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.  

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. 

 

Correction

(to my last post)

It is Part IV actually and its title is On Human Servitude and on the Strength of the Affects. I've read a page, with an intimation of possible future pleasure and of power, but I read it without conviction. So much for powering ahead with one's reading (Please see the date of my last post).

Perhaps I will bring the Spinoza to Crete next week. Perhaps not.   

A desire

Hatred and anger, rage even. Now, at last, I have themes, I hope, or starting-points.

I have been intending for a few years to have a serious go at Spinoza's Ethics. I thought that I would need to begin at the beginning, Part I, on God, but now think that Part III, on the affects, may do it.

My anger, how can I be, if not its master, its more than equal? Can you help me, Baruch de Spinoza? I am in need of a leg up.

I will have to wait until I get home, though. I am with Paul and his family in Holland, and I haven't seen a copy in the house here. 

Shopping blues, loving Simmel

I am walking down Oxford St., having difficulty shopping. As usual, it is dense with already well dressed young people carrying shopping bags of clothes. They bomb along. The threat of all the people, and a flashback, of walking through the restaurant at Belfield (University College, Dublin) aged eighteen, overpowered by the scale of it, and the number of students.

Unable to buy anything, fearing disintegration, I reach for something abstract. I think of Simmel and of one of his essays on fashion ('Zur Psychologie der Mode'), and this steadies me.   

The numbers on the street. Why, I ask myself, do people in cities dress better than people in the country? The larger the city, the better they seem to dress, and the more important it is to dress well.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. It is easy to think of smaller cities where people dress better than in larger ones. Think of any city you know in France smaller than Dublin (population one million) and people dress there better than in Dublin. (Take it from me if you do not know Dublin!) In Milan or Vienna they dress better than in larger London. But there is something, even so, in the rule. Differences of national culture aside, and all other things being equal, the larger the city,the better we dress. The less badly I dress.

The larger the city, the more abstract is the experience of its inhabitants. The larger the city, the more removed we are from the person sitting beside us in the underground, the less we know our neighbour living in the flat underneath. There are again, of course, exceptions to this, as many as you want! But the bigger the city, the more likely is this to be the case.

The city is a place of specialisation. Its inhabitants have specialised jobs. They tend to know people in a specialised circle and live in that world. The more specialised a line of work is, the more it is formalised, which has an impact on the life-world of those whose living it is. Formalisation is a type of abstraction. Functions, relations, interdependeces, out of these a concrete sub-culture and style grow. But the moment of abstraction seems to me primary.

The bigger the city, the more specialised the jobs, the more abstract the form of life.

With a level of abstraction comes a corresponding degree of definition of self through it, in many areas, including shopping and clothing. One looks at colours, shapes, textiles, styles from the perspectve of one's own particular, specialised, world into which gradations and distinctions are already built. Finding one's style against this background,  within its limits, involves making further, finer, grades of distinction. The result is that the larger the city, the more fine-tuned is the sense of dress ... everything else still bring equal!

I don't think that Simmel has these thoughts anywhere but they are built out of elements of his thought.They are potted Simmel. The focus in his essay 'Zur Psychologie der Mode' is more on understanding fashion as this always delicate, shifting, balance between two conflicting needs, to be of the group and to be individual.

So, if these thoughts steady me on Oxford St., do they allow me to understand why I find shopping for clothes so difficult, and why Belfield so many years ago flashed into my mind?

I think that I am using these ideas in part to rationalise a shortcoming!  I am trying to explain why other people on Oxford St. appear to have in the main less difficulty overall in shopping. Yes, I have returned recently to this metropolis and I am not yet working so not that inserted in the life of the city, and, yes, this may make it that bit more difficult for me to choose a shirt but it is not the main reason for my difficulty.       

What is it? I do not know exactly but it has more to do the play between group and the individual in Simmel's essay than it has to do with my ideas above about the impact of the relative scale of cities on their inhabitants' dress sense. Both moments, the throng of students in Belfield, the throng of people on Oxford St., have to do with some difficulty in defining myself over against the group, with a fierce desire to do this and an inability to. Shopping for clothes exposes some older wound, a problem perhaps of 'ego development', God knows what. Shopping goes deep. Thinking and writing used to hide this wound, I think, or be balm for it, or act as compensation, but, now, a few thoughts like these touch this place as well. Perhaps this is good!

Any comments would be welcome in this vague place!

 

 

 

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.

Interpretation as self-understanding that does not know its name

I got a comment here some weeks ago from the_tower, a student of Chinese, Psychology and Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley. It was in response to a previous post of mine on something that he had written. His comment marked an advance for me. So far, bar Bea who is family (my niece), I have not attracted readers to, or comments on, my blog! Admittedly, I had asked the_tower to comment, but even so ...

I paste the_tower's comment (I have added a few links to it). He wrote:
    

Hi, sorry for getting back so late.
I don't know what TrackBack is, so I doubt I got anything from you. I did read this post in response to your comment on my LJ [Live Journal].
To be honest I'm a little surprised you found that post, as most things I say on my blog go unnoticed by all save my friends (and flist).
The post in question was originally composed in a fit of annoyance at the number of spats that occur in the various fandoms between opinionated fans, not only because of how stubbornly they cling to their own beliefs and refuse to give any leeway to the opinions of others, but also because many of these spats could have been avoided if the writers had attempted to communicate their thoughts more clearly. A lot of these fandom wars are reported and mocked at a Journal Fen community called Fandom Wank . Thoughts about the immense popularity of Fandom Wank and of the frequency with which certain online communities get reported there led to thoughts about the pitfalls of communication online in general, which led to the post. Another thing that prompted the post was my personal experience with instant messaging through programs like AIM, where, if I don't know someone personally, it's slightly harder to establish some sort of connection, or rapport, with the person.

In my initial post which the_tower has read, I had written:

What most interests me in the_tower’s thoughts is the sense he gives of how the other person, or other people, are almost present. Online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. It is virtually (in the sense of 'almost' ) one. There is a desire for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence. Are you there?

the_tower didn't comment on this in his response but re-reading these sentences of mine now, it seems to me that they had little to do with what he had written, that I was simply interpreting his post to say what I happened to want to say, as interpreters often do.

I am less confident than I was a few weeks ago of the truth of what I said i.e. that online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. But I think it is fair to say that my posts on Bea (beginning with 'Advice from Beatrix Joyce (my niece)' have the form of a conversation. I doubt now whether there is, as I wrote

a desire [in blogging generally] for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence

But this is, I think, a good interpretation of my posts on Bea.

Interpretation is often self-understanding that does not know its name. I was not writing about the_tower's post at all but about myself.   

Has it ever struck you, as it often does me, how, when someone complains about someone else, the complaint is more true of the person complaining than it is of the person who is being complained about?   

I have just posted a comment on the_tower's blog: 
 
Dear the_tower (Do you, by the way, have a more common-or-garden name that you would be prepared to reveal to me?),
thanks for posting a comment on my blog, and sorry to have been so very slow to acknowledge it. I hope that you get that essay done today.
By way of response to your comment, I've posted something on my blog again. I don't know if you'll make head or tail of it. I risk disappearing up my own bottom. But I feel that, sometimes, you have to take risks where you hope that, later on, you will understand why you took them.
I've been making some gentle progress on my blog, though I still don't know how TrackBack works exactly! I've been posting mainly on my niece Bea, and trying to get her to start a blog. The purpose is to try to get my writing going again after finishing a doctorate. I went into a kind of writer's depression after it. What I'm noticing in my posts on Bea is that there is some gentle humour in them, and that is a good sign for my writing endeavours, however tentative they are for now. I am entertaining myself, which is a start.
I am going to post this message as part of the post that I have just finished (bar pasting this into it). I hope that is O.K..         
Best wishes and thanks again,
Conor
www.conorthoughts.net

My book 'Carl Einstein in Documents'

I'm killing two birds with one stone here, and bringing a third into being while I'm at it.

I want to make a quick first post in the Categories Art and Philosophy, to get them going.

My book 'Carl Einstein and Documents' is partly about art but also has a philosophy dimension.

The third bird is a new Category, Literature: Einstein and the other person that the book is mainly about, Georges Bataille, were writers including of novels.

Here is a page on the book. I am not marketing it, of course!