Conorthoughts

A word for John Bull

Here is my quote of the day, of the week in fact (Why not throw in the month?):

"Many people in the world say that the English are racists. I don't agree."

Ali Farka Touré the late Malian musician in conversation with the BBC music journalist Andy Kershaw in 2003 north of Timbuktu.  

Post Job

What a job I am making of posting here. It's been so long since I've written here - it's not that I haven't been trying on and off - that I received this email recently from a friend:

"Conor - how are you? It seems a long time . . . And a long time too since you posted on your blog. People disappear for a while generally because they're distracted by happiness, or by wretchedness or something awful has happened, or sometimes just inadvertently. Reassure me - Jenny"

Jenny is not his real name though he has published a novel under it recently, receiving a very positive review (of the 'go-out-and-buy-it' type) just before Christmas in one of the broadsheets. What, by the way, are these newspapers called now that they have almost all shrunk towards tabloid scale?   

Colin Burrows ended a review in a recent Saturday Guardian of a book by John Mullan Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, on the business of publishing under a pseudonym or under no name at all, with the following lament:   

"Anonymous authorship was more or less killed off by the literary marketplace, and Mullan's book makes one feel more than a little nostalgia for its teasing concealments."

I'm not so sure about the killing off. I only know a small number of writers in London - I could count them on the fingers of one hand if a couple of my fingers were amputated - and they have published, taken together, two books anonymously within the last two months. Now if I knew twenty writers ... 

Where am I? Having made a hard job of posting, I am now sewing together, or trying to, what I have just written with a piece that was to be called 'Job' of all of eight months ago. It is a rough bit of sewing.

The

thread

is

'job'.

                                                         Job

 

Not the Old Testament Job.

I don't know whether it was just in my family or whether it was a middle-class Dublin thing or an Irish thing generally – I'm pretty sure that the word is not used in this sense by English people – but, when I was little, 'job' was, em, what you did on the toilet by using the muscles in your bottom to press hard when you had a pain there. You did a job. The job was the result of the push. It bobbed around in the water or there might be two of them or even three, with nicely curved ends. Jobs. Each time you did one or more, it or they were an impressively different brown to the time before. They were a different size and texture, the most interesting ones having a rougher, granulated, surface, irregularly encrusted with tiny pebble-like structures, often a different brown or a different colour, such as a shade of cream.

Was I proud of them? I cannot remember but as I write, pride comes to me, so I suppose I must have been. They were fine jobs, jobs well done. Sometimes they were big jobs, darker and even more solid than usual.

I had a dream last night of three jobs. The toilet was a German rather than an Irish one, that is to say, it had a water-less plateau where you can inspect your faeces before flushing them down. To talk of an Irish toilet is not correct. Like Irish law and public administration and indeed our language, the Irish toilet is English. The Slovenian philosopher Žižek has a rich passage in one of his books - I cannot remember in which, it is on my shelves but they are far away as I am in the back of beyond in Umbria and I cannot do a quick search on the internet since I have not yet asked Santi, the owner of the retreat house where I am staying, whether I can use his computer, I know that there is an internet connection (Could it be broadband?) but now is not the time to ask him, he is cooking -  yes, there is a passage in Žižek where he gives a comparative analysis of English, French and German toilets¹. He delves into the toilets'  cultural meanings and what their different forms tell us about the differences between the cultures.

There were two huge, quite dark, adult jobs in the German toilet in my dream. I knew that they were not mine. The third job I produced. It was just as impressive and adult as the two that were there already.

When I was three, my father got a big job. He hadn't had a job until then. We moved from Dublin to the town where the job was. My father was a doctor and the job was in Mallow County Hospital. It was a very difficult job. My father would come home after work - he worked long hours - and talk at length to our mother in our presence of the difficulties he was having at work.

                                                        (To be continued)

Notes
1. I am now back in London, so can give the reference:  Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 4-5.

Desperate measure

Desperate measure. My therapist says ...  My ex-girlfriend says, writes ...

I need to post something here. I've haven't posted for ages. The Way of the Cross, the way of the word. What would Warburg think of that as a remark? Nothing, probably? Something, perhaps.

What can I post? Anything? Down to the wall. Another Oompah Loompah dog?  Hardly.

Here is my street, Lupus, in Google Maps. Count five (houses) from the left and I'm somewhere down there, beneath two layers of probably still sleeping bodies, looking, on a beautiful April morning, at the trees in the school-yard opposite, one of which you just make out. Damn, it doesn't work! Desperate measure, to be continued.
 

Backwards

Reading the title essay in Jacob Taubes' Vom Kult zur Kultur (From Cult to Culture)¹, a collection of essays and articles written by the Jewish-German theologian and philosopher between 1953 and 1983 and published after his death, brings me back to Carl Einstein's book Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen² of 1933. C. Einstein was the writer on whom I did my thesis. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen was his last book. After finishing the thesis, I found myself in a place similar in some ways to the intellectual space marked out in this book. I have, in a way, lived there ever since. Maybe Taubes would help me move on, by stimulating me into looking at the Einstein book again.  

Taubes' essay was written in 1954. Thirty-one years separate it from Einstein's book. The Nazi period and the Holocaust separate them. It is difficult to read the Einstein book without thinking of it as a premonition of the disaster, and it is difficult to read Taubes' essay without thinking of what happened.

The essay 'Vom Kult zur Kultur' turns around the person who was the model for Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a character who appears in Chapter 28 of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947). His name was Oskar Goldberg. Like Breisacher, Goldberg was a philosopher of culture. Goldberg had published his main work Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews) in Berlin in 1925, having already presented it in lecture form some years earlier, between 1903 and 1908. Taubes describes Goldberg as a historian of myths who took his subject so seriously that he became a philosopher of myth.

Breisacher represents for Mann an intellectual forerunner of the conservative nihilism that led to Fascism and Nazism. Like Breisacher's, Goldberg's is a theory of decline. Culture is itself decline.

                  (To be continued)

 

Notes

1. Jacob Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu eine Kritik der historischen Vernunft, eds. Aleida and Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich und Winfried Menninghaus, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1996.
2. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation des Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert, Rowohlt, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1973. 

 

Cracked

I thought that I was mad but she is, I believe, madder. Crackeder (to be pronounced 'cractor'). Addled. Perhaps I am less mad than I thought. This is some consolation, of which I am in need.

Bitter

From bitter searching of the heart
...
We rise to play a greater part

                                        Leonard Cohen

Modern Art

I have been meaning to re-type some old writings on art so as to be able to post them here (They mostly need re-typing as files containing them have been corrupted). Here is one. It appeared in the London magazine Art Monthly in 1993 (February, ps. 25-26). I attach at the bottom a file containing the image with which the article was illustrated.

Modern Art

'Fancy a spot of Modern Art?' said the actress to the bishop. The tone of the one page catalogue may have been frivolous but it had a sharp edge. Ditto for the title. On a dreary first floor, with the heating off and no-one around, my efforts to warm up were mocked by the show’s symbolic indifference to any judgement of mine, warm or cold. ‘HO HO HO’ went a drawing in the catalogue.

In a dark room of the main space, a tall sarcophagus shaped structure, made out of cardboard boxes, had been painted in gay pink and white tablecloth squares. A cheap burial chamber perhaps? Ho ho ho. Elsewhere, two bones on springs were stuck on a stone. Cathy Sharp showed two photos, one of a woman’s high heel and body seen from below through a glass floor. Roddy Thomson had put up reproduced photos of sculpted Roman heads in two rows, with a ledge and a real mousetrap replacing eyes and nose along the bottom row. And there was a butterfly in a light bulb with a live bulb above it producing the illusion of artificial light in the bulb below; ‘If it’s shown with the GALLERY you have it’, ran the catalogue. Much of the work was not identified by artist.

Though it is easy to see this sort of humour as a trivialising form of self-defence, the show’s slapdash air of indifference matched my indifference towards it too neatly to be dismissed so easily. In an essay in his book Begriffsfelder (Merve, Berlin, 1985), the German critic Hannes Böhringer notes that, as an avant-garde aesthetic can take anything as its object, indifference to its objects is built in. Anything could do. But, instead of tracing this aesthetic indifference back to some point in the history of modern art, Böhringer locates it directly in the modern city, where we all live now, farmers included. The city is characterised, following Luhmann, as an ever more highly differentiated functional system; being nothing more than bearers of functions, individuals are exchangeable and equivalent; who they are a matter of indifference. Social indifference is the reverse side of the social differentiation into which everyone is interwoven.

This social indifference becomes, in aesthetic indifference, a form of perception. Where Simmel, in 1900, in his Philosophy of Money (Routledge, 1990) saw money as the abstract medium of perfect exchangeability, equivalence and absence of qualities which characterise the relativism of modern life, Böhringer suggests that the contemporary art world is where this relativism has come fully to life in perception. For him, contemporary art is an elementary school of perception, where the degree to which anything could be anything else – the total relativity or functional interdependence of everything, mediated by the money economy – has been learnt in modern culture. But for this to be learnt, it already had to be the way things are.

Like other, older complexes of aesthetic feelings, indifference is a receptive attitude: to be indifferent towards an object, that object must be already there. It cannot be produced by the aesthetic attitude, it must be something extra-aesthetic … like the modern city.

Artists have turned the latent aggression of social indifference – silence in the Underground – into an experience of the undifferentiated weave of things. Böhringer shows that similar – but not identical – experiences are age-old. For the Sceptics, the perception of a lack of differentiation in things brought serenity. Indifference is not deciding, not turning things into a hierarchy, a contemporary variant of which could include ‘good show’, ‘worth reviewing’, ‘striking work’, ‘impressive CV’. The Greeks called this point Ataraxia, where the mind reached an imperturbable and functional equilibrium. Contemporary art has antecedents which go back further than the first Readymade.

A corollary: if this indifference is a key element in current art, then criticism which sees this art primarily in the context of recent work may obscure the fact that contemporary art is primarily an experience of contemporary life, not a commentary on anything. Perhaps more sociology and less criticism is needed. So, differentiating the work in the show by describing it this way or that, as worth a review, to begin with (ho, ho, ho, I hear it reply), fitting it to whatever my conceptual pattern may be, is also an expression of actual social indifference: I treat it the way I want, I don’t care, differentiating it my way. And the artists, no doubt, will be indifferent to what I write. This could, after all, be any old review of any Modern Art show.

But all this talk of indifference is just another exercise to which, thanks to the work, I also end up being indifferent. ‘Thank God for Modern Art’, said the bishop, when they were done.

Modern Art (Silke Helmerdig, Georgie Hopton, Alan Kane, Sean Kimber, Simon Periton, Cathy Sharp, Roddy Thomson) was at Fountayne House, Fountayne Road, London
N15, Dec 19-Jan 1.

Here is the image with which the article was illustrated.

Workshop on Max Weber's sociology of music

Attached is an advance notice on a multi-disciplinary two-day workshop on Max Weber's sociology of music to be held in Paris on the 24/25th June. It is being co-organised by my friend Philippe Despoix. I hope to go.

Unfortunately, I only have a French version. As you can see from the notice and projected list of participants, the workshop will be strongly comparatist in thrust.

Download atelier_musique_weber.doc