Austerlitz (Benjaminian Musings)

Both Sebald’s Austerlitz and the National Socialist propaganda machine represent a sort of foil of poesis, or a sort of an anti-poesis, in the sense that the success of the project in either instance depends on a necessary repression of history’s fundamental becoming. The latter, a particularly disrespectful, authoritarian cousin of poesis, attempts to enforce univocality on its object, history, the essence of which is really characterized by flux, lability, polysemy, forcing supplementary stasis—ossification—upon suppleness. Becoming becomes Being through a violent transmutation of the present progressive of history into the present perfect of the photographic image, which inaugurates a simulacrum of history in the form of the archive in that the essential vitality of becoming, instead of remaining immanent to events, is attenuated into the silent metonymies of association connecting each constituent photograph of the archive to the others.

Such violence, however, sets in motion an infinite regress as old as Zeno: segments remain, in spite of any photochemical violence wrought upon them, intractably divisible into more segments; even something as lightning-quick as a shutter-click contains a duration itself infinitely divisible. As a consequence, there lurks in the perceived synchrony of the photographic image an indomitable diachrony only partially repressed through attenuation—a part maudite, an indivisible remainder, ghostly, half-remembered, haunting the photograph. Every photograph, then, contains a fiction: the triumph of the will to meaning over time itself in the age-old struggle of mimesis and reality, resulting, as the National Socialist’s Weltanshauung suggests, in an imagined nation of human imagination populated by privileged elements suspended in harmonious synchrony and purged of fugitive diachrony, its unassimilable Other.

Dialectics silenced, history apotheosized, happenstance and contingency overdetermined as efficient causes and thus fixed into necessity, into a national narrative—the National Socialist project finds an apt material metaphor in the photograph, an object born of light (kinesis, ousia), emulsion (matrix, milieu), paper (substrate) and fixative (logos)…

A Roof of One's Own

I cannot help but continue thinking Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception quite apposite when it comes to everything that's going on in the current housing market debacle.

The sovereign's organs, in this case, the Fed and the Treasury, determine the states of exception that leads to thrifty and prudent people getting screwed by the inevitable inflation to follow. The sovereign and homo sacer, used here in a more attenuated sense as s/he who has been placed outside fundamental economic laws that punish improvident behavior, occupy spaces beyond the thresholds that contain prudent householders and renters, whose own financial well-being has been thrown on the fire in order to deal with the aftermath of the housing bubble. Troubling thing is, though, these thresholds tend to drift and to contract, until the very status invoked as the ideal — "homeowner" as fully realized American citizen — no one any longer actually has. Democratizing access to a certain status, in other words, effectively destroys that status.

I find in the Fed's current remedies to the mortgage crisis — buyout–bailouts and tax "carry–backs" — a certain homology with the machinations in Bush's Justice Department. It's the same logic as that underwriting the notion of "the ownership society," which allows mouthpieces in the DOJ, and even Bush and Cheney themselves, to claim that none of the anti-terror legislation ushered in over the past seven years has done anything negative to essential constitutional protections like habeas corpus, when, in fact, habeas corpus has been stripped of all its legal "teeth." It has been reduced to a purely a formal, conceptual entity, a placeholder in conversations about the constitution and the law; just as "the small business owner" is a purely rhetorical construct for campaign speeches, its objective correlative having been all but driven out of existence by big box stores.

Fish Baits

Concerning the Stanley Fish review mentioned in my previous post, which, incidentally, appears to have drawn the attention of folks over at Print Culture, my friend, in an e-mail message to me, make the following observations:

The problem with French theory, I think, is its language, which is an even more recondite Newspeak than that spoken by Enlightenment rationalists, with their zeal for coining words to categorize everything. This incomprehensible discourse became a safe haven for professionalizing academics who were coming under fire for not producing anything pragmatic. The fortress of impenetrable jargon made it plausible for the academics to argue that what they were doing was over their philistine critics' heads.

But deconstruction -- the idea that ideology is constructed and malleable -- has mainly been a boon to advertising, supplying working models for undoing prejudices against, say, wasteful spending or frivolous identity-making. Deconstruction immediately opens the possibility of ongoing, perpetually incomplete (and perpetually profitable) reconstruction. Hence women are always "becoming" women and men, men, etc.

I suppose deconstruction bears responsibility for lending itself to those we'd least like to see brandish its exegetical powers, namely marketers and PR flaks; but, in hindsight, this seems like it was inevitable, even if French theory had never taken off in the US and turned the nation's universities into hermetic cloisters of a new secular priest class. It just too bad that deconstruction can't lead us out of the deadlock it has led us into.

Which is perhaps why I've found myself drawn to Badiou's work. Badiou is a French theorist who's up to something quite different from his cohort. I especially like how he reconceptualizes the Real as simply the void or null set that makes positive sets possible, rather than some all-encompassing yet ineffable roil of force that informs our every word and thought without being expressible in them. Though Badiou's ontology is difficult to summarize succinctly, the upshot, as it applies in ethical and political domains, is that truth needn't be a priori; it can be contingent and a posteriori and remain truth. Badiou offers, I think, the possibility of reconciling the competing agendas of academicians in the humanities. Events in their radical, unforeseen contingency can guide accurate veridical ad hoc discourses of them, if individuals only enter into an honest composition with the event's truth.

Freedom Theory

Yesterday's online edition of the New York Times contains a review by Stanley Fish of François Cusset's history of French theory in these United States, to be published in English early next month. Fish takes the opportunity to survey the fate of transplanted Gallic innovation from his privileged vantage point from the ivory tower's pinnacle, and concludes with Cusset that, in the hands of American practitioners, these various imported "-isms" (Fish focuses mainly on deconstruction) became the very things that their originators abhorred: political instruments to be brandished at a stultifying status quo in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Funny thing is, though, these instruments — particularly deconstruction — proved ill-suited to the tasks to which they were turned, for the principle governing deconstruction, as well as French theory generally, is that a definite position — on anything — is the hobgoblin of little minds. French theory could certainly deconstruct the political assertions of the status quo, but it could not construct an alternative to them in their place. The misguided attempt to do so on the part of leftist American intellectuals, Fish writes, has led to an enfeebling, permanent saturnalia:

But, Cusset observes, “Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible,” and even though the “very logic of French theoretical texts prohibits certain uses of them,” they have not refrained from “taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work.” The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.

Fish strikes a keynote usually associated with departmental fuddy-duddies that literature and the humanities has collapsed into a babble of political tongues, ones of such limited application that they seldom apply to any more than a few individuals, and perhaps to only one individual in many cases, viz., the whole phenomenon of identity politics.

The irony of this all, as I see it, is that precisely in its refusal to admit that when we talk about the world its actually the world that we talk about, and not some prior discourse about the world, French theory has contributed to a refashioning of the academic world in its own image and likeness as a fractious, anarchic place — a bellum omnia contra omnes of agendas and egos — never again to find the sweetness and light of common endeavor or purpose.