice-versa). When this state of affairs is straightened by the 2. The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process. (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 86, my emphasis.) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 33 | MEMORY progression of various economies and their ensuing industries, the contingent nature of time is overtaken by the myth of necessary time — and likewise, memory is halted and altered according to external viability. Viability emerges from the jargon of amnesia. 20. An excuse to pause Ever since modernity demystified political economy, the hegemony of causality and its reductionist certainty have been exposed as pure mysticism. In this light, any argument for freedom and democracy has to engage in a process where fulfilment is not preclusive by ways of an end, but inclusive by way of a potential to many ends. The equivocal nature of the end as any or many should suggest a kind of openness. In turn, openness is an excuse to call other, often tangential, ends. Openness is an excuse to pause. In actual sense the many ends (qua objectives) of freedom and democracy are provisional, indefinite and plural. 21. Memory’s counter-offensive Human expression is a multiple narrative that reveals a quest characterised by an exchange between sacrifice and happiness. As art, this exchange is constructed by the lives of women and men who fight and die by way of a nostalgic humanity in which they vest their hopes and sense of belonging. A nostalgic humanity pertains to a memorial polity moved by the will to return and reclaim by force of the homecoming — the nóstos — of freedom and AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 3. Here it is worth recalling the etymological root of nostalgia in the ancient Greek word (nóstos) which embraces the meanings of ‘returning home’ as well as ‘travel and journey’. In common parlance, nostalgia stands for homesickness and ‘a yearning for the past’. As ‘homecoming’ gives ‘nostalgia’ a richer philosophical and poetical meaning, especially in view of the related word 34 | MEMORY democracy, whose time scale is plural by way of its many ends.3 This memorial polity enfolds through a history that stands out of the myth of necessary time. The myth of necessity considers human history as a series of curtailed stories where memory is substituted by the fallacy of viable ends. As the leading ideology of ‘viability’, contemporary empiricism — like its bedfellow, practicism — deliberately precludes wonderment and prevents the grammar of contingent time from human history. 22. Liberty, anamnesis Some eighteen years after the end of the Second World War and right in the middle of the Cold War, Adorno argued that certain patience had to be exercised ‘with respect to the relations between theory and practice’. Such a request may be justified because in a situation like the present [1963] (…) whether it will be possible ever again to achieve a valid form of practice may well (nóstimos), meaning ‘belonging to a return’. In the context of this essay, the notion of memory as a belonging would further imply the relationship between individuals on the ground of a memorial polity where freedom implies the democratic (re)appropriation of history. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 35 | MEMORY depend on not demanding that every idea should immediately produce its own legitimating document explaining its own practical use. The situation may well demand that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications so as to see where it may lead. 4 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, R. Livingstone (trans.), T. Schröder (ed.), (Polity Press, Cambridge 2000), p. 4. Also cf. Adorno’s Thirty years on, the ideology of viability continues to critique of rewrite the rules for aesthetic praxis by quantifying ‘practicism’, more specifically when discussing the tension between theory and practice arguing that there is ‘a greater need of theoretical intervention at the present time’: On the other hand, it is no less true (…) that theory and practice do not slot into each other neatly, that they are not simply one and the same thing, but that (…) a kind of tension obtains between the two. Theory that bears no relation to any conceivable practice either degenerates into an empty, complacent and irrelevant game, or, what is even worse, it becomes a mere component of culture, in other words, a piece of dead scholarship, a matter of complete indifference to us as living minds and active, living human beings. This even holds good for art for, however mediated, however indirect or concealed it may be, such a link must nevertheless exist. Conversley (…) a practice that simply frees itself from the shackles of theory and rejects thought as such on the grounds of its own supposed superiority will sink to the level of activity for its own sake. Such a practice remains stuck fast within the given reality. It leads to the production of people who like organizing things and who imagine that once you have organized something, once you have arranged for some rally or other, you have achieved something of importance, without pondering for a moment whether such activities have any chance at all of effectively impinging on reality.’ (p. 6). Adorno revisits practicism in the light of empiricism, in a commentary on Kant’s definition of the realm of theory (cf. pp. 61ff.) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 36 | MEMORY passion into a measurable currency. In this state of affairs, the culture of amnesia is being consolidated to extents that the freedom to which men and women have aspired after the World and Cold wars, is more akin to myth than reality. As a counter-offensive, the logic of freedom has to emerge from memory and its quotidian geography. Instead of the immediately ‘quantified’ arguments of predominant polities (which have systematically curtailed human liberty under the very guise of democracy and freedom), we need to recognise the less ‘practical’ realities of human history. Amongst the latter forms of real history, there is what Quentin Skinner calls the discontinuities found and expressed within our intellectual heritage where ‘values set in stone at one moment melt into the air at the next’: 5 . Skinner, Quentin, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998), p. 111. We need look no further than, for example, the names of the great composers carved with such confidence on the façade of the Opéra Garnier in Paris: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven … Spontini. As with our cultural heroes, so with many of our values and practices: they too are liable to become buried in the sands of time, and stand in need of being excavated and reconsidered.5 Other than an economics of fathomed viability and equivocal continuity, liberty emerges from the politics of AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 37 | MEMORY anamnesis as random recollection, commonplace remembrance and as a return to the everydayness by which art and history gain their keep. To excavate the narrative of everydayness is to remember the event of storytelling (cf. §3 and §7) — an event that was halted by the illusion of an identitarian cycle (cf. §8). 23. Works of jocularity The work of those artists and historians who choose to refuse the immediacy of the viable, stands for the revaluation of labour’s aesthetic capital and its struggle for freedom.6 By ‘labour’s aesthetic capital’ I want to define those forms of human making that for so many reasons have to rely (in their applicability and legitimacy) on the manifestation of quotidian ‘paganism’. In its dual contexts of quotidianity and paganism, the making is a game amongst other games. Lyotard claims that a pagan state of affairs requires that ‘each game is played as such, which implies that it does not give itself as the game of all the other games or as the true one’.7 Anamnesis as history is a pagan state of affairs where history is ‘revealed’ as a permanent race between Achilles and the tortoise. In this case, the rules of the race are not fixed or determined by time, number or physics — and so, it stands to be altered in law, process and outcome. 6. It should be noted that here, aesthetic capital is deliberately distanced from Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital in both application and critical elaboration. 7. Lyotard, JeanFrançois, Thébaud, JeanLoup (1985), Just Gaming, Wlad Godzich (trans.), Manchester University Press: Manchester, p. 60. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 38 | MEMORY This may begin to illustrate how in their failure to emancipate human labour, the métiers of aesthetic capital — passion and gesture, pain and struggle, time and myth — have come to re-enact the narratives of nostalgia as an access to the potency (dynamis) of memory. Given that the tools of aesthetic capital operate as predicates to a game — thereby being jocular in grammar as well as expression — the law of potency itself will be paganized. To recall Lyotard’s ensuing argument for the pagan-artist: 8. Lyotard, Thébaud, Just Gaming, p. 61. I think that pagans are artists, that is, they can move from one game to another, and in each of these games (in the optimal situation) they try to figure out new moves. And even better, they try to invent new games. What we call an ‘artist’ in the usual sense of the term, is someone who, in relation to a given purport, the purport of the canvas and the medium of the picta, for example, proposes new rules of the painting game. Same thing for the so-called independent cinema, or for music.8 Memory is a recollection of a ‘work’ (poíema), which in turn is a process of anamnesis where the memorial distinctions between life and death are distanced from the teleological traps of consumption. As an agent of struggle that champions the politics of anamnesis, nostalgia does not merely trigger a longing for a reversed grammar of fulfilment — an entelecheic syntax — where AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 39 | MEMORY memory is an exchange between potentials and acts. By this form of exchange, memory releases the equity of labour’s aesthetic capital into an economy of significant, and hence jocular, forms. Here the imperatives of ‘to make’ (poiéo) reinstate a kinship with the poet — the poietés.9 This consolidates the agency of labour’s aesthetic capital for anamnesis and confirms that the struggle against amnesia begins on the barricades of nostalgia. 24. Discontinuity By means of art’s jocular purport historical discontinuity is upheld on those passionate grounds where our aesthetic grammars have been averted from instrumentality. The jocular is the a priori condition of aesthetic individuation. It is one of art’s givens. It confirms history as perpetual discontinuity. The jocular often emerges as a disjoint relation. Disjoint relations do not follow linear trails from a to b — whether historicist, relativist, or practicist. If historical ‘practicality’ were to allow only one form of causation (if a then b; if b then c, etc.) without questioning the teleological certainty by which it has been instrumentalised, then the jocular is foreclosed. It is in this context that categories (which we have invested with a desire for social change) such as the working class, have become a bad work of fiction. Walter 9. I have discussed the relationship between (poiéo) and (poíesis) in some detail in my Easels of Utopia. cf. Baldacchino, John, Easels of Utopia. Art’s Fact Returned (Ashgate, Aldershot 1998), pp. 1-5, pp. 65ff. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 40 | MEMORY Benjamin suggests as much in his critique of Social Democratic dogmatism in the 1940s: 10. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.) Harry Zohn (trans.), (Fontana/ Collins, Glasgow 1973), p. 252. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.10 This substantiates the argument (cf. §19) against the myth of necessary time.11 25. Avant-nostalgia The measure of anamnesis is primarily exercised on grounds where the métiers of memorial politics are legitimised by everydayness, and not by the laws of historicism (cf. §22). Such quotidian narratives alter the tables of legitimacy and claim an autonomous stake in the poetics of reality — as art. If this does not occur, then 11. Also cf. Benjamin’s critique of historicism in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Thesis XVIII [A]): ‘Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.’ Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 255. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 41 | MEMORY the autonomy with which art could claim to establish and legitimise difference (though it is not implied that art functions as such automatically, everywhere and always) will be aborted by the identitarian syntax of amnesia (cf. §23). Adorno rightly argues that in such a state of affairs, the subject as definition (and consequently as ‘all knowledge’) is equated with the object on the grounds of ‘positive reconcilement’. By the formula of ‘self-sameness’, of pure identity, the knowledge of the object is shown up as hocus-pocus, because this knowledge is no longer one of the object at all: it is the tautology of an absolutised . Irreconcilably, the idea of reconcilement bars its affirmation in a concept. (...) The structure of his [Hegel’s] system would unquestionably fall without the principle that to negate negation is positive, but the empirical substance of dialectics is not the principle but the resistance which otherness offers to identity. Hence the power of dialectics. The subject too is hidden in dialectics, since its real rule brings forth the contradictions, but the contradictions have filtered into the object. If we attribute dialectics to the subject alone, removing contradiction by contradiction, so to speak, we also remove dialectics by broadening it into a totality.12 12.Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, E. B. Ashton (trans.), (Routledge, London, 1990) pp. 160-1. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 42 | MEMORY To avoid their objectification of totality as selfrecapitulation — as absolutised intelligible intelligibility (nóesis noéseos, ) — the quotidian narratives with which the poetics alter the tables of legitimacy must be read sideways (if read at all). Though these narratives are highly ‘legible’ (because they are commonplace forms of meaning) they often inhabit the disjointed intervals which distinguish the necessary from the contingent. By so doing, such narratives confuse both categories, leaving a vacuum that could accommodate the hegemony of production. This is where the dialectics of everyday life must activate a struggle between fact and act; law and word. In its disjointed contexts the quotidian fails to gain consensus (even when sought) from the totality of identity, as it could never mediate objectification by some kind of hermeneutic circle. The quotidian is non-identitarian by instinct, and to this effect it cannot forget that genealogies are mere records of a time that was necessarily bent.13 Prompted by a desire to expropriate law by the poetics of our everyday grammars, a free exchange between the private and public spheres will counteract the 13. Foucault identifies within the act of genealogy an equivocal choice, where both metaphysics and interpretation fall in mutual banter: ‘If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations.’ (Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 86.) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 43 | MEMORY reconciliatory (identitarian) structure of private consumption. In altering the tables of legitimacy, the grammars of the poetic as an autonomous form of anamnesis would reveal — and avert — consumption as absolutised intelligible intelligibility. In this way the prospect of a history that is reduced to a mere identitarian document could be avoided (cf. §8 and §9). 26. Proviso With games being pagan, necessities are implicitly contingent. This is the paradox of the commonplace. The struggle against the consumption of history will not happen simply by altering the laws of interpretation where the narratives of everyday life are expected to reveal themselves as autonomous from any historical, economic or ideological identification. A simple alteration of grammar will not avoid the traditional logic that ‘takes minus times minus for a plus’. 14 The alteration of the process of legitimacy must be accompanied by a further course, where the story will not merely defy (empirical practicist) reductionism, but will align motive to action in an anamnetic struggle where potency has to supersede the limits of causation. 14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 158. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 44 | MEMORY 27. Act beyond cause 15. Austin, J.L., ‘A plea for excuses’, in Austin, Philosophical Papers, (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1990), p. 178. Once the limits of causation are recognised as thresholds beyond which possibility is neither barred by myth nor privatised into consumption, it would be necessary for whoever attempts to indulge in such hypotheses, to identify what actions will the grammar of anamnesis adopt. This will pronounce what lies beyond the boundaries of causality, and to provide some terms of reference. As a referential edifice, the hypothesis will not signify the removal of motive. Rather, it would argue a case for the excuse. Here, any convention adopted for the application (and analysis) of the excuse will remain in the possession of both action and motive — as a possession of legitimacy that is contextualised by an internal convention without teleological stricture. This case for anamnesis is prompted by the spirit (though not necessarily follows the intention of) Austin’s elucidation of the grammatical currency of excuses when he urges more rigour with regards to the conventions of action. Austin argues that there is a tendency to forget ‘that “doing an action”, as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression—it is a stand-in used in place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that “thing” is a stand-in for any (or when we remember, almost any) noun substantive, and “quality” a stand-in for the adjective’.15 An oversight would falsely AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 45 | MEMORY assume equivalence between actions: (…) composing a quarrel with striking a match, winning a war with sneezing: worse still we assimilate them one and all to the supposedly most obvious and easy cases, such as posting letters or moving fingers, just as we assimilate all ‘things’ to horses or beds.16 Similarly Ryle rejects any attempt to classify pleasure with sensations: It may be thought that it is after all a venial and unimportant fault to misclassify pleasure with sensations. No great harm is done, in ordinary circumstances, if we misclassify rabbits as a species of rat or sweet-peas as a species of Umbelliferae. But ours is a different sort of misclassification. It is not a case of trying to play a conceptual salmon with a conceptual trout-rod instead of with the correct salmon-rod: it is a case of trying to play a conceptual salmon with a cricket-bat or an ace of spades.17 Within the remits of human expression there is a lot to be said about how ‘dilemmas derive from wrongly imputed parities of reasoning’. 18 In the attempt to get beyond the imputed parities that have often endorsed causality with truth (as wrongly exchanged with the mythification of equal actions), one must take stock of Austin’s attention to excuses and investigate the validity 16.Austin, ‘A plea for excuses’, p. 179. 17.Ryle, Gilbert, Dilemmas, (Cambridge University Press, London 1973) p. 60. 18. Ryle, Dilemmas, p. 66. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 46 | MEMORY of a science of the excuse. 19. Austin, ‘A plea for excuses’, p. 179. In examining all the ways in which each action may not be ‘free’, i.e. the cases in which it will not do to say simply ‘X did A’, we may hope to dispose of the problem of Freedom. Aristotle has often been chidden for talking about excuses or pleas and over-looking ‘the real problem’: in my own case, it was when I began to see the injustice of this charge that I first became interested in excuses.19 To stand out of a causal tabulation of actions running as ‘wrongly imputed parities of reasoning’, one’s hypotheses must be excused from the judgements that are customarily expected to gauge legitimacy (private or public). On such grounds motivation is neither legal nor democratic, since the memory on whose premiss one would establish the excuse lies outside a consensus based on fact. Rather, it holds no case for the present as causal — because its causality would limit the scope of recollection, even when it forms part of it. Any other state of affairs would set aside the excuse and try to justify recollection as a closed process of externalised ‘verification’. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 47 | MEMORY 28. The dainty, the dumpy and Zorba’s excuse The study of excuses opens up new avenues for ‘fieldwork in philosophy’ where ‘at last we should be able to unfreeze, to loosen up and get going on agreeing about discoveries, however small, and on agreeing about how to reach agreement.’20 The genial way with which Austin explores the most complex issues in the most accessible vocabulary remains an admirable aim for whoever wants to discuss the quotidian narratives with which stories have always formed the foundation of human wisdom. When he makes a case for aesthetics to set aside the grand manner of the beautiful ‘and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy’21 , the excuse and art begin to signify a jocular relation that is not unfamiliar with contemporary art practices. When the poetics of everyday life bear directly on an aesthetic foreboding that is non-identitarian by way of its autonomy, whoever chooses to select such a site would need the grammar of excuses in order to communicate from outside the norm. Alexis Zorba’s denunciation of human reason as ‘the backside of the miller’s wife’ is one such excuse: Oh you just sit there and ask questions! It just came over me, that’s all. You know the tale of the miller’s wife, don’t you? Well, you don’t expect to learn spelling 20. Austin, ‘A plea for excuses’, p. 183. 21. Austin, ‘A plea for excuses’, ibid. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 22. Kazantzakis, Nikos, Zorba the Greek, Carl Wildman (trans.), (Faber & Faber, London 1995) p. 13. 48 | MEMORY from her backside, do you? The backside of the miller’s wife, that’s human reason.22 Be it dainty or dumpy, reason is ultimately corporeal and so, tactile. Zorba’s endearment for the way reason figures its use in Chaucer’s parable raises the issue of an(other) jocular and pagan dynamic — that of touch and its ensuing aesthetics. III Touch 29. Epaphus In the poetics of myth, the idea of godliness emerges as a contact between a being (and Being) for omniscience — as a presumed ‘ground-origin’ for absolute knowledge; and the human need to know the case for knowing — as the desire to appropriate the ground-origin of one’s own disposition to know. As the story of Prometheus suggests, the contact between knowledge, knower and the known is not at all felicitous, especially when the presupposition of the omniscient is estranged into a jealous godhead like Zeus. This sorry tale could only be explained by the storytellers’ desire to relinquish their narratives to a history where they could safely turn the tables on the godhead itself. Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus for giving fire and the arts to humanity is paralleled by Zeus’s touch that bore Epaphus by Io whom he loved yet made to AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 50 | TOUCH suffer. In Prometheus Bound Aeschylus tells us the story of two forms of touch. The first touch is read through its consequences: Prometheus, the titan who shaped humans by a benevolent touch and imbued them with his subsequent gift of fire and the arts, is punished by the tyrannical touch of Zeus. Then there is a second, parallel, touch in Aeschylus’s tale, which in many ways provides a hopeful backdrop to Prometheus’s predicament. Whereas Prometheus’s punishment is made public as a sign of warning against disobedience, Zeus’s other touch — making love to Io — lies concealed from everyone so as to avoid Hera’s jealousy. By so doing, Zeus condemns his young lover-priestess to the predicaments of animal form and hapless wonderment until she is partly restored by mothering her son Epaphus. 1. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, v. 845-853, in Aeschylus, The Seven Plays in English Verse, Lewis Campbell (trans.) (Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 258-9. (...) A town lies, Canopus, at the limit of that land, Close to the mouth and sand-bar of the Nile. Therein shall Zeus restore thee to thy mind, With dreadless hand touching thee, nothing more. And thou shalt bear a son, dark Epaphus, Named from the manner of his birth from Zeus. The fruits of all the land that Nilus’s flood Makes rich with wide o’erflowings, shall be his.1 AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 51 | TOUCH 30. Physical truth In his quest to own the fire that was human by an ‘historic’ right, Nikos Kazantzakis could never stand still. In Report to Greco he attempts to reconstruct truth genealogically, knowing very well that such an exercise is flawed a priori. He tours the ideas of men and women whose search for the ultimate touch regales them with truth as a body marked with anguish. Overwhelmed with bitterness and growing ‘weary of resurrecting the dead’, Nikos dreams of a moment with female lips that asks (of) him: ‘Who is your God?’ ‘Buddha’, I unhesitatingly replied. But the lips moved again: ‘No, no, Epaphus!’ (...) Epaphus, the god of touch, who prefers flesh to shadow and like the wolf in the proverb does not await upon promises of others when it is a question of filling his belly. He trusts neither eye nor ear; he wants to touch, to grasp man and soil, to feel their warmth mix with his own, feel them become one with him. He even wants to turn the soul into body so that he can touch it. The most reliable and industrious of all the gods, who walks on earth, loves the earth, and wishes to remake it ‘in his own image and after his likeness’ — that was my god.2 For Kazantzakis, the way to Epaphian fulfilment is the coming together of soul and body. In this physical 2. Kazantzakis, Nikos, Report to Greco, (Faber & Faber, London 1973), p. 418. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 52 | TOUCH communion the question of truth is not relative to the grammars of logical judgement, neither is it victim to empirical machinations. Truth is borne of the gift of touch where neither hearsay nor certainty are taken as givens unless grasped, felt and brought together in the ‘warm mix’ within one’s own soul made flesh. 31. Smudged layers 3. I discuss the notion of equivalence in Giorgio De Chirico in Easels of Utopia, pp. 81ff. In the aesthetics of touch, narrative, myth and reality are interspersed and shuffled on the plane of equivalence. It is on similar grounds that a metaphysical artist like Giorgio De Chirico discerns equivalence between what lays inside and what is projected outside a painting.3 The equivalence between truths and realities achieved by the act of touch creates a connection that represents a return to what was appropriated by those who touch. And this time the touch is not merely representative of a gaze, but is physical. Images are narratives of the hand and their touch is not filtered by the mere use of media like a brush, camera, or subject, but is found in the smudged glazes that intervene on its recipients — canvas, screen and audience alike — and between paint, scenes and intervals. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 53 | TOUCH 32. Communion Zeus and Epaphus are manifestations of the Prometheian will to wander into the horizon where sky and land touch and are exchanged between each other. At the heart of the tragedy’s ultimate attempt to deliver us from the violence which opens the scene in Aeschylus’s tale, one awaits for the touch between the hidden fact and the ultimate truth as an expectancy for the provision of some kind of solution from life’s ultimate riddle. (…) why be compassionate and dwell On vain procrastination? Why not hate The god most hateful to all gods, who gave By treason your bright glory to frail men?4 Even when one assumes an ideal structure for a reality to be fulfilled, one relies on a trajectory of manifestations (be they imitations or representations) that come together to rear an ultimate koinonía.5 This communion is a reflection of a choice of ground upon which one constructs an edifice of knowing — whatever that may be. One way of knowing is to strive for the construction of reason. But like touch, reason takes on parallel forms — of love and compassion, as well as hatred and tyranny. While the latter may reside in the reason for communion as an objective (albeit suspended in its final ‘judgement’); the former empowers a polity that punishes and lays judgement on the latter. 4. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, v. 38-40, p. 236. 5. In its ancient meaning, koinonía ( ) means communion, as in ‘sharing’, but also connotes the idea of society as well as intercourse (qua interaction) and love (qua charity). AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 54 | TOUCH The ‘vain procrastination’, by which compassion is reluctant to hate those who ‘disobey’ (by suspending judgement over) the destiny set by the reason of the polity, is a form of such communion. One hastens to add that as a ‘joint entity’ the act of koinonía is not a serene touch resonating in absolute harmony. Knowledge as a structure of ‘identity’, whether positively assumed (as a form of causal optimism/certainty) or negatively presumed (as unresolved paradox/ aporia), could never rely on the harmonisation of the dialectical grounds that assumes its origin (cf. §16, above). Rather, like touch, the reason of communion is fuelled by the ‘treason’ that stole and gave [Zeus’s] ‘bright glory to frail men’. 33. Mimetic consumption The aesthetics of touch are found within the vestiges of representation in the everyday makings of human expression by whose accidents the self is realised. Touch manifests the very roots of power. It is touch that empowers the expressive medium (the dance, the music, the chant) but more importantly it sanctions the ethical space inhabited by those who dance, paint, make love, pray or blaspheme — in other words, those who objectify the world by touching it. One of the most poignant moments of touch between the human and what it elects as its ideal or divine, is found in the traditions of faith. To take the tradition of kissing sacred representations in Roman and Byzantine Christianity as one example, touch becomes, perhaps after communion, the epitome of spiritual exchange. Kissing an image mimics the embrace between the divine and human as played upon the rules of tradition. In this exchange between humans and gods the ultimate power lies with those who choose to touch. Touch eventually exhausts (and ultimately consumes) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 55 | TOUCH the representative materiality of the image. If it is true that the millions of lips kissing St Peter’s statue in Rome have worn down the effigy’s bronze foot, it is further evidence that the symbolic order lies at the feet of women and men who venture to appropriate eternity by the power of their lips.6 6. We should never forget that tradition is invented by the human kisser and not the venerated figure. 34. Forfeited origins In Basil’s theological logic, ‘the honour paid to the image redounds to the original’, which to John of Damascus implies that what it redounds to is the very sacred reality that is imaged. 7 In the Damascene’s rebuttal of iconoclasm, the image operates as a picture (a likeness, eikón), and as perception (as eìdolon, which as form is akin to the idea [eidos]). This presents two intentional acts whereby a sacred image becomes a reason of communion between materiality and spirituality. Yet without the touch, this communion lacks embodiment. On the planes of its original intention, an untouched image remains partly insignificant. One could argue that this goes for all images — be they deemed as secular or sacred. One could go as far as assert that to leave an image untouched equals to the forfeiting of its origins. 7. cf. John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, IV. c. 16, in John of Damascus, Writings, Frederic Chase (trans.), (The Catholic University of America Press, Washington 1958) pp. 370-1. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 56 | TOUCH 35. Rendered truths 8. Hypóstasis ( ) connotes ‘foundation’ as well as ‘substance’, ‘matter’, ‘reality’ and ‘real nature’. We could then read hypóstasis stands as a ground-origin that gives meaning to what is constructed — as intentioned — ‘on’ it. To touch an image is to partake of its intention. In modern parlance, to touch an image is to signify it. Away from its theological meaning, the icon enacts a process of empowerment where as sign it mediates accident with necessity, rejoining signifier with signified. The liberal (and expected) touching of images reinforces communion as a bonding between personal intentions and the objective world. In devotional jargon, the word ‘intention’ is still in use to indicate and provide a locus for an act of prayer (communion) between person and godhead, between individuals and their rendition of reality. To pray for the intention of x means to direct one’s intention to x, and thereby enter the story of x. Within the poetics of touch the locus of prayer is surrogate to the ground-origin of knowledge (cf. §29, above). In effect, the image is a terrain that enjoins persons with their realities. The image is the vehicle for one’s intention — which also means that the image enables one’s intention to move towards x and thereby enter its story. In this way, images become distinct. By their distinction images carry personality — that is, they are vehicles of personhood. In its theological origin, the term ‘distinction’ (as empowerment) was qualified by the triune meaning of hypóstasis, person and individual. 8 John Damascene explains that all three terms, as originally used by the AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 57 | TOUCH Church’s Patres stand for the same thing: ‘namely that which by its own subsistence subsists of itself from substance and accidents, is numerically different, and signifies a certain one, as for example, Peter, and Paul, and this horse.’9 It follows that by its distinction, the image is a conductor of significance as imparted by touch and its corresponding intention. This further implies that the touching of an icon is an act that identifies those who touch as persons, individuals and more importantly as the ground-origin from where the meaning of images is sourced.10 Ultimately any truth conferred over images is not sourced outside the person, but returns to the individual at the very moment of intention. Itself an image, truth is rendered — and by implication made — in the course of an aesthetic process that is marked by a series of different and subsequent acts of touch. The moment of intention is a plural event. While the process of making an image (of any sort) denotes stages and moments of intention, the image is never foreclosed once it is completed. The continuous touching of an icon by a multitude of devotees constitutes a plurality of intentions — each and every one valid in its own right. To this effect intentionality is externalised, while the art form — in terms of its origin and the other conventions that have historically elected it as such (a work of art; an object of reverence; et cetera … ) — retains an implicit 9. John of Damascus, The Fount of Knowledge, The Philosophical Chapters: ch. 43, in Writings, p. 68. 10 . Here I want to widen the implication of the icon to a likeness ( ) that is not necessarily a picture or a statue as customary assumed in religious art, but as any form of representation — including representations that are not necessarily tactile. In the latter category I would include film, music and convergent media, where ‘touching’ would imply a wider (and ampler) meaning. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 11. To use Gianni Vattimo’s perusal and discussion of weak thought (pensiero debole), an attempt to identify the intentionality of an art form would necessitate the weakening of the portents (if not validity) of intention altogether — an event that should never be precluded from critical consideration. See in particular, Gianni Vattimo’s Credere di credere (Grazanti Editori). 58 | TOUCH (some may say constant) intentionality. Somehow an overall intentionality is neither a hierarchical negotiation nor a summation of all.11 36. Copies While all icons hark back to the dogma of a prototype by which they gain theological legitimacy, their own aesthetic legality is no more a copy of the prototype than the human individual is a copy of God, History or the Idea. On the contrary, the icon begets reality as a hypóstasis of the touch. Upon the moment of touch, any assumption of iconic origin remains to be signified within the person who adopts a special (read: particular) role in the rendering of truth as a genealogy of copies. However one hastens to add that as in the earlier discussion of genealogy and memory (cf. §19, 21, 23, above), the assumption of a ‘lineage’ of copies is a contingent one. It is clear that such descriptions are only assumed for the sake of a language-based explanation. And given that any explanation is either written or spoken, there is hardly any other way of putting it. The lineage of copies has its origin in the concept of the godhead, and it is in this grammatical totality, and for the sake of its own (often necessary) orthodoxy, that the AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 59 | TOUCH argument for the icon came to be aligned (and sustained) to a legitimacy by prototype. For the purpose of this essay, a genealogy of copies remains many times removed from certain lineage. As in the assumption of one’s own historical belonging, the genealogical assumption of copies assumes the figure of a line only as a way of concretising (and often necessitating) yet another fictive notion of time. In parallel to this argument, I will cite Adorno: It is not idle to speculate whether antagonism was inherited in the origin of human society as a principle of homo homini lupus, a piece of prolonged natural history, or whether it evolved — and whether, even if evolved, it followed from the necessities of the survival of the species and not contingently, as it were, from archaic arbitrary acts of seizing power. With that, of course, the construction of the world spirit would fall apart. The historic universal, the logic of things that is compacted in the necessity of the overall trend, would rest on something accidental, on something extraneous to it; it need not have been.12 In any assumption of genealogy — be it orthodox, progressive or salvific — the copy emerges as a narrative whose prototype, albeit assumed, need not have been. It is very dubious that the original has ever been, and to this effect it is not even necessary that it should have been. As 12. Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, p. 321 (my emphasis). AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 60 | TOUCH in Adorno’s comments on antagonism, it is not idle at all to speculate that the notion of an origin assumed from a likeness is a myth, and that ultimately a likeness is of itself original. This is because the essence of a likeness does not emerge from some discernible line of others that it is supposed to imitate. Rather, a likeness is uniquely owned by the intention of the touch that assumes it as semblance. If audiences were to be asked what they would discern as the origin of a copy, the number of images they would have in mind would far exceed that of the existent copies (let alone one original). Like history and memory, a genealogy of copies confirms that any construction of a world spirit has to fall apart. 37. History’s folklore Related to the iconic ritual is the speculation of ‘true representation’ where the narrative of likeness is not simply linked to a lineage of ‘true’ images, but extends to that of a ‘true ground’. Even when intentions are enunciated by the individuality of prayer and touch, a ‘true ground’ reifies the space of intention into a common historical origin. Core to this recycled world spirit is the exploitation of the myth of the copy and the refutation of its autonomy. This mechanism is assumed by the same teleological certainty that gave rise to what Adorno calls a ‘prolonged natural history’. By its longevity this story assumes a peculiar benignity that becomes folklore to those whose way of surviving is to ‘conform’ (even when this amounts to refutation). Whether this has evolved around an assumed necessary principle ( or as a power mechanism, is irrelevant. One important caveat to this state of affairs is that, on the grounds of likeness, the process of similitude redounds on the presumption of an ‘origin’ (cf. §34). AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 61 | TOUCH But rather than consolidate such ground, the particularised intention of a likeness puts any notion of core truth out of joint — as the personalised perception of copies confirms (cf. §36). By implication this reduces the assumption of a common historical origin to an assumption of similitude, and thereby recoils (and redounds) to a grammar of sameness in the form of social entrenchment, religious obscurantism, cultural autarchy, prosaic legalism, subversion, and the consolidation of provincial backhand economies. Ultimately the destruction of orthodoxy, progress and salvation is internally conduced. Far from communist, foreign or sinful, what haunts the world spirit is the pious, homely and benign. 38. The flaws of precision In the quest for a recognised (and reassuring) pattern of intentions, our world stories need to redound onto the familiar. For this to happen, the grammar of necessity has to be claimed in full, so that it could reinforce a set of ethical imperatives that are supposedly adept to nature. But as Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime (in the Critique of Judgement) implies, by the same ‘natural’ process we could only come to a full workable grammar when we come to recognise the limits of natural forms and their supposedly implied rational definition or consequence. What is added to nature finalized aesthetically is (…) the loss of its finality. Under the name of the Analytic of the Sublime, a denatured aesthetic, or, better, an aesthetic of denaturing, breaks the proper order of the natural aesthetic and suspends the function it assumes in the project of unification. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 13. Lyotard, JeanFrançois, Lessons on The Analytic of the Sublime, E. Rottenberg (trans.), (Stanford University Press, California 1994), p. 53. 62 | TOUCH What awakens the ‘intellectual feeling’ (…), the sublime, is not nature, which is an artist in forms and the work of forms, but rather magnitude, force, quantity in its purest state, a ‘presence’ that exceeds what imaginative though can grasp at once in a form - what it can form.13 In the (perfectly benign) desire to resolve the issue of consequence we all seek instruments of moral consumption and social exchange and, like the Kant of the Critique of Reason, assume that we could organise knowledge to achieve ‘coherence according to one principle’.14 Yet the project keeps failing, not because we have ceded to believe in history or humanity — as some would argue in their attacks on the windmills of post-modernity — but because the project is flawed by any account of precision that we may have assumed. 14. Still sharing in the optimism of the Enlightenment, the systemisation of art and education into identifiable teleological projects is a Enlightened reason is as little capable of finding a prominent standard by which to measure any drive in itself, and example of such in comparison with all other drives, as of arranging an epistemological the universe in spheres. It established natural hierarchy project. For a discussion of the implicit failure of this optimism cf. Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming (trans.), (Verso, London 1989) pp. 81ff. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 63 | TOUCH as a reflex of medieval society, and later enterprises are branded as lies in order to indicate a new, objective value ranking. Irrationalism, as it appears in such empty reconstructions, is far from being able to witstand the ratio.15 Unless we keep in mind that this is implicit to the reversed grounds of origins into the particularity of similitude (§37), we may try to unravel this seeming paradox by an attempt to reconstruct yet another site of ‘origin’ — thereby claim the right to write a further Book of Genesis. Invariably we are dealing with a historical location, but as in the construction of any history, the conventions are contingent to the stories attached to it. Any tale of genesis that ensues from the need to assume a common ground may console and indeed reveal a working grammar of Being. Yet we must never forget that the notion of a beginning — an arkhé — is a hypothesis constructed on ‘borrowed time’. What we construct as our written history is nothing but a time-line of occurrences marking the various moments when such time expires. Furthermore, this tale should be recognised as an essentially inbred affair and that any attempt to reverse it, is precluded by the fact that the distance between representation and reality, image and word, theory and praxis, is always constructed in reverse — with hindsight (as common parlance puts it). 15. Adorno, Horkheimer, ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’, p. 91. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 64 | TOUCH 39. Magdalene’s memory In upholding a lover’s warmth and achieving the philosopher’s wings, Kazantzakis upheld the manner of Epaphus in the form of an agonised birth as sown by Zeus’s selfish touch. While this agony would remain a human predicament, Kazantzakis offers a far more soothing description of the ground that bridges the divine with its human prototype. Thus Mary Magdalene recounts her shared childhood to a perturbed thirty yearold Christ: 15. Kazantzakis, Nikos, The Last Temptation, P. A. Bien (trans.), (Faber & Faber, London 1975), p. 99. ‘Then you took me by the hand——yes, you took me by the hand, Jesus——and we went inside and lay down on the pebbles of the yard. We glued the soles of our feet together, felt the warmth of our bodies mix, rise from our feet to our thighs, from our thighs to our loins. Then we closed our eyes and ...’ 15 IV Involution 40. Map If one were to map out involution, it would have to present a series of teleological choices where a way of living would emerge in abstractio as an aporetic structure. Arguably it may be read as a map of failure for those who refuse to recognise the individuality of copies in our representation of the world. This will trace reversal (§38) as culture — i.e. as the locus for the self’s abode within its own spectacle (§1) — and rearrange the ‘order’ of things whereby as a reading of the world, it necessitates a value system that would prioritise the tactile above the scopic, semblance before truth, empathy above charity, story in lieu of fact … et cetera. Above all, this map eliminates the mirroring of antinomies in pairs and confirms an agnosticism over the underlying structure of antagonism (§36) as regaled to us by the paradigms of Modernity. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 66 | INVOLUTION 41. Tautology 1. Baudrillard, Jean, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, (Semiotext[e], New York 1983) p. 28. (my emphasis). 2. What marginalised the accident was a narrative of necessity that assumed itself as an origin to be copied. Baudrillard approximates a definition of involution as follows: The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflects them. It absorbs all messages and digests them. For every question put to it, it sends back a tautological and circular response. It never participates.1 Involution is a take-over that confirms itself as incestuous — Oedipal — by its recognition of tautology as its only form of progression. Involution is Oedipal in a Sophocleian, not a Freudian, sense. Because the son begets his offspring from the mother, he recoils progress and disturbs the grammatized history (qua genesis, eros, bíos) of polity and economy, of ethics and aesthetics. Involution means that margins of accident take over what marginalised them in the first place. 2 Involution is a chasm. It draws everything (including its own logic) into a space of hypothesis where what is, may well not be. It also goes sideways, where what would have been could never be, unless it was at some point a ground for being — which as we have established, is an act of fiction (§38). In this odd pattern there is no synthesis, and logic is only assumed by a want of explanation. What is affirmed is prompted by refutation. Involution is the sharpest AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 67 | INVOLUTION refutation of synthesis because it appears as the ultimate synthesis (a ‘mass that absorbs all’). 42. Stretch While it remains dubious whether it could ever be figured, any ‘stretch’ between the start and assumed end of involution is formalised by a tautological instinct that identifies itself as a totality with no purpose. Because this is not a middle-ground or terrain upon which we could negotiate (and fix) a set of rules to play the game of meaning, involution annuls boundaries. For involution tautology is elasticity, and by that it implies that truth is not even relative, because there is nothing for it to be related to. If anything, one of the few methods by which we could understand (and perhaps articulate) the nature of tautology (qua elasticity) is to inhabit its stretch as art. But one hastens to add that abiding within the stretch of involution as art does not imply an aesthetization of Being.3 Rather, art’s inhabiting of involution implies the fundamental notion of making. Art (as ars, as tékhne, as indeed craft) ultimately denotes a construction of reality by which Being recognises itself as the ground of polity: Un deseo de formas y límites nos gana. Viene el hombre que mira con el metro amarillo. 3. Which, as a total system, would present itself as an antidote to the apparently hapless relativism of involution. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 68 | INVOLUTION 4. We’re taken by a longing for forms and limits. | Here comes the man who considers everything with a yellow ruler | Venus is a white still-life | while the collectors of butterflies flee away. Federico García Lorca, Oda a Salvador Dalí (Ode to Salvador Dalí), in García Lorca, Federico, Obras Completas, Arturo del Hoyo (ed.), (Aguilar, Madrid 1973), vol. 1. Venus es una blanca naturaleza muerta y los coleccionistas de mariposas huyen.4 43. Ismene’s silence Polities that have been assumed as fixed and predetermined prove to be elusive and insufficient. By now, we are aware of how the relativist argument has pressed home, and it will be no use ignoring the significance and power it holds on all spheres of human activity: be they of discourse, strategy or application. Those sufficient and effective conventions by which the representational practice of politics have been successful in securing individual rights such as social justice and security, equal opportunity, education, and health, are often questioned, changed and rejected by what are sometimes called the ‘new’ politics. Nonetheless, the confusion between what is ‘new’ and what is ‘old’ tends to be prefaced by practices that could hardly be recognised as new or radically different: war, economic struggle, and the threat to social justice and democracy still characterise the human condition. Nevertheless no feeling of dejà vu could preclude the radical change in the grammars by which we now need to operate and articulate our agendas. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 69 | INVOLUTION ISMENE. ANTIGONE. ISM. ANT. ISM. ANT. Not from irreverence. But I have no strength To strive against the citizens’ resolve. Thou, make excuses! I will go my way To raise a burial-mound to my dear brother. Oh, hapless maiden, how I fear for thee! Waste not your fears on me! Guide your own fortune. Ah! yet divulge thine enterprise to none, But keep the secret close, and so will I. O Heavens! Nay, tell! I hate your silence worse; I had rather you proclaimed it to the world.5 One places no attraction, ambition or trust on the mythical seals by which ‘traditional’ politics and their ‘new’ relativism preclude their own choices. My discussion opens and ends on the literary plane by whose political analogies it will claim a degree of ‘freedom’ for the poetics of decision, the tragedy of consequence, and 5. Sophocles, Antigone l.80-89, in Sophocles, The Seven Plays in English Verse, Lewis Campbell (trans.), (Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 5. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 70 | INVOLUTION the wisdom of hindsight. To some extents these political intentions assume the same freedom by which Ismene’s silence partook — one could say, by default — of a critique whose real implications where pretty similar to those which we face in our own political projections, acts, and inertia. 44. Inclusion as indirectness Ismene’s silence may give the impression of reluctance arguing for prudence; a representation of a person who decides to lie against herself to save her condemned sister, even when she initially disagreed with her sister’s decision. If this was the case, she would be a mere accessory to Antigone’s story; a mechanical insertion in a plot which has nothing to do with her genealogical ground and provenance. In view of her opening role in Sophocles’s tragedy, Ismene carries another, much more meaningful context. Here the individual is zôon politikon — a political being — and by her craft she comes to signify the mechanisms of power and ritual. But Ismene’s choice places an abstentionist claim on her being and thereby poses a challenge to the ground of acceptability that is far more effective than the linear struggle waged by Antigone. Unlike Antigone’s, Ismene’s challenge is not visible by the measure of a politics of gender or social class. Rather, Ismene’s challenge ascends from an ontological plane where the grammars of origin (genealogy, reason, and historical pragmatics) are taken inside out and read as referents of a reversed scenario. Ismene’s politics operate on a lower, more fundamental level. Her choice to be silent and indirectional cannot be premised by factual structures, even when she cites gender as a fact in her attempt to dissuade (and save) Antigone: AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 71 | INVOLUTION ISMENE. We needs must bear in mind we are but women, Never created to contend with men; Nay more, made victims of resistless power, To obey behests more harsh than this to-day.6 6. Antigone, l.61-64. p. 4. If Ismene stopped there, her reluctance to corroborate to Antigone’s decision to re-enact her family’s polity would have laid flat on mere factuality. Instead Ismene decides to operate her reluctance within a greater reference of indirectness. Her attestation to the genealogical inherence of her objection invokes an inclusive polity of struggle: ISMENE. Ah, sister, think but how our father fell, Hated of all and lost to fair renown, Through self-detected crimes— with his own hand, Self-wreaking, how he dashed out both his eyes7 7. Antigone, l. 48-51, pp. 4-5. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 72 | INVOLUTION Ismene and Antigone, daughters of Oedipus King of Thebes who married Queen Jocasta not knowing that she was his mother, epitomise the tragedy of a tautological equivocacy which Sophocles turns into a treatise on the politics of fate. The interconnectedness between the private tragedy of the king and the political disaster of his kingdom brings about an involutionary state of affairs where power meets history, in the same way the State becomes kinship, and contingent fate is refashioned as a necessary moral. Ismene elaborates her different strategy on a historical process that resides in the involutionary stretch of a political kinship that is bred from its conclusions. In Antigone Sophocles follows the involutionary polity of Oedipus Rex: Oedipus sets out to find the origin of a criminal state of affairs that turns onto itself, only to find its origin in Oedipus himself. 8 . Sophocles, King Oedipus 354358, in Sophocles, The Seven Plays in English Verse, Lewis Campbell (trans.), (Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 94-95. OEDIPUS. TIRESIAS. OED. TI. O void of shame! What wickedness is this? What power will give thee refuge for such guilt? The might of truth is scatheless. I am free. Whence came the truth to thee? Not from thine art. From thee, whose rage impelled my backward tongue.8 AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 73 | INVOLUTION Ismene’s — and our — story-line touches upon the structure of truth: the State had grown weak because its collapse was archaically prefigured in the tautological nature of its method (cf §38, above). Ismene’s analysis diagnoses the decadent nature of Antigone’s decision: the resurrection of a tautological lineage is irrelevant to the modern State. 9 45. Justice against myth King Creon, Jocasta’s brother and uncle to Antigone, Ismene and their fratricidal brothers, had no choice but to construct a new power-structure intended to be immune from the deadly riddles of fate. Enlightened by the wisdom of hindsight, Creon’s State represents a modernist ambition that distances itself from the tautology of a theocentric State whose feudal-incenstual legislature became redundant. Ultimately, Creon’s modernist ambition was to reject myth and to place above it the primacy of the State. Creon’s political premiss is radically different from Oedipus’s, whose State was founded on a victory over the Sphinx’s deadly riddle, waged and sustained by his mythical mastery. Unlike Oedipus’s, Creon’s political grammar externalised and rejected the link between myth and polity. This secularism is evident in his confrontation with Tiresias: 9. One needs to make it clear that the Sophoclean context has to do with power structures that are other than Freud’s, Lacan’s, Deleuze’s or Guattari’s. Indeed, it would be foolish to say that Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari thought otherwise. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 74 | INVOLUTION TIRESIAS CREON. 10 . Sophocles, Antigone, l.1048-1051, p. 32 TI. CR. Ah! where is wisdom? who considereth? Wherefore? what means this universal doubt? How far the best of riches is good counsel! As far as folly is the mightiest bane.10 Creon had no choice but to embark on a hegemonic construct which rationalised power and refashioned its legislative structure on the foundations of a justice so absolute which could not afford to spare his niece’s life. Ismene’s protestation against Antigone’s decision to bury Polycines, represents an indirect defence of this modernity. Her modernity may have been distanced from Creon’s, but it took heed in a defaulted justice that recognised the invalidity of Oedipus’s politics notwithstanding the kinship by which Ismene was tied to an involutionary hegemony of old. Antigone’s attempt represented a ritual re-enactment of the old regime. Creon’s resistance was rational, but the signifying mechanism by which politics operate brought back the myth he so strongly wanted to resist. Tiresias’s prophecy brought back the predicament of the State and its inherent phenomenological problems: the polity is once more mediated by the myth of its genealogies. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 75 | INVOLUTION CREON. TIRESIAS. Far-seeing art thou, but dishonest too. Thou wilt provoke the utterance of my tongue. To that even thought refused to dwell upon.11 46. Anxiety and struggle In this mechanism one could trace valid analogies for contemporary forms of representation whose mythological constructs have overtaken the modernist intent by which the rational State was formed. If the project of the Enlightenment — in its Jacobin, Liberal and Libertarian origins — was to create a measure of justice that would reject the mythical undercurrents manipulated by cultural, religious and political signification; it would be safe to say that the ‘new’ political claims for economic and social justice directed against the deterioration of the rational state cannot but be asserted in an indirectness that is no less ambiguous than Ismene’s. However, while the new political critique has evidently been proven — at least for the moment — as a decision that will no longer take for granted the rationalist project, its decisions often raise an anxious and suspicious scepticism with its own supporters. If there is a case for 11. Sophocles, Antigone, l.1059-1061, p.32. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 76 | INVOLUTION the notion of continuous struggle this could never afford Antigone’s predicament. 47. Totalities Ismene’s indirectness proves to be a case for reflection, especially when the claims for pragmatic democracy is in itself rooted in a paradigm that is well aware of the shortcomings of terms and practices like ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘freedom’, ‘education’, etc. In his discussion of the political usage of totality, Laclau considers social totality as an enunciation by which the modernist project legitimised intervention (an intervention that is not dissimilar from Creon’s): 12. Laclau, Ernesto, Emancipation(s), p. 84. From the point of view of the meaning of any significant political intervention, there was in modernity the generalized conviction that the former had to take place at the level of the ground of the social.12 As a ground, the social brings about the ‘being’ of the modernist project. As a grammar it necessitates and signifies political action, whether reformist, radical or democratic. There is, in addition, the question of the framework that allows a conceptual grasp on such a political intervention. This was provided by the notion of social AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 77 | INVOLUTION totality and by the series of causal connections that necessarily followed from it.13 In view of the emergent change and apparent irrelevance of the modernist project, Laclau argues that while there is a ground to understand and accept the issues posed by a recognition of modernity’s ‘afters’, one needs to retain the ground which was given to us by the modernist political decision. By this he makes a case for retaining the contents of modernity while ‘deconstructing’ its terrain. I would like to suggest an alternative strategy: instead of inverting the contents of modernity, to deconstruct the terrain that makes the alternative modernity/ postmodernity possible. That is, instead of remaining within a polarization whose options are entirely governed by the basic categories of modernity, to show that the latter do not constitute an essentially unified block but are rather the sedimented result of a series of contingent articulations. To reactivate the intuition of the contingent character of these articulations will thus produce a widening of horizons, in so far as other articulations — equally contingent — will also show their possibility. This involves, on the one hand, a new attitude towards modernity: not a radical break with it but a new modulation of its themes; not an abandonment of its basic tenets but a hegemonization 13.Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 84. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 78 | INVOLUTION 14. Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 87-8. of them from a different perspective. This also involves, on the other hand, an expansion of the field of politics instead of its retreat — a widening of the field of structural undecidability that opens the way to an enlargement of the field of political decision.14 Laclau puts a cautionary tag on this and reminds us that one cannot afford to fall in the traps of a new essentialism or subjective closure. But within the same context, he leaves no choice for the urgency by which the terrain of modernity needs to be identified, and thus reorganised by the pragmatic contingencies that one claimed by the historical shifts (read: stretches) that made them redundant in the first place. 48. ‘Justifying’ Ismene By now it is evident that the project of this chapter is not a study in Classics, but places the political intent within the analogical structures of representation (including the arts). By this political usage, the appraisal of Creon’s defence of the modern State aligns Ismene’s silence to an indirect recognition of the shortcomings of a State that has become redundant. While the intent is not to sideline Antigone’s model of struggle, it is also clear that the directness by which Antigone takes upon herself the right to defend her own AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 79 | INVOLUTION lineage and reiterate a historical continuity (which noone could deny her), represents a form of struggle that fails to recognise the involutionary origin of its ground (or one should say, stretch).15 One must note that Creon’s State falls in the predicament announced by Tiresias. Antigone commits suicide. Haemon — Creon’s son and husband to Antigone — falls on his sword. And Creon’s wife Eurydice is also lost to the grief of this tragedy. Sophocle’s artistic intent takes its toll on the plot, and as characteristically necessary, its ethical conclusion is passed onto the audience. But beyond the ethical project of Sophocles’s Tragedy, the cathartic mechanism weighs heavily on Sophocles’s political plot — which interests us most, since the implication is that the modern state is not immune from its historicity, especially when it is evident that notwithstanding its rationalist contraptions of equity in duty and right, the mechanism of myth continues to be present as an apophradical shadow terrorising the human condition. 49. Hands that are not ours Ismene’s indirect recognition of absolute justice and her silent protestation against the reinsertion of myth, takes us onto the analogous problematic offered by the Enlightenment’s political project. Here, the rational terrain 15.This is where it is imperative that such an interjection is framed into the successive line of argument between copy and the structure of involution. It is also worth reading this backwards into the implications of the genealogy of copies and how a failure to recognise the individuality of a copy and the transience of its ‘origin’ recoils into a failed polity that is falsely hailed as a hallmark of progress. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 80 | INVOLUTION of the modern State and the grammatical framework offered by its social totality, come into question when, against the expectations of the rational project, a new challenge comes from within — precisely from the genealogical ground on whose vestiges the modern State emerged — as a major threat to the democratic intent. And this is where we are now, as we are reminded by Seferis that: 16. Seferis, George ‘Scirocco 7 Levante’ in Collected Poems, Keeley, E., Sherrard, P., (eds. & trans.), (Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995), p. 51. The hands that touched us don’t belong to us, only deeper, when the roses darken, a rhythm in the mountain’s shadow — crickets — moistens our silence in the night seeking the sea’s sleep slipping towards the sea’s sleep.16 V Returns 50. Recounts The moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The day Martin Luther King was assassinated. When Ali Agca shot John Paul II. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The horror of September the 11th. These facts become acts of memory by an infinity of grammars by which they enter (and in turn form) the moral imagination. Myriad tongues enunciate them. Variously interpreted, these events are intended upon us by a series of open-ended stories. Ultimately we experience these makings of history privately through the medium of live television, by which we are entered into a much wider, far more public and significant, majority. This majority partakes of a collective memory that claims back everyone else — at times, even when this ‘everyone’ is yet to be born. While distant in location (and position) significant majorities become ‘party’ to history through a form of collective empathy. Beyond the incomprehensible AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 82 | RETURNS 1. It will be useful to find ways of distinguishing between the private character of origins and the publicly mediated reconstruction (if not reification) of such moments. Surely two modes of origin hereby present themselves to us, which need to be kept in mind. Cf. §10 above, with reference to the circumstance that renders the public-private divide irrelevant. trauma of September the 11 th, or the sense of human triumph felt at the time of the landing on the moon or the fall of the Berlin Wall, there are other stories recounted on the grounds of such historical events. These recounts — these racconti — place a wider (ever more present) claim over the construction of history, where the private (participatory) origins of such events are re-mounted in relation to a public sphere.1 51. Givens In this concluding chapter, the definition of origin is taken up once more as an attempt to reposition it within what makes it. Surely, the private recollection of moments like September the 11 th constitute a moment of origin — a primoriality, in the sense implied by Edith Stein in her On the Problem of Empathy (cf. below) — at which point a construct of time (as well as being) becomes discernible. The mediation that is offered with this construct is in its turn mediatized by a kind of historical appropriation marked by the prosaic question: ‘Where were you when y happened?’ In itself the question is harmless. Yet implicitly it goes to assume a set of values against which one’s response is measured. Almost by way of retrieving one’s positioning within this constructed human communion, one comes to recall the moments of ‘I was at AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 83 | RETURNS z, doing x’ as a wager of one’s entire personal story. To this effect, the mediation by which such events enters the realm of the self, goes further than mere anecdotal positioning. This moment assumes, for itself and the individual, the currency of a fixed origin that operates beyond a relation of positioning (cf. §12). It begins to pertain to a deeper, significant, level of intention: There is a well-known analogy between acts of empathy and acts in which our own experiences are given non-primordially. The memory of a joy is primordial as a representational act now being carried out, though its content of joy is non-primordial. This act has the total character of joy which I could study, but the joy is not primordially and bodily there, rather as having once been alive (and this ‘once’, the time of the past experience, can be definite or indefinite). The present non-primordiality points back to the past primordiality. This past has the character of a former ‘now’. Accordingly, memory posits, and what is remembered has being.2 52. Undergrowths For Gilbert Ryle the dilemmas that ensue in the construction of different grammars require a common 2. Stein, Edith, On the Problem of Empathy, Walstraut Stein (trans.), (ICS Publications, Washington, D.C., 1989), p. 8. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 84 | RETURNS ground to be qualified as such, where any ‘resolution’ demands an ‘agreed’ terrain. We may never resolve the dilemma — as it will mark an end to human thinking if that were to happen — but we may resolve (and indeed justify) the case for not attempting to eliminate the dilemma. 3. Ryle, Dilemmas, p. 13 (my emphasis). ‘The satisfaction which we combine wth the representation of the existence of an object is called “interest”’. cf. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §2, J. H. Bernard (trans.), (Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan, New York 1974). p. 38. A live issue is a piece of country in which no one knows which way to go. As there are no paths, there are no paths to share. Where there are paths to share, there are paths; and paths are the memorials of undergrowth already cleared.3 For the memorials of undergrowth to be cleared one would assume that they are ‘declared’ as contexts of truth. Yet the truth of such undergrowth is interested (to peruse Kant’s term 4), even when the assumption of those who make the choice may be otherwise. Far from a simple construct of subjectivism, the interest by which paths are subsequently shared, is in itself an object of the process by which paths come to be concealed by undergrowth as a pattern of diverse memories. What is crucial to this ‘process’ is the relationship between the choice (taste) of truth and the givenness that presents it. Like memory, the terrain of one’s own experienced truths (those given) and the choices made (those returned), pertain to a context of empathy which drives one’s positioning beyond a formulaic relatedness between primordial narratives like joy and sadness, fulfilment or abject loss. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 85 | RETURNS The question ‘Where were you when y happened?’ is an externalised act of desperation thrown at us by two sets of questioners standing on opposed ends: (a) those who are lost for rational explanations, (b) those who want their explanations to preclude everyone else’s. Between these extremes, the dilemma should not strive to pacify the ground by mowing through the undergrowth. As Rose rightly reminds us: We cannot think without freedom because we are thought by freedom and unfreedom, their insidious, dirempted morality and legality. Let us not be holy nomads; let us invent no theologies, mend no middle — until we have explored our own antiquity.5 53. Nothing lost, nothing found The resulting cultural ‘direction’ of a broken middle remains recognised per se. As diremption it claims no terrain as such — it is neither within nor outwith the grounds of intention. Diremption is a situation which Marx, in his valorisation of freedom as making (qua human labour), struggles with, when he argues that capital ‘confronts the totality of all labours , and the particular one it confronts at a given time is an accidental matter’.6 Like labour, the mediation of the individual is suspended as a moment of potentiality ( dynamis), where it finds 5. Rose, Gillian, Judaism and Modernity. Philosophical Essays, (Blackwell, Oxford 1993), p. 51. 6. Marx, Karl (1973), Grundrisse, Nicholaus, M., (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 296-7. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 86 | RETURNS no solace in the optimism of secured social reform but depends on the external contingencies of hegemonic relations — of which Rose makes us fully aware: 7. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 48. (my emphasis) 8. This reconstruction of a future in reverse is the subject of Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962), where history is retrieved from individual memories to reconstruct a future that is ultimately cannibalised out of a ‘made’ past. I have discussed this in Easels of Utopia, pp. 108ff. It has become easy to describe trade unions, local government, civil service, the learned profession — the arts, law, education, the universities, architecture and medicine — as ‘powers’. And then renouncing knowledge as power, too, to demand total expiation for domination without investigation into the dynamics of configuration, of the triune relation which is our predicament — and which, either resolutely or unwittingly, we fix in some form, or with which we struggle, to know, and still to misknow and yet to grow. Because the middle is broken — because these institutions are systematically flawed — does not mean that it should be eliminated or mended.7 This is where a recognition of democracy as paradox (cf §17, 18) should be read against the scenario of exchange and consumption as arising from particular choices of what is given and not as (economic, social or aesthetic) absolutes that give. The contingent nature of the choice of labour is confronted by a set of interested makings that we construct in reverse, as a kind of entelecheic hope for a future that is, in itself, a ‘made’ past. 8 Implicit in Marx’s work is the hope that the actuality of labour is recognisable as an implied ontology of freedom that somehow enables AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 87 | RETURNS the construction of a better future.9 In its very entelecheic currency, this teleological hope recalls an Aristotelian (later Thomist) theology of inevitability as an act of human fortitude. Here, even in the contingent (and sophist) dysfunction of actuality (which is, in its accidentality, the rule and not the exception of the human condition), individuality and its quest for mediation is trusted with its own ways of self-preservation. Rose rightly argues that this optimism is not lost, even in the post-modern attempt to dispel it: 9. Again, I refer to Adorno’s interjection (cf. §36, above) where he questions the absolute of historical antagonism: ‘[Marx and Engels] could not foresee what became apparent later, in Post-modernism is submodern: these holy middles of the revolution’s ecstatic divine milieu, irenic other city, holy community failure even where — face to face or Halachic — and the unholy one of the it succeeded: that perpetual carnival market, bear the marks of their domination may unexplored precondition: the diremption between the outlast the planned economy moral discourse of rights and the systematic actuality of (which the two of power, within and between modern states. And therefore them, of course, they will destroy what they would propagate, for once has not confused substance is presented, even if it is not ‘represented’, with state however ‘continuous’ with practice, it becomes capitalism) — a potential whereby procedural, formal, and its meaning will be configured the antagonistic and corrupted within the prevailing diremptions of trend shown by Marx and Engels, the antagonism of economics towards mere politics, is extended beyond the specific phase of that economics’. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 321.) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 88 | RETURNS 10. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 47-8 (my emphasis). 11. Seferis, ‘Scirocco 7 Levante’ in Collected Poems, p. 51. morality and legality, autonomy and heteronomy, civil society and state.10 Ultimately the ‘condition’ raised by Seferis’s presentiment about the external, hapless truth of the hands that touch us being not ours (§49), is neither a fact of despair nor an excuse for theology. As there is nothing lost, nothing will be found: In the shade of the big ship as the capstan whistled I abandoned tenderness to the money-changers.11 54. Strange words At this point, we must reconsider the ‘origins’ by which the ground for avant-nostalgia returns to the memorials of undergrowth as a polity that is legitimised by the fact of its quotidian being (§25). Given that avant-nostalgia implies the origin as an everyday event, often emerging in jocular fashion by positing a series of contingent points of recollection (§23), origins have to be taken on the different lines of thinking from reversed teleology. I propose that we examine this within a parallel reading of two texts by Gillian Rose and Edith Stein: AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 89 | RETURNS As my grandfather lay dying, he lapsed into High German, a language, which, like all German products but German automobiles in particular, had been banned from my grandparents’ house and presence since the war. (…) As he lay there plucking at his heart, the forbidden words poured out of his mouth. I was the only close mourner who could understand what he was trying in his agitation to convey. This was his final bequest: the very language into which I believed that I had safely alienated my adult vocation by becoming a scholar of German philosophy. I had taught myself German, which is a highly inflected language, by reading the works of T. W. Adorno. I was attracted by the ethical impulse of his thought, but also by the characteristics of his style, the most notoriously difficult sentence structure and the vocabulary full of Fremdworter [strange {foreign} words]. This embarkation also betrays a The living body cannot be separated from the givenness of the spatial outer world. The other’s physical body as a mere physical body is spatial like other things and is given at a certain location, at a certain distance from me as the center of spatial orientation, and in certain spatial relationships to the rest of the spatial world. When I now interpret it as a sensing living body and emphatically project myself into it, I obtain a new image of the spatial world and a new zero point of orientation. It is not that I shift my zero point to this place, for I retain my ‘primordial’ zero point and my ‘primordial’ orientation while I am emphatically, nonprimordially obtaining the other one. On the other hand, neither do I obtain a fantasized orientation nor a fantasized image of the spatial world. But this orientation, as well as the empathized sensations, is con-primordial, because the living body to which it refers is perceived AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 90 | RETURNS 12. Rose, Gillian, Love’s Work (Vintage, London 1997), pp. 52-3 (my emphasis). 13. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, pp. 61-2. further motivation: an inexorable inner need to experience my dyslexia in daily intercourse with the signs and syntax of Adorno’s forbidding universe. Was this recalcitrant medium, whose rigours I had willingly assumed, a legacy, a return to ancestral tradition, and not, as I had thought, the channel for my protestantism against the broken promises of the mothertongue?12 as a physical body at the same time and because it is given primordially to the other ‘I’, even though non-primorially to me.13 This parallel rendition requires a clear distinction between Rose and Stein — and this notwithstanding the apparent commonality of grounds found in an ‘ancestral tradition’, Judaism, which they would both ‘leave’ (though never stop from conversing with). This is, however a deviation and an unwanted ‘shortcut’. The Judaic is a consequence of origins that come and go as Rose and Stein wish. This choice of Stein and Rose wants to be seen as partly serendipidous and partly plotted — without feeling compelled to write an other column which appropriates both. Stein and Rose have nothing to do with each other, AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 91 | RETURNS and Rose does not reference Stein’s work in her texts (I stand to be corrected if otherwise). So the choice is deliberate by a way of citing a discussion that is partly assumed upon mention of the issues of memory, body and origin, even when prima facie there is neither memory nor body nor origin to be had. 55. A ‘forbidding universe’ So why a parallel reading of Rose and Stein? In the case of Gillian Rose, we are presented by a text — Love’s Work — that unlike others (such as The Broken Middle and Judaism and Modernity) confronts us with the prohibitions of biography. In Love’s Work we are not sure whether she wants us to empathise, simply pry or move away. The intimacies Rose gives, challenge the reader into questioning whether he or she has a right to read. Rose, knowing she’s terminally ill, seeks to write a text that does not give readers the right to read — a gift to which we are not worthy. Yet out of respect (and ultimately love) we are compelled to read. And with that we read not only about love, but also about the shattered middles by which love is challenged, precluded or ultimately destroyed — yet without which, love cannot become: ’Exceptional, edgeless love effaces the risk of relation: that mix of exposure and reserve, of revelation and reticence.’14 14. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 98. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 92 | RETURNS Rose deliberately inhabits the broken middle between end and language and thereby reveals to us the reticence by which love, like philosophy, becomes ancestral through its prohibitive contexts. The language that is prohibited by her family (by the ways of genealogy) is a direct response to the anathema that culminated in Auschwitz. Yet the Grandfather’s claim to genealogy has nothing to do with the myth of ethnicity. Here, genealogy holds to a love that liberates him — as well as his grand-daughter — by a greater reappropriation of a fuller genealogy. The Grandfather claims back a lineage that was deliberately shorn, and to that effect he rightfully claims the ground prohibited by fascism. Rose takes this backwards and returns into the genealogy sideways. She siphons the patriarch’s freedom and returns with a biography that is also rightfully hers. Her protestant severance from the legislature of univocally authorised exegeses is moved by an appropriation of a wider — yet more intimate and personalised — ancestry, which she celebrates by ‘an inexorable inner need to experience [her] dyslexia in daily intercourse with the signs and syntax of Adorno’s forbidding universe’. 56. Gaps of projection While in Love’s Work we witness Rose’s claim to an end as a rightful origin, Stein’s project is cited at its source, where like empathy, thought resides within the ‘zero point’ of the ‘I’ whose trajectory ultimately redounds onto her own life. Stein’s life attests to the reiteration of origin as intended moments of the ‘I’ — zero points assumed primordially by the knowledge of distinction between what is given and what has been received: AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 93 | RETURNS I now untie the past experience, which first arose before me as a whole and which I then took apart while projecting myself into it, in an ‘apperceptive grip’. Diverse forms of memory can have a variety of gaps. Thus it is possible for me to represent a past situation to myself and be unable to remember my inner behavior in this situation. As I transfer myself back into this situation, a surrogate for the missing memory comes into focus.15 One ventures to follow the origin through the ‘variety of gaps’ that present themselves within the diverse forms of memory. If within the gap there remains an apperceptive grip, the shift from a lineage to another (or better the bending of time within the purpose of genealogical structures and threads) would attest to a convergence of points of position. Here the ‘I’ assumes — in its apperceptive ability to empathise — a predisposition to convert and thereby claim its right on the makings of its origins. To read Stein’s conversion to Catholicism (and her consequent entrance in the closed Order of Carmel) through the appropriation of the I’s reconstructed origins (read gaps; read apperceptive grips — though do not make one equivalent to the other) is to take back Stein into her own love’s work and recognise an ‘authenticity’ that the Catholic church may well be right to take into the realm of sainthood.16 15.Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 9. 16. Under her Carmelite name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1998. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 94 | RETURNS Stein’s ultimate death in Auschwitz takes the very discussion of origin further. If Auschwitz represented the horror of the myth of origin, it is in Stein’s work that we take solace and reappropriate the rational task which must return us with the ability to appropriate what is rightly ours — as indeed Rose asserts with her Grandfather in his claim for the language of his ancestry. By way of illustration I would refer to one of Stein’s latter works, Finite and Eternal Being, which I would cite in parallel with another passage from Rose’s Love’s Work: Does this mean then that the feeling of existential security has been proven [by Heidegger] objectively groundless and irrational and that therefore ‘a passionate … consciously resolute and anxiety-stricken freedom toward death’ represents the rational human attitude? By no means. The undeniable fact that my being is limited in its transience from moment to moment and thus exposed to the possibility of nothingness is counterbalanced by the equally undeniable fact that despite this transience, I am, that from moment to moment I am sustained in my being, and that in my fleeting being I share in enduring being. In the knowledge that being holds me, I rest securely. This security, however, is not Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as complicated as the relationship in general — even more so. Kiss, cares and penetration are the relation of the relation, body and soul in touch, two times two adds up: three times three is the equation. The three I harbour within me — body, soul and paraclete — press against the same triplicity in you. What I want, my overcharged imagination, AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 95 | RETURNS the self-assurance of one who under her own power stands on firm ground, but rather the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm. And, objectively speaking, this kind of security is not less rational. For if a child were living in the constant fear that its mother might let it fall, we should hardly call this a rational attitude.17 released inside your body, taken up into mine, with attack and with abandon, succumbs so readily and with more joy than I could claim, to your passion, pudency and climax.18 57. Paraclete (or The logic of the case) Exhorted by the need to provide ground for the narrative of love, Rose presents us with a description of a triune state of affairs that emerges from touch as body, soul and paraclete. This figures a ‘logic of the case’, where case stands for foundation (qua essence) as conjoined in the Damascene’s triple concept of hypóstasis, person and individual (§ 35). Stein’s objection to Heidegger’s existential deferral gains further relevance in this context, especially when her theological narrative is read in parallel to Rose’s. On 17. Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Being, cited in Stein, Edith, Essential Writings, John Sullivan (ed.), (Orbis, New York 2002), p. 68. 18. Rose, Love’s Work, pp. 63-64. (my emphasis) AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 96 | RETURNS 19. Wittgenstein Ludwig, Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge, 1930-1932, Desmond Lee (ed.), (Blackwell, Oxford 1980), p. 10. the grounds of the I, the extension by which the I gains rational meaning — or indeed, from which it imparts its own case — comes to us as paraclete-hypóstasis: a gift that returns us with another logic — that of the possible. As Wittgenstein reminds us, ‘thought must have the logical form of reality if it is to be thought at all. Grammar is not the expression of what is the case but of what is possible. There is a sense therefore in which possibility is a logical form.’19 58. In the gift of mortality Almost symbolically, by way of Odysseus’s nóstos, I propose that we return to the offensive of anamnesis (cf. § 21). As a story that extends to an epic of survival, Odysseus’s homecoming is recounted by a narrative made real in the gift of mortal words. By the force of these words, the logic of possibility rebounds within the need of survival: (...) ‘So then, royal son of Leartes, Odysseus, man of exploits, still eager to leave at once and hurry back to your own home, your beloved native land? Good luck to you, even so. Farewell! But if you only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore, AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 97 | RETURNS you’d stay right here, preside in our house with me and be immortal. Much as you long to see your wife, the one you pine for all your days ... and yet I just might claim to be nothing less than she, neither in face nor figure. Hardly right, is it, for mortal women to rival immortal goddess? How, in build? In beauty?’20 Calypso’s questions decree the logic of the case, where the ground holds no space for paradox, because for a deity the choice between truth and fallacy does not exist. Calypso’s divinity is pronounced in its totality as a language whose ‘propositions represent a state of affairs and are either true or false’.21 Such a privilege of certainty is only in the gift of the gods, and to the (divine) logic of the case, time is strictly ontological and is not preoccupied with the phenomenal. In her relationship with human time and being, Calypso could partake of both the logic of the case and that of possibility — as it partook of the human and the divine in her love towards Odysseus. But her questions concerning Penelope are foreclosed by the certainty of Zeus’s decree that her lover is to return to Ithaka. Odysseus, on the other hand, partakes of no logic of the case. As a mortal, his being is incumbent with the weight of time and its uncertainties. Conscious of his mortality he has no choice but to master the logic of possibility. His answer gains the favour of spatio-temporal 20. Homer, The Odyssey, Robert Fagles (trans.), (The Softback Preview: London 1997). V: 223-236, p. 159. 21. Wittgenstein, Lectures. Cambridge, 1930-1932, p.10. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 98 | RETURNS currents, and in the knowledge of Zeus’s decree, he also knows that the divine and the human could inhabit — in their temporal possibilities — the antinomic grounds of love and sensuality; loyalty and pleasure: 22. Odyssey, V: 238-247, p. 159. ‘Ah great goddess’, worldly Odysseus answered, ‘don’t (be angry with me, please. All that you say is true, how well I know. Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you, your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all and you, you never age or die ... Nevertheless I long — I pine, all my days — to travel home and see the dawn of my return. (...)’22 Knowing his limits, Odysseus masters the possibilities he has at hand. Unlike the goddess, the uncertainty of his temporal fortunes makes the mechanism of the dilemma incumbent on him. If the logic of the case is in the gift of immortals; dilemmas are in the gift of mortals whose temporal being needs to master the ruses of the body (by which one may indeed project a semblance of a case). While Calypso could only mimic dilemmas, Odysseus has to live by them: Even as he spoke the sun set and the darkness swept the earth. AVANT-NOSTALGIA | 99 | RETURNS And now, withdrawing into the cavern’s deep (recesses, long in each other’s arms they lost (themselves in love.23 23. Odyssey, V: 248-251, p. 159. 59. Spaces left behind Far from the Odyssean clamour of struggle and claim over Penelope’s suitors, homecomings pertain to the enigma that expects to recoup a space it left behind — only to find that it has long gone by: I arrived, panting. The face, the skin, the look. Everything had changed. The loved ones met me, while around them there extended far into the distance the sublime with its special atmosphere and clamour. My heart said to me: Settle in its shade, and may the Eternal preserve it.24 24. Mahfouz, Naguib, ‘The Journey’ in Mahfouz, Naguib, Echoes of an Autobiography, Denys JohnsonDavies (trans.), (Anchor Books, New York 1998), p. 54.