blah-feme

fragments and death... towards late bloging

To write in fragments: this is the mode du jour of the late blog style. It is a hysterical, overwrought and supercharged style, symptomatic of the anxiety that attends anything in its late phase. The late style stinks of death, wreaks of an institution in terminal decay, but also holding that end off, keeping it all alive with a supreme effort of will, a willfulness that is written across every prosaic spasm; the late modality, then, is a sysyphian modality.

My friends recently gave a beautiful and challenging talk at my university about the late and posthumous voice. What strikes me in this juxtaposition (late and posthumous) is just how unstable the juxtaposition is, and therefore how intriguing, how gloriously productive. Italian Germanist Massimo Cacciari's  Dallo Steinhof, translated into English as Posthumous People,  opens with Nietzsche’s famous Maxim: ‘It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!’  Nietzsche’s textual self-projection into an abstracted reader-reception after his death touches on a ubiquitous process that had been under way in the Hapsburg lands since the 1850s and which continue right into our own predicament of the late modern – the careful reorganization of education around homogenized standards of reading and an immersion of students into and out of tradition: a kind of gentle dipping motion, like sheep in need of a good barrier against the pests and diseases of the vernacular.  Cacciari’s complex but beautiful account of the intellectual and artistic world of fin-de-siècle Vienna points in essence to the observation, metaphorically cast from the Steinhof (a hill above the metropolis on which stands the church of Sankt Leopold designed by Otto Wagner), that tradition and innovation are here ranged against each other, in productive but deadly conflict:

The symmetrical, repetitive rhythm is accentuated from the outside by a revetment of thin marble blocks. The iron clamps and bolts that keep them in place, rimmed with copper leaf borders, give a sense of motion to these walls, yet without any monumental emphasis and without any concession to ornament. Inside, the building’s perfect measure of basic forms is joined, without contrast, by the multicoloured clarity of light that streams through the stained glass windows. Here is the meeting, never realised so well, of the principles of tradition and quotation on the one hand and the Nervenleben [vitality] of the Secession Movement’s images and colour on the other.

In these two juxtapositions (late and posthumous and tradition and innovation), which refuse absolutely to coincide or resonate with each other, we can detect something of what seems to be at stake in the blogging moment (and it is a moment: this too will pass), a provocative and yet utterly hopeless questioning of the extent to which speaking and writing might have an intimate connection.

I do no want to emblamatize the writing/speaking binarism or link the two poles to a simple presence/absence oscillation. It is better, it seems to me, to think of medialities, the materializations that each allows and forbids: when one dose this, their relation is not binaristic, but differentiated along a line of medial fields (channels, ruts, dikes) and speaking and writing are close, very close, but not structurally summative, not able to grasp the full complexity of the late modern imagination of what it is possible to mean.

The late  and posthumous voices are thus fragments, parcels of symbolic material hat have broken off and  set adrift in a free from reign of  terror, of joy, of agony.

This is the logic of the fragment: to run free in chains, to play in strict discipline, to tarry and to leave, to conjure and to bury.

Late indeed; posthumous, certainly.

When the music stops: distributed agency and listening after music

In the tradition of rhetorical hyperbole, I want to make an assertion: in the West we are, I suggest, living after music.

That is to say, our engagement with music, our consumptions of it and the ways in which we understand and distribute it have 'come to constitute' (in the sense of adding up to something bigger than the sum of its parts) a very radical shift in musical ontology. At one time, (and especially since the Enlightenment) there was a clear (material) relationship between both individual and collective authorships and agency: authors (whether numerous, collective, or working 'alone') could count on something like a public marking, a naming of their work (or labour), and where such namings tended to be more fluid (as in the case, for example, of traditional musics) there was, nonetheless, always the possibility of that naming, always, in tune writing, in collecting, in performing, a kind of staged agency that made itself felt as, in some sense, having purpose.

Music since the Enlightenment, then, might be said to have channelled something like a materialised subjectivity, an unfolding of praxis in time, a performance of passing, of changing or marking time. And that changing or marking is where the sense of agency was always grounded, always held in place according to an elaborated, but essentially Cartesian, fantasy. To mark or change, so that fantasy goes, was always to guarantee some kind of ill-fit of subject to object; from that mismatch comes the very possibility of the subject, his agency, his way in and out of the world. In short, that subject had always o constitute an excess to a mere flow of semiosis.

And so the stories always seemed to have gone; but when the key elements of that fantasy come under critical scrutiny (from biology, deconstruction, radical collectivisms, feminisms, cyber-romanticisms and other forms of acted-out political hostility to the enthroning of the subject), then the agency that always seemed to drive it, as that mismatch, that sticking out of and marking of time, turns into a kind of playful automatism. It would seem that  there are no longer any singular points of agency from which political and social action can flow. No longer are we able, without irony or without seeming to cast ourselves in the role of court jester, to hold onto that myth of subject-as-purpose.

And in the ways we listen, that shift is already very clearly articulated. Indeed, we are at a place now where what Anahid Kassabian has termed 'ubiquitous listening' has come to stand for this new symptom:

As we enter the second century of the disarticulation of performance and listening, new relations are developing that demand new models and approaches. It is easy to see that the industry is changing. It is perhaps harder to hear the changes in music, in listening and in subjectivity that all of this portends. Yet musics, technologies, science fiction, social relations and subjectivities have been fermenting these changes throughout the twentieth century. At least in the metropolis, listening to music is ubiquitous, and it forms the network backbone of a new, ubiquitous subjectivity.

Kassabian is making both a startling and yet demonstrable assertion, that the modes of listening and consumption that have dominated our imagination of music (or, rather, our imagination of those  modes of listening) are under radical (perhaps even malign?) erosion, and that erosion is both a symptom and trace of a way of being that is in some sense after the subject. It is particularly in the changes that mark our consumption of music that we are most clearly able to see these changes, and this is a quality that has been ascribed to music before, most notably by Jacques Attali. There is here, though, something particularly useful in the claims Kassabian is making – her point is not that music as a set of textual traces is necessarily to be privileged over material practices but that the ways in which we encounter texts, especially musical texts such as recordings, performances (even scores) helps us understand some of the ways in which our culture marks and maintains the line between text and context. In other words, although this is not the substantial point of this article for Kassabian, there is in the analysis of the distribution and consumption of musical texts the potential for something much more far-reaching than that analysis might at first seem to offer: it is not simply about mapping where goods flow to or what hey say about class, race, gender and so on. All that is fine, but it does not capture the nub of the issue at stake here.

I would say that, beyond the demographic and harder sociological analyses of musical consumption, it ought to be possible, as Kassabian also seems to be saying, to get to something of the texture of how we imagine ourselves in the world: if these forms of 'listening' (if that is the right term) mark something profound or even momentous in our imagination of subjectivity, then I think here are a few questions we would need to ask before proceeding to a characterisation of the new situation.

The question as to the ethics of this situation is, of course, particularly fraught: what are we to make of a situation in which the agency of musical labour becomes ever more routinely curtailed or even obliterated altogether? What sense is there to make here of the ever more distended and complex copyright battles, of the intensification of litigation in he light of he putative decline of such agencies? How, in that light, are we to understand the overwhelming popular distrust of corporate structures alongside a booming music industry? What, in short, are the prospects for a level of radical engagement if agency is now always already distributed?

These politico-ethical questions (forgive this clumsy hyphenated hybrid), centre around the hegemonic justaposition of political conscious action and, to adapt and elaborate Kassabian's term, ubiquitous unconscious inaction. This has always been the hegemonic logic of political theory, is sees to me: to link citizenship, democracy,  social and civic participation to some notion of individual and collective agency which, to shorthand it rather crudely, is always to be linked to a certain notion of action, and therefore to a certain model of the subject, a Cartesian subject (meant here of course in the broadest of terms). When agency fails, it is because citizens, agents, slump (or are made to slump) into a kind of generalised apathy, a ubiquitous sloping off into automatism, into unconscious half-dead state of blind and dull obedience.

This structure looks something like this where the symbol || represents a fundamental impossibility in the sequence.

← (exception)          ||          (ubiquity) →

action = agency = citizenship || slave = automatism = inaction

Here, then, citizenship is that which guards against slavery.Or, to put it in more abstract and pared-down terms:

exception ≠ ubiquity

and, therefore, ubiquitous listening must inevitably constitute a kind of slavery.

But what if, contrary to this broadly Cartesian logic of exception and sovereignty we are all so familiar with in Carl Schmidt, we were able to rethink agency and ubiquity as part  a continuous (or  connected) sphere of action? What if, in short, ubiquity were a kind of distributed agency?

This prospect is one which I have only just started to think though, but it does seem to me that there are a number of ways in which the notion of musical agency might help here. We would inevitably  begin with a thorough-going critique of the 'simple' notion of authorship: of course this has been done to death (so to speak) and I o not propose to waste time here revisiting that question so systematically rehearsed by he likes of Bathes, Foucault and Chartier. Suffice it to say, beyond that delicious moment in the 60s, that the patrilineality of the authorial economy is that which is also its undoing. I think the more interesting set of issue to rehearse here are those that centre around the pairing conscious/unconscious. If ubiquity can be said to work as a kind of unconscious (and I am not accepting that proposition as it stands, but just test-driving it here) then to bring ubiquity into the orbit of agency would be to question profoundly the status of the unconscious as in some sense anti-conscious. In other words, both the conscious and the unconscious as such could be seen to represent modalities of consciousness that are part of a continuum. One doesn't simply flip from one state to the other but is in constant engagement with both states (if, indeed here are only two).

In other words, thinking ubiquity and agency together means recasting the very terms on which we might be said to be subjects. The political unconscious, then is not an oxymoron, as Žižek and other Freudian leftists before him have shown quite elegantly, but an essential element of he ideological life of action. We similarly think this in terms of ubiquity as, in some sense, a crucial element of exception, as in some sense continuous with action, with citizenship with sovereignty.

In this sense, the ethics of ubiquitous listening begin to look very promising indeed: background and foreground listening can come to stand for moments in the polotical workshop of consciousness.

I know you're there (the great white shark speaks)

Occasionally (very rarely, in fact)  I am caught short by the extraordinarily intense mark of intention that makes itself felt in my writing. It is not that I seek this out or look to say, say and say in a way that is of or for 'me', but that, sometimes, very rarely, I am surprised by the strong impression of encountering myself talking back to me from the 'page'.

Quite why one passage should strike me like this and another doesn't is extremely difficult to ascertain. In such moments I am called to question the popular wisdom in enlightened liberal educational institutions that characterises the programme of education as enabling students to find their own voice.

This emphasis on the search for that singular vocality in writing, for that indelible trace that cannot and will not unhinge itself from the acousmêtre of the author, is grounded in a notion hat the best of writing is always the most original, the most unique, the most individuated.

And yet, those moments that seem to 'speak' to me of me, those intensely reflexive turns in the written prose that speak back are precisely those things I dislike in my writing, Only when I am able to write as if  in control of the materials –  only as if unfolding an idea in full and erudite spontaneity, as if in short, I were someone else – only then do I feel that the writing is good, secure. In shot, writing is always for me a kind of effacement.

I want to purge those embarrassing Northern vowels, that mark of suburbia, of the Midlands, of bland, safe lower bourgeois, poorly educated autodidact. I want to write as if I were from a glorious and aristocratic generation of emigré Jews, of dissident Palestinians, of Hungarian violinist, of African rebels, or Cuban guerillas; of Clarissa Furtwangler, Szagylyn Passmaker, Hyacinth Smortlyna, Mahmoud Kobal, Cruella Rozhdestvinsky. Wouldn't it be great to be that, to be other than this white, bland, suburban bore?

When students begin to write critically, intelligently, creatively, perhaps the last thing we should do is encourage to write as themselves. Who on earth wants to do that? Why not encourage them to write as if.

AND YET.... In this tendency to efface ourselves is precisely located the operation of a certain power at its most unmediated, in this feigning of boredom with oneself, with the routinely quotidian white. To play act as if in turmoil with oneself, to march endlessly through the detritus of one's average life in search of something else, something new, something Other, is the act of a class terminally ensnared in luxury, in excess without telos, without suffering. It is the feigning, the colonising , the ruthless appropriation even of the pain this class inflicts as if to say – we cause you harm and yet we maintain the right to own your suffering, to colonise it with our soft and whining pettinesses.

Here then is precisely the burden: to rage against self is to play act as if powerless; and yet to valorise the care of that same self is to enact that brutality of a self-obsession in the face of  the cruelty inflicted on others.

No way out. No way out???

In that encounter with the self, as if speaking back to oneself from the written page, then, one experiences a moment of extraordinary uncanniness when the promise of some kind of way out is glimpsed if only for a moment: the self becomes performative, split, epistemologically impossible, the creepy doppelgänger that promises both a death and a rebirth.

I am you, speaking back to to you. Who do you think you are?

Does the blogosphere have an unconcious?

Is there something in blogging that is inherently redundant? We repeat ourselves, certainly, and go round and round the same topics; but that is not quite what I am asking here. By redundancy, I mean precisely that which cannot be taken up in the flow of argument, cannot be taken up and made part of the exchange, the movement, the shudder. Or, to put it another way, is there something in this practice of writing for a highly dispersed and often anonymous audience something left after all the reading, re-reading and exchanges that can often follow a smart or contentious post? In short, to put this precisely the way I should perhaps have put it to start with, is there an excess or remainder to blog practice that is in some sense surplus to the requirements of that practice?

Theoretical paradigms since Levi Strauss and the so-called structuralist turn make much of the figure of excess, surplus, remainder, kernel, nugget. They are not simple synonyms, of course, and I don't want to reduce them to a simple Zeitgeist, but perhaps there is in these notions something quite useful, however open to he charges of trendiness or opportunism they might at first appear. What strikes me here is the extent to which asking this kind of question brings the critical turn full circle and insists on a certain theory of place, space or territory, insisting perhaps on the primacy (however critically) of scapes, vistas, panoramas to set up the question.

In short, the question might be reworked here to speak that which it really wants to speak – what are the limits, boundaries, horizons of this thing that we do when we log on to post another post?

If we ask this question in terms of excess, the answer inevitably embraces the radically contingency of blogging: to blog, so this answer might go, is to perform the excess hat cannot perform itself elsewhere, cannot open up itself to the demands of other discursive practices. Here is the first answer then, that that which is surplus to blogging is that which blogging does not seek (or need) to find an arena for.

If we ask the question in terms of the kernel or the nugget, then the answer will inevitably seek to articulate that which blogging does not speak or say, but on which it relies, over which it is built, through which it realises itself and under which it labours: to blog, so this answer might go, is to speak in both a concious and an unconscious register.

I have been thinking about this notion for some time now since one of my most erudite and  radical  colleagues asked the question as to how the notion of the unconscious might live outside the psyche: he was talking in particular about Radio 3's Late Junction and was wondering how the hidden, the unspoken of this collectively-authored/-curated radio programme might be read. The notion of an unconscious 'outside', of course, is not altogether new and versions of the notion have existed in some form for 100s of year.

I think what is interesting about asking this question in terms of blogging is that it points up the radical openness and indeterminacy of agency in the blogosphere. Or, at least, it shows how that indeterminacy is played out in the blogosphere in a particularly intense and extreme manner.

The questioning of agency has many authors and its radicalisation in the last 20 years or so has been quite remarkable: gaming theory, theories of fields, institutions, habitus and, even, the sinthome – all these new theorisations have pulled the rug from under the Romantic construction of agency as in some sense always traceable to a small number of sources and addressing an ideal addressee.

The deconstruction (for want of a better word) of such notions is perhaps the place where the left has had most difficulty – a strong theory of political action is difficult under such circumstances, political engagement much more complex and the terms and scope of any kin of offensive action always much more difficult to determine.

What strikes me as potentially useful, though, at least for a short while, might be precisely the blogosphere's disavowal of simple (mono-directional) agency and its broader engagement with citing, pointing, referencing and quoting. One only has to subscribe to a small number of smart blogs like I cite, K punk or larval subjects, to get a sense of the radical potential for this kind of practice.

And, perhaps, the dreadfulness of the right's blogs does not have so much to do with its ideological underpinnings, but, precisely, with the extent to which the blogosphere is, dare I say it, ontologically at odds with modes of thought that seek to reduce, simplify or moralise the social field. At its best, blogging can and continues to hold the promise of refusing that kind of hectoring modality.

Of course blogging encourages a rather full-on and belligerent style of writing sometimes, and often, if one leaves comments completely open, one can be deluged with heaps of mean-spirited or even obscene comments. But this is inevitable if something is to try to maintain a contentious relationship with mainstream journalism and pubic opinion.

Of course, the blogoshpere does not guarantee anything and we must in the end take responsibility for is shape and contest its colonisers and censors; and even then, of course, there is no guarantee that these kinds of engagement will of themselves make the difference we want them to. But agency has a way of biting back, of digging in just when you think its all over, and it often does so when a number of ideas authored over a large time period are drawn together as a uniform resource: the blogoshpere might form a large part of that resource.

So does the blogosphere have an unconscious? And what might that look like? It is undoubtedly structured, undoubtedly disparate and undoubtedly marked by a radical incoherence. An yet, we all know what blogging tends towards: we have all said it many times before – he egoing, the self-analysis, the unbearable drabness of meing that makes up much of the blogosphere is at least testament to its commitment to a certain discursive tone, a to a certain politics of the ego, to a certain figuration of confession as productive. And although this will undoubtedly have to change quite radically if anything like a radical political unconscious is to emerge, its does at least point up the flaws in the arguments that the blogosphere is hopelessly fragmented.

Look at me, no me, no me.... The ubiquity of that confessional tone is what in the end disturbs it – he performative becomes ever more visible in the repeated claims to speak if/as/for self and it is there that he end might be seen...

The political unconscious of the blogosphere might yet show itself to have made something new and something gloriously radical. Hope springs eternal.

what a day

This is just a quick report from our one-day symposium at Newcastle. More to follow...

The day was entitled: Toward a philosophy of the vernacular? And was based around our reading of Richard Middleton’s new book Voicing the Popular, although no one was forced to argue from/for/against his work.

The day started with a striking paper from Mladen Dolar who stunned us with an amusing, good-natured and yet challenging look at the vernacular voice, drawing on Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, John Cage and many others.

I don’t want to go through the day by presentation, but I think it is fair to say the level of presentation and discussion was consistently extremely erudite. Issues ranged from considering the nature of the vernacular or popular voice, to a number of case studies – conspiracy theory through considerations of canon formation to the nature of the street through to theorisations of the vernacular ‘event’ (after Badiou), reclaiming the elitist within the vernacular and voice and sickness.

The day was, not surprisingly, avowedly Lacanian, with some striking attempts at strong theorisations of commitment, truth claims, fidelity, truth effects and performativity.

The round table, although inevitably slightly rambling at times (as these things always are), fell on some striking formulations and really helped both consolidate and open up the papers’ themes and orientations.

Participants :

Mladen Dolar

Jodi Dean (I Cite)
Freya Jarman
Will Edmondes
Mark Fisher (K-Punk)
Richard Elliott
Ian Biddle (Blah-feme)

Organiser:

Lars Iyer

The programme was as follows:

10.00-11.00 Keynote presentation

Mladen Dolar (University of Ljubljana): Vox populi

11.00-11.30 tea and coffee

11.30-13.00 First session:

Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York): Popular Credibility: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Freya Jarman-Ivens (University of Liverpool): Enjoying the low Other, or, Confessions of a popular musicologist

Will Edmondes (University of Newcastle): Coming Straight From The Street: Keeping It Surreal

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.30 Second session

Richard Elliott (University of Newcastle): Hail, Hail Rock 'n' Roll: Interpellation, Identification and Ideological Transference in Popular Music

Mark Fisher (UK): The Object Speaks: Grace Jones

Ian Biddle (University of Newcastle): Before the people, voice.

15.30-16.00 tea and coffee

16.00 Round Table: Toward a philosophy of the vernacular?

Mladen Dolar, Richard Middleton (University of Newcastle) and all other speakers

The textual I that haunts my reading

Who is this figure that they name as I in their texts?

I must confess to LOVE being cited – when I see something I have written up of wood s lot, or (very rare, this) mr spurious decides I have been a good enough boy to warrant a passing reference (this is me being ironic, by the way), I am always thrilled. This is unbridled monomania, of course, and it is something in me I must always struggle to manage.

But that is not what interests me here (I find writing about myself utterly tedious): there is something about stumbling across oneself in another’s text that is quite disturbing (I have written on this before). Here, then, one encounters what is anonymous in oneself, that which cannot be grasped as body, as smell, touch, breath, sound, but the cypherised reduction of self to scratch (that word again). The self as marked out in another’s text, then, is also a textual "I" that is not beholden to one’s own censure, one’s own re-reading, reworking, but a trace of the awfulness of oneself in the grasp of another, of taken up by a force, an agent, that is capricious, unyielding, cool, distant (since they, too, are always already wielding my "I" as a textual agent and making me become "he" or "she" or "her" or "him").

There has been plenty given up to this idea, not least the extraordinary chatter about textual mediation, the death/mediation, figuration, textual exegesis of the author and so on. But to read ‘oneself’ as marked out and disciplined in another’s text is a dangerous supplement to all that, not least because of the damage it does to the fabric of the textual economy – it breaks through or unsettles in a way that seems to throw textuality into a kind of turmoil, breaks its simple disseminatory logic and makes marks re-enchanted again with the thrill of agency, the singsong of undead labout.

When I am cited, when I am made complicit (as I have suggested elsewhere) I am made to stand for a con-script, with-texter, and yet, when I am cited and sited as in some sense a figure, I seem in some sense to be  disciplined by the text, but not altogether held by it. I am, in this sense, an excess that is always already merely sufficient to the text.

If "I" am an excess, if that scratch, that single stroke that marks me out as graphism (and which of course I re-write over the texts of others when they refer to me as you, as she, as him), what do we make of the texual dissemination of that scratched mark and why must it always return to that single downwards falling scratch (is this the fall from the grace of enchantment)?

My suggestion is that there is an embedding in this situation of a certain historicity that can be traced to the demise of the ego as auratic being, to the decline of the state of being that holds self together in a uniform and consonant whole. If the ego’s era is drawing to a close, if the consternation that this notion draws to itself is to be taken as a symptom of that decline, then the scratching of I, the pounding of the mark into the paper, the sending of that on-off signal to the CPU, the deliberate making and re-marking of the virtual tabula rasa with pronomial frenzy would seem to be some kind of traumatic repeating, of going over the mark, of making and remaking and remaking again of the graphism in the absence of its enchanting agency.

The I that haunts my reading is already dead.

Do you mean me?

To be referred to, to be quoted, sorted, circumscribed by the gesture of the upturned commas, single or double: what does this mean? To be linked to, to be pointed at, made part of a discourse, drawn in, made party to it, beholden to it, responsible, culpable? A with-writer, a conspirator, a friend? To reference, be drawn in, made party to..... this is a dizzying thing, a moment of radical alienation (is it me? Really? Am I really part of this – am I here at all in all this?). To reference, to draw in, to conjure up, to evoke.... oh this of all things, this more than anything is to make neurotics of us all.

And, to be as sure as writing lets my me (my me-ing, my being me), this, here, in this instance of scribble, this indeed is where writing breaks with the reader, where the Schreibgesindel fashions its anonymisations and flattenings, disavows the readerly and turns she or he hat reads into a cypher.

You are empty, my dear. You are merely your scribblings, your muted voicings, your clicky surfeit.

What is more (there is always more, it seems, always something that doesn't quite fit, match or hold itself in he serene composure we expect from reading) you are dead. Made still. Held here. In this place. This is what is become of you, you cipher, you figure, you SCRATCH, you CLICK.

Here in this simulated scratching that only references the scribble of the analogue of writing as trope, a tiny little stabbing of cold and disassociated digits, individuations that float in their own isolation tank of voicing. CLICK and again hovering over the mouse, back again, and here we go again around and around – spell check, make right, sort through and make neat, tidy, clean and neat... always neat... neat. This tiny motion of stabbing the marks that disavows the scratch, disavows the paper that we imagine the scratch to break into over, that disavows the materiality of writing as a continued, glissando of noise, the scat of the scratch: this is now gone forever.

The sin of the keyboard.

reading and political commitment

In Althusser's theory of reading and the reader, then (see here for more), the reader, when reading 'symptomatically'  is committed to a kind of political practice that uncovers a discontinuity of forms, a terrain.

If this is the case, and Rooney seems to me to have it absolutely right, then the nature if that political moment, its focus, its Affect and effect, is somewhat open-ended. Is there a way of recuperating from this theory of reading a political practice that is useful here? Can there be something Marxist at the core of this practice or is Althusser's theory about abandoning Marx to a certain extent? Rooney is not clear on this point at all.

In Althusser's reading of Marx, of course, here is a radical shift from a reading as politics to a reading as political - a distinction that must be held clearly in view:

• reading as politics is a practice that approaches texts, symbols, portents, signs, with a certain foreclosure in mind: i is a way of reading that is directed, channelled along a pathway and the text stands or falls according to the extent to which it can measure up to that modality of reading
• political reading, on the other hand, seeks to hold a text in a certain state of incertitude, of ambiguity such that it can be turned, remade, at any point in order to materialise itself, in order to place itself into the world

The second mode is thus much more strategic, and I like to think of it (at its most radical) as a kind of Trotskyite (rather than Stalinist) approach. Reading could function here as a kind of perpetual revolution.

readers: a pole

Well I did a bit of thinking about reading, and now something a bit less well-shaped (if possible) about readers, those rare an shy creatures that skulk in dark and damp places, and never let you know they are there.

Actually, that's not quite true. I have one or two readers who do not call by for my fabulous wit or my elegant turn of phrase or even for the fabulousness of my political musings (honest, they don't....:-)). There are one or two of them that are, wait for it, (are you sitting down, are you, are you?) my FRIENDS.

This extraordinary discovery has hit me quite hard, actually: I had preferred a certain quietude and anonymity to this blogging thing (I prefer people not to know my gender, for example) but when I got a phone call from a close friend last week, worried if I was OK because of something I had written on my blog, I have begun to radically rethink the meaning of this blogging thing....

My anxieties about the unbearable blandness of the me-ing of it all aside, it's clear that, when friends read what you post, there are codes, meanings, double foldings of the words, that are not always available to other readers. One comment I get recently, which took me aback was 'I know who you were referring to there'... actually I wasn't referring to the person in question at all....

In a way, a community of readers is a set of points in the cartography of discourse-making: where some might read to encounter ideas, or turns of phrase or a certain political solidarity, other read to glimpse something of the person. There are at least two (and, obviously many more) kinds of readers implicit to this description: the reader who consumes in anonymity, who is happy to read and re-read and to consume slowly, thoughtfully. The other is a kind of smash-and-grab reader who drops in for a quick look, clicks around and leaves.

We all prefer the former, of course, but in the end the reader is a creature who is never consistent to itself.

I know some of my friends, for example, never read closely (at least not in the Blogosphere) - this is not how they engage with it - for them, blogging is about a certain pleasure, a certain informality: their blogs read like lists of cats and symptoms, jokes about their day and few witty aphorisms about who they've seen, where they've been and what they will be doing tomorrow.

Others take a different view, choosing instead to rise to the challenge of writing as a political symptom. Here is where I feel most at home, but I am not consistent to myself. And so here are two different posts, one for the former, and one for the latter..... Let's see which one gets the most comments (if any)....

a post for my first kind of friend

Hi lovelies!

How is everyone? What a week it's been: long meetings and dreary days working on dreary admin stuff. At least I'm off to R and M's tonight - should be well jolly - they can really cook up a storm those two. Recent highlights of their efforts have included salt cod with potatoes and cream, wonderful salads including a variation of panzanella, duck rice (absolutely fantastic), bread and butter pudding with pear (oh, my God!) and so on. I;m going to be such a bloater by the end of it.

Had a lovely coffee with B and C (a colleague form the School of Modern languages and her partner) and chatted about school, life and research. They are SO lovely... Had some yummy chocolate with chillies and and good old chin-wag. Enjoying being on my own today - sis is out with th girls and the cat is out somewhere pretending he can fight bigger and scarier cats (he's such a wuss).

Weather grey, but I;m listening to flamenco which cheers me up. Thought I'd take some jazz round to R and M's tonight - L is going through a serious jazzing and we all want to nurture it....

anyway, must get back to he drabness that is my inbox

un besote