blah-feme

the coordinates of theory

What are the coordinates of theory? This is a question that has been pressing itself on me for some time now. I ask the question not least because I find myself in an ever more hostile political and epistemological environment in which the backlash against theory has not only taken up its place in those ‘post-theoretical’ rhetorics of well known well-trodden high-profile debates (Eagleton, et al) but the backlash has become absolutely generalised: to theorise, it now seems, is to leave oneself open to the distinction of mere crass generalisation.

I am, to be sure, perplexed by the wholesale academic abandonment of theory in my own discipline. But it is not localised there, of course. My discipline’s falling out of love with theory is, inevitably, a falling out of love with the idea of thought as having a kind of ‘power’ as Simon Critchley has put it. For some, the decline of philosophy into theory is the beginning of the problem, but for me that moment marked a particular fecundity in the idea that the given-ness of the world is available to radical question.

In a recent presentation to my own department, a rather surly and unfocussed ‘question’ (I use the word most generously here) from a colleague raised the question as to my own location in the theoretical edifice I was trying to elucidate: his intervention was based, it seemed to me, on the erroneous notion that any theoretical observation must begin from an obsessive empirical elaboration of the speaker’s voice in it, as if to defuse from  the start any claim it might therefore be able to make to having any effect on the world around it. I was ‘cherry picking’ my examples, I was trying to negate my own investment in the world. The question was followed by an incomprehensible testament to the ‘reality’ of political action in Greece and other recent events in the world as if to dare to think at all is always already to turn one’s back on them.

This kind of question, and many like it, rather than seeking to engage the world in a radicalising way (in developing . that is a strong trajectory) points to a certain poverty in our ambition in engaging the world: we are prisoners of the new Taleban of empiricism. Theory is the blasphemy that questions the reality principle, that will not quieten its distrustful mutterings about ideology and unspoken truths.

Theory is, I have always believed, and believe it even more strongly than ever, precisely about a turning towards the world, a head-on tackling of the brutal and deadly challenges it poses and a wilful nay-saying to the grey orthodoxy of detail, of historicism and of ethnography.

These, then, are the dealiest of orthodoxies, because they live and breath as if they were in touch with the world, as if the deadening quagmire of its passive avoidance of ideology critique were in some sense a priveleged site from which to get close to the world. This is mere sophistry. Theory requires always that the world be not taken as if presented, but as always already mispresented, as hidden, coded, displaced and and misaligned through the supreme act of hegemony. There is no common sense other than the sense of dying, of giving oneself up to the world in a kind of masochistic play of representations. What theory does, at its best, is not merely show this, but relive it, dramatise it. Make it palpable. Theory is materialism.

gluttony

Gluttony. The friend of the dispossessed, amorous and dark succubus you haunt me and taunt me with your cakes and creams and fried stuffs. Eat, is all I want to do when you visit; like queen of the night you swoop and howl and scream my hunger, insist I eat and eat and eat. Out, out damn rot, damn urge, damn need.

The need for food is radically different from gluttony, the latter structured not at all by hunger but by the compulsion to eat structurally. The process, once started must be finished, cannot be abandoned, must be taken to its end, the empty and reproachful dish. It approaches like a little tiny itch, a small and delicate ripple across the skin and finishes in shame shame shame on me.....

on being superfluous

I grew up with the notion that being useful was what one wanted in life: superfluity was simply not good enough, the absolute end! Be useful, I was told, and you shall be happy! I remember, when I stumbled, as a callow and impressionable youth, onto the notion of the superfluous man or lišnij čelovek (лишний человек) in Russian nineteenth-century literature, the joy at discovering that forbidden purpose, the end of purpose itself in these men: Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev, they all speak of useless men, men without aim or need, men who sit around, languish, take up, perhaps, a gentleman’s post in the army for a short while, travel, write memoirs and take a lover or two. 

And so I read and read, devouring these men, insatiably wanting not only to understand them, but to become them. To be that, I thought, is what I really want: I wanted, that is, to be someone who lived without purpose or need, outside the demands of the awful gray misery of the work ethic.
At last, I thought, a way of being absolutely nothing. 

And so it was that I bought a long trench coat and started smoking French cigarettes; I developed a habit of sprawling in demonstrative melancholy in cafes with long and intricate works of Russian literature; I never went anywhere without my copy of Lermontov’s collected early poems or A Hero of our Time and was always close to my Turgenev and my Yevteshchenko; I stopped eating proper meals and took up a prodigious alcohol habit; I stayed up all hours listening to the Doors; smoked too much and went about the business of wasting time with a zeal and conviction of which only someone fully imbued with the protestant work ethic is capable. 

And yet, to be nothing, I found, was a very tricky business. One had to find ways of doing nothing which involved as little work as possible, whilst only ever spectacularly succeeding in doing nothing once one had made the appropriate and diligent preparations; and one could only spectacularly succeed in being nothing, once one had succeeded in doing nothing. 

It was actually quite complicated. You see, you had to find a way of setting the day up such that sprawling and procrastinating could become bearable. This was the trickiest part of the process: to be and do nothing meant having endless and unflinching patience. The discipline of this superfluity was extremely exacting. In response to the demands of my languishing, I developed a quite strict regimen: rise promptly at noon, avoid showering and contact with others at all cost, don elegantly ratty trench coat, toss long unkempt hair and strut out into the street with a sense of clarity and purpose afforded only to those who bathe in the glorious splendor of their superfluity. Take up residence at library, cafe, coffee shop or bar and begin the day’s languishing... Over the months and months, I started elaborating my regimen to take in certain rituals (kneel and you shall prey? Repeat and you shall be content). I experimented with kinds of walking, and attempted on several occasions to occupy space with a certain deliberateness. If I could feel my body occupying space, I thought, if I could remain consistently conscious of its fleshiness, its materiality, I could not get distracted by the ubiquitous toxicity of purpose and need... It was my ultimate desire in this to occupy space with an intention so focused, so purposeful, that could only come from an unswerving commitment to the project of nothingness. I found I could concentrate on occupying space for up to 4 minutes at a time and developed a way of setting up a posture that could block out any attempt from the outside world to shake me from my resolve: do not speak to me of time or of need, I am busy with the core of being, thank you very much. 

In the end, then, I became an exemplary layabout. The Stakhanovite heroism of my commitment to this regimen is one of my life’s greatest achievements. 

This year, I shall mostly be trying to recapture those heady days of nihil.

the end of friendship ...

It is a sad thing when a friendship ends – and such is the nature of the world that all things end. One can, for so long, hold out the prospect that what at the time seemed like a misunderstanding can be redeemed. But that too must pass, it seems, that too must die and the past is recast anew in the light of that passing. I’m done, we say, but are we really? I have tried to engage in useful work of mourning. But when I say ‘I’m done’, I have clearly only just begun to think over and over about words said, about moments and choices made, about responsibility, blame and recrimination. The repeating is like a death grip. Endlessly I revisit those moments. I wonder what I might have said differently, I torment myself with those possibilities. If only .....

The ending of a friendship draws one’s attention to the gut-wrenching fragility of them all, to the vulnerability of our social bonds and their endless hopeless devastating volatility. If there is anything to be done it is, it seems, to assess the extent to which a friendship can be repaired, and the extent to which one is prepared to prostrate oneself before the alter of that friendship, humbly taking on the responsibility for what is always already radically shared. To take on the responsibility for the end of a friendship is sometimes the only way to bring it back to life, but at what cost? Is the friendship more important than a truth that will all over again destroy it? Is the friendship more important even than one’s own sense of self-worth? Ask yourself this: could you prostrate yourself before it knowing that you have no reason to take on the burden of the friendships’ ending?

Determining that also brings with it questions as to the ‘original’ nature of the imagined friendship. Was it based simply on mutual self-interest? Was one agent of the friendship more inclined to set aside time and effort to help the other? And was there ever a time during the friendship when mutual care and mutual investment were really even-handed? Is such a thing ever possible?

It might just be that friendship is a kind of masochistic impulse in which one allows oneself to be continually taken up and used, not, necessarily in those grand earth-shattering ways, but in the tiniest of ways. And the fantasy work of the friendship is what allows one to put the smallest of injuries aside, to make sense of them only as anomalies, as small glitches in the free-flowing balance of the friendship. And we do this over and over again. We allow the small injuries, we explain them away.

But we do not accept them. To do so, I think, would be to change fundamentally, and, perhaps, productively, all our social relations. It would be, perhaps, to find the key to being more than one. A key therapeutic question arises in this moment: do I destroy my friendships because I cannot stand to be more than one? Do I destroy these social bonds because they always hurt and I cannot make peace with that hurt?

We might also ask this: is the most intimate arena of friendship an arena of vulnerability that points to the always-already flawed nature of the social itself? And would recognising that flawed and mutable nature be an opening of ourselves to something new? Perhaps the greatest lie under which we have been forced to labour since the advent of mercantilism has been precisely this: when the surplus care of any friendship remains hidden, the friendship continues to function.

The move I wish to make in trying to reclaim this friendship, then, is going to be this: I will no longer attest to a false mutuality but will bear witness to the mutability of the social bond. Once I have done that work, I can begin the mourning work.