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.

habitus extinct

Hadrianus Junius, Emblemata (1565)

I have often wondered how it might be possible to unsteady the deepest cultural habits, to problematise the stranglehold of what Bourdieu would no doubt have termed the 'habitus', that 'operation of culture onto the body': what are the real prospects for upturning the habitus, for engaging in a kind of scholarship that sets out, in the spirit of an absolute activism, to shake the deeply embedded gender ideologies of Western masculinity to its core? We might even think this as in some sense a hopelessly Foucauldian move, a smart, even witty arse-bearing at faux fiends and make-believe monsters, always shouting as if with the pious zealot's commitment, but really speaking from a mandarin position of loathsome aristocratic detachment.

And here is the key problem - how are we to think this without this loathsome aristocratic detachment, how to make the process simply begin, even start to unsettle without noting something that is at core absurd in the attempt? Maybe humour is the only way, maybe comedy the best chance for an unsettling; the absurd, it seems, might be one way to name that which is dangerous, that which flouts the rules of so-called common sense, which refuses the hegemonic stranglehold on what is acceptable and what ridiculous.

Let's begin at a place I know quite well, and one that draws me back to it over and over (why is this this? perhaps that's a different post). I want to visit late nineteenth-century Vienna and ask these questions about comedy, the absurd, the ridiculous pose of thinking as if no longer inside, no longer implicated in the hegemonic stranglehold of that body, that male, swaggering graphism that haunts every attempt to think it differently, to think as if we were infinitely malleable. Why Vienna and why then? Well it is a place, I suggest, where we come to see, possibly at its most intense, some of the the ways in which the modern habitus is put into place, disciplined and held under the powerful sway of masculine hegemony; this is the moment of Freud, of film, of radio, of phonography, of regimes, of health farms, of endless quirky sanitoria.. the place of the first celebrities, of the first rehab, of the first Priory.

Recourse to the cultural-historical shorthand of taxonomy (from the Greek taxis [‘arrangement’] and nomos [‘law’]) is something of which Michel Foucault was especially fond. At the Viennese fin de siècle, a place Foucault rarely visited, taxonomies proliferate, but, unlike the exotic taxonomies of the Foucauldian archéologie, they do so according to a logic that is seductively close to our own: they proliferate in order to fill out or thicken the empirical texture of the world. Laughter fills Foucault’s response to the exotic taxonomies of distant and strange places, and the purpose of that laughter is quite explicit – to articulate the seductive nature of difference. There is also laughter to be had for us, no doubt, in the face of fin-de-siècle Viennese taxonomies, but this is a laughter which resounds in response to a set of epistemological problems rather too similar to our own: the seductive epistemological closeness of the Viennese fin de siècle, its metropolitan imagination, its fascination for decline and degeneration and its obsession with the inner self, might so easily stand in for our own late modern predicament.

Hegemonic masculinities, those which shore up, enrich and polemicise atavistic claims to men’s a priori right to public discourse, become describable at the fin de siècle by means of a new proliferation of taxonomial adjectives: it becomes possible at last to speak empirically or ‘in detail’ of men, to understand men as objects of scrutiny, to construe them as susceptible to the operation of discourse. In this, the Austro-German fin de siècle marks a ‘thickening’ (a somatising) of the solidity of masculine hegemony by making available to that hegemony a new set of epistemological tools with which to define, circumscribe and construe itself.

This self-discoursing nonetheless brings with it a consequent and paradoxical ‘thinning’ of hegemony, a counter-effect to the thickening, which threatens men’s exclusive access to discourse: characterisation, description and other forms of empirical ‘capture’ are also the very same processes through which man had sought to ‘capture’ the feminine and through which man now becomes the object of his own discourse. This is the double bind of the new empirical man-object: on the one hand it is ‘thickened’ by its detailed taxonomical capture in the empirical discourses; on the other, it thereby loses its invisible, relatively unchallenged, status as silent bearer of discourse.

A ubiquitous response to this double bind was to deliberately appropriate more self-consciously atavistic discursive markers of masculinity – markers which had seemed, until the medicalisation of men that marked the fin de siècle, to operate without impediment, to operate as salient and powerful assurances of man’s power before his constitution as patient and case study. These atavistic markers – amongst which we might include textual authority, physical strength, uprightness, moral and intellectual superiority and a firm grasp of the public arena – seemed, in the fin de siècle imagination, to call up a golden age of Arcadian masculinity: undoubtedly, what characterises the operation of hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle is thus a kind of gender nostalgia.

 It is no doubt the case that men have consistently made (and continue to make) recourse to the operation of coercive discourse in order to articulate their masculinity as inevitably hegemonic, but at the fin de siècle this habit takes on a particularly intense quality. By figuring authority, reputation and/or professional competence as contiguous with virility, men take flight into hyperbolic phallic discourse: this discourse finds expression in body-discoursing through an emphasis on bodily well-being and a normalised physical masculinity on the one hand, and in the aestheticisation of political life and a withdrawal into the intellect (a flight from the body) on the other. The Danish pedagogue Jens Peter Müller’s exaggerated Hellenic poses in his exercise system Mein System (1905) demonstrate how the nostalgic masculinity of the fin de siècle finds expression also in a rage against the new:

A portion of the authors of our belles-lettres have done incalculable harm to the young people in our society by systematically championing, through personal example as well as through their writings, a mixture of exclusively intellectual culture, physical weakness and moral sickness…. The typical office worker in big cities is often a sad sight. Hunched over in early years, his shoulders and hips made crooked by the awkward position at his desk, his face pale, pimply, and powdered, his thin neck sticking out of a collar that a normal could use as a cuff, his foppish, fashionable suit rotating around pipe-cleaners that are supposed to be arms.

Müller’s emphasis on physicality underlines the nostalgic quality of masculinity at the fin de siècle and shows how that nostalgia can find expression in exaggerated binarisms: sickly modern urban (false) man versus the healthy physicality of the (true) Arcadian, intellectuals versus the ‘normal’, moral weakness versus moral health. It is also evident here that the metonymic juxtaposition of physical and moral weakness is meant to dramatise the moral malaise of metropolitan culture, a malaise which is written onto the bodies of its weak and sickly men.

The Körperkult or body cult of the Viennese hegemon thus always finds its counterpart in the dreamy aestheticism of groups like the Secessionists and their emphasis on ornament and, in its popular reception, on the consumption of objets d’art. Hence, the ‘virility’ of which I speak above is neither fully ‘physical’ nor completely figurative, but held at the level of discourse, having a vividly affective and effective cultural life – it functions at the level of the habitus, the discursive imagination of the body.

As we see from Müller’s System, images of exemplary male bodies, of exemplary masculine physical attitudes, undoubtedly touch the discursive operation of hegemonic masculinity, but it is also in the invisibility of the male body, its trussing and wrapping in the anonymous garb of institutional misogyny that masculinity continues to try to operate its silent monopoly: this is the other side of gender nostalgia, its yearning for the discursive silence of Arcadian masculinity.

The ‘strong’ gender thus attempts to sustain its operative power by engaging a dichotomous strategy: a refusal of physical objectification – resisting its reconstitution by the new sciences and continuing to insist on physicality as a privileged site of the feminine – on the one hand, and an embracing of exaggerated images of physical masculinity on the other.

Characteristics, typologies, nomenclatures – the stuff of taxonomy – operate as shorthand for the messy operation of cultural fields. The characteristics of masculinity which proliferate in the new fin-de-siècle ‘sciences’ of gender and sexuality are too numerous to name, but those of the hegemon centre on an anxious overarticulation of physical and figurative solidity – Festigkeit, Standhaftigkeit, Geradheit, Rechtschaffenheit, Zuverlässigkeit, Tapferkeit, Aufrichtigkeit, Virilität, Zeugungskraft. The typologies are fewer – soldier, monarch, entrepreneur, worker, artist, author, intellectual; its nomenclatures are fewer still – man, and in the new medicalised discourse of sexuality, heterosexual.

In this taxonomy, the logic of masculine ‘solidity’ or Festigkeit is assured by a double-edged refusal of and simultaneous recourse to the new medicine in sexology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing published his Psychopathia Sexualis in which he outlined the prospect for a science of sexual pathology and in which hegemonic masculinity (‘the divine image of the poet’) is juxtaposed with its shadowy counterparts (‘horrid caricatures’):

Whosoever proposes psychopathology as [the object of] scholarly study confronts there the dark sides of human existence and the sufferings of man in whose shadow the glistening divine image of the poet is turned into horrid caricatures and the aesthetic and the moral lose faith in the eternal image of God. It is the sad privilege of medicine, and especially of psychiatry, to have to witness the reverse side of life, human weaknesses and wretchedness.

What is interesting here for our purposes is the almost melodramatic (even ‘Gothic’) characterisation of counter-hegemonic masculinity. Just as the ‘glistening divine image of the poet’ [‘das glänzende Götterbild des Dichters’] finds its counterpart in his ‘dark sides of human existence’ [‘einer Nachtseite menschlichen Lebens’], so fin-de-siècle gender and sexuality, as medicalised discourses of personality, work with asymmetrical binarisms that place a certain amount of pressure on undersides, hidden worlds, dark mirror images, others, to reflect back the glistening hegemony of the bourgeois male: distorted mirror images, pale reflections, creatures of the night that stalk the haunted psyche of the bourgeois male all figure as proliferating viral others to the singularity of the hegemonic male.

This underworld is peopled by the pale and the emaciated, a derivative world of mockery, mimicry, false gods and vicious dandies. Perhaps most crucially, this underworld, or perhaps better ‘world of the others,’ is also a world of the rabble, of the mindless collective, Nietzsche’s ‘valley’. This is the logical extension of gender nostalgia at the fin de siècle – homophobia, misogyny, misanthropy, and an aristocratic disdain for the collective.

To return to the opening out of the beginning of this post, then, this place holds sway of its citizens by holding up to scrutiny, by displaying, demonstrating, what horrors befall the counter-hegemon - he is lost to a world of heartless vicious and cruel monsters that will not leave him until he is broken, limp with opium, emptied out, sucked dry. The operation of gender hegemony thus operates here like this: the fear of what lies outside is what holds men inside, keeps them safely at bay and insists on their allegiance to a simple but powerful creed: stand upright, be steadfast to the principles of inscrutable masculinity, hold onto your Herrschaft for dear life and watch out for those deadly sirens that will turn you any moment, calling calling, calling.

To refuse that hegemony, it seems, is to painfully twist and turn in the way of the underworld: come down with me, into the depths, into that place where Freud saw Lüger, in the darkest and most terrifying underplaces where we can tarry with the  monsters.

before the people, voice

[a raw version, unedited, of a paper delivered at Newcastle on November 25th, posted at Spurious's suggestion]

At the beginning of Voicing the Popular Richard Middleton asks of the British chartists’ 1848 proclamation “the voice of the people is the voice of God” the following question: ‘Where was this voce to be located, who owned it’? This question is what drives Middleton’s book and what, in classic Middletonian style, opens up an extraordinarily rich line of argument. My question today will be to ask, in manner indebted to Middleton, how the histories of the voice and the people are related. Is there a longue durée of the popular voice?

Is there any sense in which we might speak of that voice as having a history unto itself, as having a certain autochthonous agency, as engaging certain actions, as intervening even, in ways that are not imaginable in other contexts, other materialities, other medialities? Is the specificity of voice at all generalisable, available to the re-scaling of periods, epochs, trajectories? Is there a story to tell of the voice, a narrative that begins and unfolds. And, if such a narrative were tellable, if such a trajectory were traceable in the movement of history, is there anything we might recognise as a song of origins, beginnings?

For Virginia Woolf, beginnings are always about errors, and can only ever be the beginnings of a modernity that is sick; for Woolf,  that which is captured, taken down, made legible, is that which is modern, that which has fallen, been turned. In Anon, she speaks of a voice that emerges from the swamp, anonymous, empty. It is, in some sense, ready, prone and give itself up immediately to capture:

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it.

And so the story of literature itself begins, or so Virginia Woolf would have it: the voice in song breaks the ‘silence’ of the primordial forest, emerges, as it were, from the swamp and grounds literacy, (and, by implication, the origins of modernity itself); song is modernity’s beginning and its Other. For Woolf, then, the voice in song works to both found and ground writing (notation), to set it in motion; at the very moment when the voice breaks the ‘silence’ of prehistory, it has already fallen under the disciplinary sway of that scripture.

What is striking in Woolf’s modernist myth of vocality is its appeal to the voice in song as in some sense primordial or pre-linguistic: the discipline of that scribing, of making marks to record the apocryphal moment of modernity’s birth, is thus beholden to the moment of spontaneous oral abandon that precedes it and which works as its violent and disturbing Other – the violence of that discipline must batten down the spontaneity of that first abandon.

And it is not simply that the scriptural disciplining must attempt to overcome or overturn this Other (although it surely attempts to do this too): this pre-historical Other, the primordial birth pain of modernity, persists at the core of the Law of literacy, a persistence that Anglophone Lacanians like to term a “nugget of enjoyment”  and which, far from constituting just a potential undoing of modernity, is absolutely key to its continued operation, as something to which subjects can attach themselves, a materiality, a texture, a grit, mud, friction.

When, in Mrs Dalloway, the merest traces of that mythic voice is let loose into the urban cityscape of London, thousands of years after the apocryphal moment of Anon’s emergence from the forest, it is all the more intense, all the more debilitating for its acute incommensurateness with modernity into to which it is poured, and which it paradoxically grounds.

A sexless, ageless voice interrupts Peter Walsh’s misogynist ruminations on the ‘icy’ Clarissa  and the Woolfian articulation of the voice in song  as a kind of trace, a remainder out of place, as a staging of some first innocent jouissance; the woman singing felt it during that enchanted moment, so many years ago, when she walked, in May, with her lover. Her voice stages her expulsion from Eden, that moment when Law intervened in enjoyment. Woolf imagines Peter as someone caught up, ensnared in this nugget of enjoyment, this material that persists and persists, this grit, this friction. She has him imagine it as permanent, as formidably material beyond the reach of history:

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter…

Other literary representations of the voice in song (Kafka’s 1914 short story, ‘Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk’, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Proust’s Memory of Things Past, Wackenroder’s essay ‘The Naked Saint’, Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, and many others) situate the voice in song squarely outside the realm of history, of speech, of writing, as somehow always already struck out of the flow of discourse, an excess, but as a remainder, a stubborn stain, a mark, something that persists and yet, paradoxically, as something that has been and could again, any minute, be lost.

What also holds these disparate imaginations of the voice together is their commitment to an imagination of the voice in song as in some sense enchanted and enchanting (from the Lain root cantare, to sing and incantare, to incant). The enchantment, literally the ‘ensonging’, works for these disparate authors as a moment of epistemological uncertainty, but also, paradoxically, of raised or intensified consciousness: song interevenes in the flow of the everyday, changes things, puts the world out of sorts. In this sense, song might be said to have an agency all of its own; indeed we might say that the voice in song, for these authors, does cultural work.

It is here, then, that a certain story of voices (note my shift here into the plural) might be told; their longue durée might be traced in this notion of voices as doing cultural work, as , in some sense, agents, material incursions, textures, grits, frictions. The Woolfian narrative seeks to draw all voicings, especially those that enchant, transfix or undo, to a singular utterance before all utterances. Its singularity, its radicalising incursion into the silent forest, the radical impossibility of its recuperation is what gives it its force. Popular and traditional musics from Europe and North America abound with origin myths of the singular voice: born on the air, the first seduction, the first calling, the first turning, this interpellation before all interpellations – this voice above all is cherished as the site on which is built the edifice of the vernacular utterance. It is a voice that presents itself as always already lost, as the greatest of all losses, an unknown, silent and mythical voice, before all voices, the first sigh, the first murmur, the first quiver.

The point I want to make about the apocryphal voice here is that, despite its mythical reverie of origins, born out of an atavistic theology of singularities, it is historically quite specific, or, at least, shows itself to be sufficiently malleable to emerge again and again as constitutive of modernity itself: with each intensification of the technological rationalisation of the forces and means of production, this singularity emerges again to sing of loss, to recount the end of days.

Vernacular song traditions from around the advent of recording technology all engage in an intensified discourse of mourning for lost voices: in fado and flamenco traditions, for example, the advent of recording technology marks a particular shift in their conditions of dissemination and reception. For both traditions, certainly, this was the period of rapid urbanisation, and the period in which both musics appeared for the first time on the commercial urban stage: Fado’s revistas (reviews) & casas do fado and flamenco’s cafes cantantes and peñas flamencas.

The period in which the impact of commercial recording begins to make itself felt is also the period in which these traditions become fixed, held in place by the discipline of the new technologies: certainly, the earliest recordings are akin to field recordings, but the first commercial recordings (from the mid-1920s after the advent of electronic recording) already reference these earlier recordings as somehow magically charged mananciales de nobre (noble sources) fuentes de sueños duros, as if to suggest that the slightly later recordings were mere faded traces of an earlier ‘golden’ practice. The nostalgia industry gets to work extraordinarily quickly in this context. [Adorno: ‘Nadelkurven’]
In the early commercial recordings of fado and flamenco, moreover, record labels seem to be attempting first of all to ‘naturalise’ the technology of recording which would have been marked as undoubtedly ‘new’, as implicated in industrial processes ‘alien’ to the two traditions: We can see this ‘naturalisation as working in two distinct ways

•    naturalisation by referencing the pre-history (i.e. recording already belongs to this tradition)
•    naturalisation by utilising advances in that technology to elide the technology – commercial electronic recordings appear as early as 1927

Clearly then, these discourses on flamenco and fado are already touched by the dissemination of certain kinds of objects – recordings. Whilst these objects are not readily mappable onto the psychoanalytic object, they do change the symbolic dynamic in some striking ways. The playwright and folklorist Frederico Garcia Lorca referred to the gramophone as early as 1920 as a kind of tecnología mentira de la escritura [false technology of writing] and Adolfo Salazar, documenter of the famous 1922 concurso de cante hondo refers to the technology of recording as un arañar violente [violent scratching].

Clearly, for both commentators, recording technologies constitute an unwelcome intervention in flamenco practices. A strikingly similar discourse can be seen in the reception of the famous fadista of Lisbon Adelina Fernandes who, having signed to HMV’s Portuguese franchise by the late 1920s, her albums outselling anything else in their catalogue, was nonetheless ridiculed by puristas and connoisseurs as unspeakably commercial.

In both the flamenco and the fado context, furthermore, recorded objects seem to have created an ‘imaginary’ loss,  - the great voices of the tradition before recording are now lost forever since they cannot now be recorded: nostalgia, in this context, as a condition of this modernity, seems to have emerged here  as a response to the  very technologies that shape that modernity: this is a common trope in recent scholarship on trauma and in this context, it is the displacement enacted by recorded objects on the popular imagination of the locatedness of the tradition in specific places, specific cultural spaces that is crucial to my reading of this nostalgia work: recording technology intervenes in a these musical cultures’ imagination of themselves.

This loss out of capture, this reaching back into a lost space before capture was ever possible, is, in a crucial sense, then, constitutive of modernity. When Middleton asks who owns the voice of the people, he is asking about the very terms on which modernity constructs political agency. The terms of that agency, its complex mediation and distribution across a number of medialities and cultural fields, are inextricably linked to the necessity for a grit or friction in the system that gives traction.

In my crudest Lacanian terms, the apchryphal voice of Anon must always stay lost, and its evocations, however fulsome or ‘authentic’ must always remain enchanted, incomplete, since to capture it fully, would be to bind it too consistently into the symbolic order, and to smooth out all its surfaces, to seamlessly reintegrate it into the flow of discourse, to absorb it and leave nowhere for subjects to bind themselves to it. To invert a commonplace wisdom about collective agency, for a Lacanian, voice must always precede the people.

a moment in listening

[…] today, the middle classes are deeply moved by the works of the crazy, sick musician. Have they become aristocratic, are they like the nobles of 1814, struck with awe at the will of the genius? No […] they have something wrong with their ears now, they all have Beethoven’s ears. […] All their anatomical details, all their ossicles, labyrinths, drums, and trumpets, have taken on the diseased forms of Beethoven’s ears.

Adolf Loos, ‘Beethoven’s ears’ (1913)

If gender were a sound, what would it sound like? Adolf Loos’s characteristically strange and beautiful ruminations in 1913 on the meanings of Beethoven for early twentieth-century audiences – of a Beethoven that had, until recently, served as exemplar of male creative genius – raise this question (extremely obliquely) by reference to the body (or, rather, anatomy): the dislocated inventory of body parts and instruments (‘drums’ and ‘trumpets’ in the German also resonate with the medical terms for parts of the ear and, of course, for Beethoven’s ear prosthesis ), their disease, their lumpen-mass, points to a rather troubled and contested connectivity between the body and listening, between sound and the flesh that vibrates with it in order to ‘receive’ it.

And that dislocated flesh is the primary site after Loos’s fin de siècle for the thinking of gender. In this short text fragment, gender has become for Loos synonymous with biology, anatomy, medicalised matter available to the scrutiny of science. In this weird and disturbing juxtaposition of listening and anatomy we encounter an eloquent articulation of what many at that fin de siècle perceived as a radical degradation of listening. Indeed, with the intensification of the scientific scrutiny of the body and the medicalisation of discourses on gender and sexuality, listening degrades for the bourgeois male aesthete into a mere mechanistic vibrating of body parts;  this is its implication in the degradation of gender into a genitally ordered binarism.

If gender were to make a sound at that fin de siècle, it would be as something vibrating into the body from without, as something somatising, as something seeming to come from within when clearly inflicted, imposed, enforced by the discipline of public culture and institutional science from without. For Loos, as for many growing up in the last years of the German nineteenth century, to obliquely raise the question as to how gender might sound is to raise a whole set of other pressing questions: How can matter breathe life? How is meaning ‘impregnated’ into flesh? How do men come to be as subjects within the body?

In the disease of the decaying ear parts, in the traumatic dissection of the body into lumps of matter, Loos articulates the troubling nature of bodies that listen under the industrial logic of production, of bodies soon, and certainly by the time this prose fragment was first published (1919), to be torn to pieces by the first of two devastating world wars: listening too has fallen under the sway of industry; it too has succumbed to the debilitating dehumanisation of labour.

In Loos’s bitter complaint there is an implicit reproach: listening, of all activities, should have remained aloof from such processes, since to listen at the beginning of the long nineteenth century (in what might be termed the Austro-German romantic economy) was to embrace an exemplary interiority, to deepen one’s humanity, to experience a fulsome abundance in the self. But this reproach is not confined to the end of that long century: indeed, listening seems to come under extraordinary pressure throughout the long nineteenth century to carry the burden of what Germans referred to as Bildung, the development or formation of the exemplary bourgeois self. And in this, listening is seen again and again to fail to live up to these expectations.

Marx and Beethoven: a fragmentary hagiography

To begin with, we must look for ruptures, gaps and mismatches since they are the markers of a certain kind of cultural work: the ego, according to both Freud and Lacan, papers over epistemological and ideological gaps, tries to hide them, rushes to fill them and this is the main mechanism of its ‘psychosis’:

In the ‘emancipated’ man of modern society, this splitting reveals, right down to the depths of his being, a neurosis of self-punishment, with the hysterico-hypochondriac symptoms of its functional inhibitions, with the psychasthenic forms of its derealizations of others and of the world, with its social consequences in failure and crime. (Lacan: 'Aggresivity in psychoanalysis')

This historicity of the ego, then, is our starting point. Its general function is to maintain the fantasy of a containment, a wholeness, a uniformity of the self; its various specificities are to be located in the ways in which that fantasy is held in place at the local level. What, then, are the cultural materials that the ego utilises to underpin the fantasy of its wholeness at the historical moment of Adolph Bernhard Marx’s Beethoven in his 1859 biography of the composer?

Certainly, the ego will encounter quite specific threats to its putative cohesion and in such cases must find a way of maintaining its strategic sense of wholeness: in this sense it functions as a balm or defensive suture. The gap, or ‘split’, we have encountered in this understanding of the ego, then, does a cultural work that I will henceforward term ‘ego work’.

In writings on music from the middle of the nineteenth century, discursive gaps can be read as markers of a certain anxiety about personality formation and are present either only by surreptitious intimation, as having already been papered over (and thus as traces of the ego’s healing work), or as cautionary, invoking the need for ego-work to be set in motion. Scott Burnham has shown how Marx was able to draw on the Beethovenian ‘heroic style’ as a resource in constructing a certain moral personality:

Like the great myths, the Beethovenian heroic-style sonata form assumes a place as one of Western culture’s master plots … The attachment of this particular musical-formal procedure to an ethical position severely alters the way in which other forms are viewed. As a particularly telling example of this, remember the way in which the Beethovenian sonata form acts as the crowning form in A. B. Marx’s Formenlehre: it is the motivating telos of his derivation of all other available forms … Marx’s pedagogical program enlists Beethoven’s music (and thus music in general) in the all-important agenda of Bildung, a process concerned primarily with the aesthetic and ethical development of self.

Burnham is undoubtedly right to draw attention to the centrality of the Beethoven style in Marx’s pedagogical agenda, but there is something missing here, I would like to suggest. The specificity of Marx’s reading of Beethoven, especially if one concentrates one’s scrutiny on the 1859 Beethoven monograph, is to be found as much in its construction of the Beethovenian figure at large as in the (anonymised, generalised) Beethovenian style.

The shift in my reading from style to figure might seem a conservative move, a nostalgic return, perhaps, to an heroic biography, or even a neo-liberal celebration of the individual as some kind of privileged site of cultural work: certainly, Burnham’s delicately drawn historiography points to some of the ways in which Beethoven’s style comes to be held at the level of a certain mentalité, a collective and anonymous discursive modality (‘Marx treats Beethoven’, so Burnham would have us believe, ‘as a Hegelian telos: only from the vantage point of the end of history can History begin’ ); yet what this reading misses here, it seems to me, is the prodigious materiality of the Beethoven figure itself, as avatar of a certain moment in the development of what Bourdieu has termed the modern habitus, the enacting of culture onto the body: this is a crucial moment in the sealing of the modern personality into that habitus when, crucially for our purposes here, the ego emerges as a kind of body-sense, functioning rather as a field that is folded onto the space occupied by the body – in this sense, the ego and the habitus are crucial agents in this moment of the history of Western bourgeois masculinity. Marx seems to grasp as much in his narrative of Beethoven’s ‘breaking out’ into the world, as a newly formed and powerful agent in it:

His build had become stocky, though not tall, thick set, full of vitality, a picture of strength; at that point illness did not yet seem to be an issue. His head was covered in bushy dark hair, that lay unkempt, more mane-like than curly; his forehead was broader and protruded all the more for being mounted above the darkness of his cagily receding eyes; his nose was strong and had developed a broadness rather than protruding, in German profile rather than the Roman profile of most artists’ noses. His mouth was well formed.

Marx constructed this description of the 25-year-old Beethoven as a pointed and deliberate contrast to the famous silhouette of Beethoven at 16 included in the Wegeler-Ries Biographical Notes.  Marx’s description of the younger Beethoven from that silhouette emphasises his ‘open profile’ with an ‘upturned nose’ and a light and ‘still undeveloped’ forehead.  What is at work here is a pointed exercise in the narrating of body-Bildung,  education through physical development, an enacting of the narrative of Bildung onto the habitus. A peculiarly German conception of personal development (although it finds many analogues in other cultures), Bildung has been characterised by Norbert Elias as ‘the inner enrichment, the intellectual formation of the individual, primarily through the medium of books, in the personality.’

This Bildung-narrative, as we shall see, is a crucial driver of Marx’s Beethoven fantasy; what is particularly interesting in this driver is the way in which Marx seeks, at certain isolated moments in the monograph, to shore up its effectiveness by making recourse specifically to the male body.

The pointed contrast between the two figures (the silhouette of Beethoven at 16 and Marx’s projected Beethoven figure at 25) is a material one, the difference between two technologies of representation: the earlier figure is referenced in relief, the silhouette tracing the outer markers of Beethoven’s personality; the later figure is imagined not in relief, but as an image available to the close scrutiny of the observer, such that the composer’s eyes give up their meanings under the protruding forehead, the mouth, well-formed, seems to work as a sign of health, and there is, as Marx stresses, no sign here of Beethoven’s coming illness.

This second image, at least, is fully legible. The technologies of nineteenth-century seeing, as Jonathan Crary has shown, were already under radical transformation by the late 1850s. Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik  published one year after Marx’s Beethoven monograph, had gone some way to, as Crary puts it, ‘[formalise] perception’ and ‘render the specific contents of vision irrelevant’.  Marx’s manner of ‘seeing’ here is in line with this formalisation, despite its heady romantic overtones and its commitment to ‘specific content’: in Beethoven’s forehead, the way in which it hides the eyes, in the well-formed mouth, and the racialisation of the artist’s German nose,  Marx’s image promotes a manner of seeing that draws on the logic of the modernisation of optics that Fechner seeks to achieve.

What Crary terms the ‘human sensorium’ here finds a parallel in the intensification of Beethoven’s subject-status, not as Subjekt, but as Versuchsperson, as one subjected to intense scrutiny.  There is thus a certain intensification of the look accompanied, paradoxically, by its disengagement; Marx’s ‘eye’ retreats from the scene of looking and the figure of Beethoven dominates, breaking into the narrative with a rude muscularity.  Beethoven’s physicality dominates, and yet that physicality marks Beethoven’s susceptibility as one being-looked-at, his objectification.

The two figurations of Beethoven at 16 and 25 also tell us something about the specifics of Marx’s engagement of the Bildung-narrative: the story of Beethoven’s stepping out, ‘into the world’ [‘in die Welt’] as Marx calls this second chapter of his monograph, is told through recourse to a conception of Beethoven’s personality development as proceeding along a predetermined trajectory. Indeed, throughout this section, Marx draws prodigiously on the well-trodden clichés of Beethoven’s complex and difficult character and is particularly keen to tie these traits and his physical attributes into the musical works as if all this should add up to a self-consistent narrative:

This contradiction of an apparent closedness combined with an openness of the mind to all true sentiments and inclinations is a predominant element of Beethoven’s character [that remained] from his boyhood, a sign of the deeply invested powerful and serious nature at work within him, which should be evident from the first works onwards.

Suzanne R. Kirschner has termed this tendency to oscillate between the local-personal and the longer-term conjoncture of the Lebenslauf or life trajectory the ‘romantic spiral’, drawing explicitly on older German narrative traditions that outline man’s estrangement from and higher reintegration back into nature.  In this sense, as Kirschner seems to suggest implicitly, the Bildung-narrative is a secularisation of the narrative of the fall from grace, rounded off with a neat reintegration, a kind of secular redemption. That secular narrative, in its most hegemonic form, calls into being fantasy figures whose progress is made to stand in for the progress of man at his most general towards that redemption.

Lacan and Althusser take a walk

Imagine it, a short walk at night, the two of them. What did they say? Their gangly strides striking the warm pavement, the vinegar maker's prodigy and the manic depressive, walking, talking, walking....

What DID they say to each other?

Our relationship is an old one, Althusser

Lacan, you say that you think about the analyst's desire. And you say you've observed that what you say transforms the attitude of you students and your patients and changes their approach to psychoanalytic reality

The complexity of their encounter, Lacan's terse and cryptic proclamations on Althusser's long and ebullient eulogies on Lacan's work, Althusser's desire and need for a champion, Lacan's lukewarm friendship, Althusser's dejection.

It all points to certain unease and imbalance between the two (is this a matter of system, of semiotics, of semantics, ideology or personality?). Personality and ideology do not work according to the same logics – a certain humanity and compassion can make the least palatable worldview almost desirable, but it cannot intervene totally. There is always something left over which, in the end, is strictly ideological.

Disentangling the ideological from the disposition of the two is particularly difficult here: Lacan's aristocratic tone (a symptom, perhaps, of his tempestuous struggle with the IPA), matches Althusser's well – they both speak as if from a gilded place, from a place of extraordinary composure, but those composures, those two assurednesses: they are fundamentally disparate.

It is not just that the technologies do not match: Lacan said of Althusser's shot essay on the “Marxist Dialaectic” (produced afterwards in Pour Marx) that it raised similar question to his own, and made a cryptic reference to his own 'obscure researches on Marx, which have been going on for fifteen years.'

Roudinesco marks this moment well: Lacan for her is a cold and diffident creature who takes some time to warm up to Althusser. His letters to Althusser tell a similar story: here is a man who cannot effuse, cannot warm up without a slow and careful unveiling of the Other: who are you to me and what do you want?

Hey you, shouts Althusser, and Lacan stays silent, refuses to acknowledge the interpellation enacted on him by Althusser until the shouting becomes deafening...

The terms of the incommensurateness of the two's systems can be outlined thus: where Althusser might be said to engage Lacan's notion of méconaissance as a kind of unconscious without an unconscious ('twas ever thus on the left, it seems), Lacan offers no way of making that méconaissance available to dialectical solution, to a modelling of an exit trajectory. No way out, says Lacan.

In a sense, then, there is no progressive agency in the Lacanian economy, just a kind of fatal deadlock, a matrix in which revolution is always already merely spectral, merely a symptom.

In that nightwalk, that stalking, creeping, gangly encounter, Marx and Freud circle each other in radical discomfort. The name-of-two-different-fathers.

My dad can take yours...

Mahler and Strauss

[extract from my forthcoming book]

It is clear (or, at least, intensely apparent) that bodies are the sites of discourse. This is amply demonstrated at the Habsburg twilight by the proliferation of theses on pathology, disease, gender and sexuality, which concentrate their energies on the fleshly; they constitute a powerfully overdetermined focusing of discursive activity on the body. Whilst it is certainly the case that the Habsburg fin de siècle deals with the body in ways deeply indebted to a long and vigorous humanist tradition of the body, the particularity of the re-figuration of that tradition is what concerns us here: how did the new sciences of the body circumscribe the public experience of Mahler’s body? And how did public debates about the body and its appropriation frame Mahler’s private figurations of his own body? To attempt to answer this last question is no simple matter: unlike many of his contemporaries, Mahler has left us very little of the usual material for biographical speculation – no diaries, no memoirs, very little in his letters as to the way he saw himself, his oeuvre or his milieu. This chapter will thus attempt to think through the problematic of Mahler’s body as an historical object of analysis by scrutinising some of the contemporaneous literatures (fiction, psychoanalysis, medicine) that help form a cultural currency of the body, and will employ a series of interpretative strategies that centre on Mahler’s body as an agent in the formation of that currency.

Mahler’s body, it seems, was a deviant body: in the late nineteenth-century (racio-)criminological mind, there is an unbroken continuity from the deviant bodies of prostitutes, harridans, perverts, homosexuals, criminals, through to the bearers of sickness, the insane and ‘lower’ racial types such as the Hottentot, the Negro and the Gypsy; the Jewish male body is similarly marked in the raciological discourses of the time by its physical ‘inadequacy’ and deviant genus. As we shall see, it is a crucial determining inclination of Viennese raciology to read the surfaces of bodies and their morphology as bedeutsam (‘meaningful’) of their Charakter (‘character’) or Gattung (‘species’). The inclusion of the Jewish body amongst the other ‘deviant’ bodies is grounded in a logic of marginalisation through embodiment: this structural trope identified by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain is strictly binaristic. Her most useful observation for our purposes is that one encounters in a range of literary sources from the fin de siècle a tendency to juxtapose the seamless, ‘light’ and ‘invisible’ body of hegemonic masculinity with the intensely visible and over-signified fleshly bodies of its deviant Others. Something of this alteritous formulation is captured in a short diary entry made by that most eloquent of witnesses to the Habsburg twilight, Franz Kafka, in 1914, three years after Mahler’s death, in which he observed two men in a room in the building opposite his window:

29 July. The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, mild-mannered yet firm, too dainty, lisped;

This striking duality, one that Sander Gilman has also recognised in the Mahler/Straus juxtaposition, is a telling addendum to Scarry: not only were hegemonic masculinities characterised by their ‘lightness’ but they were also marked by a comfortable physicality (‘smiling, reserved, clever’). The overdetermined embodiment of the Other of that comfortable physicality, the thin, dark, slightly fussily dressed, ‘too dainty’ masculinity of the ‘smart Jew’ (or any smart Other), is achieved – unlike Scarry’s British colonial examples of the overdetermined healthy bodies of, for example, ‘black’ men – through a sickliness or over-articulated counter-physicality: it is in the Other that the body seems to be under a kind of malevolent erasure, not in the wielders of discourse, as in Scarry’s model. If we nonetheless accept Scarry’s thesis that ‘those without power’ will have a ‘body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction and wounding’ (my emphasis), and that this body marks a territory that contracts one’s sphere of existence, ‘down to the small circle of one’s immediate presence’, we must also recognise the specificity of the Austro-German imagining of the duality in the slenderness and wistful cerebrality of the Jewish Other and the healthy physicality of the hegemon. The ‘wounding’ that Scarry so eloquently outlines is manifest here in an internalised (racial) mark of difference: the Jew is marked out as suffering from (wounded by) its peculiar ontogeny, from its very biological givenness. The urgent problem for a public male Jew like Mahler was not how to attempt to acquire the comfortable public physicality of the hegemon, but how to erase or somehow challenge the bodily impediment (of the sickly Jewish ‘intellectual’ body) to the wielding of public cultural power. The consequences of Scarry’s theory of embodiment are far-reaching, but of usefulness in this context only if modified slightly: whilst intense representation (embodiment) can function as a way of regulating the symbolic meanings of bodies, which stand outside the hegemonic physicality of ‘upright’ bourgeois propriety, that embodiment can work as a kind of pathologisation and ‘thinning’ rather than as a thickening of the physicality of the racial Other.

At the Habsburg fin de siècle, one certainly encounters a range of body types that are wilfully and consistently marginalised from dominant discourses, thereby safeguarding the putative ‘normality’ of certain forms of military, bourgeois and public masculinities. The deviant bodies are often marked by their racial difference and, as we have seen, the Jewish male body stands as an exemplar of the dissidence of ‘non-German’ masculinities. Like Kafka’s huge (baby-)father in the Das Urteil, the upright male body of the empowered Austro-German hegemon is a highly discursive graphism (an emptied ‘shape’ or shell) that can expand itself to cover an inordinate amount of cultural space and, like the Kaiser-figure in Heinrich Mann’s ironic novel Der Untertan, that hegemonic graphism is empty, unfettered by deviant ‘character’ and has ‘no limits on [its] extension out into the world’ despite (perhaps because of) its fleshly physicality. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, it is a completely deterritorialized body. For the Jewish body, conversely, it is the perception of its very particularly embodied ‘character’ (its thin, spindly awkwardness) that marks it as an impediment to the experience of and pleasuring in cultural space. As we shall see, the anxiety about space finds particularly powerful expression in German-Jewish literature from the period and has been linked by Deleuze and Guattari to Kafka’s notion of a ‘minor literature’. The attempt to disrupt that impediment, the strategic dislocation of the body (as a kind of internalised flesh(l)y ghetto) from Jewish male creativity, a strategy followed with zeal by Mahler, Kafka, Brod, Werfel, Buber and other German-Jewish intellectuals from the long fin de siècle, is a crucially assimilationist project, and one which, as we shall see, finds resonance in Kafka’s view of writing and Mahler’s view of composing.

Nice this month

Some nice things worth following up this month:

Click here for a great piece by Bourdieu, which I'd not seen before: 'The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason' (thanks to wood s lot).

Click here for a great piece by Chloe Taylor in the current issue of Postmodern Culture, 'Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida'

Click here for the latest gorgeous post from spurious now entering in full his late jazz phase (we wish him a happy and blissful journey, cat...

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.

a post for other kind of freinds

The reception of Althusser's theory of ideology, as Ellen Rooney has pointed out, has been somewhat fetishised around the science/ideology dichotomy. Her view, and one I share, is that there is in Althusser also a very well developed and useful theory of reading and the reader.

It goes something like this (and I am paraphrasing brutally here):

1. Reading is never innocent or 'of first sight'. It engages 'blindness' and 'insight' in a dance of commitments and disavowals and is always unstable
2. It is constituted in a certain crisis of form, marked by its tendency to construct terrains, cartographies
3. It should be  'symptomatic' - where it actively encourages the uncovering of the gaps between forms, readers and reading communities (this is a useful way to re-read Althusser's Reading Capital)
4. It occupies the gap between 'the Great Book that was, in its very being, the Wold, and the discourse of the knowledge of the world; between he essence of things and its reading, ... [we find that] a new conception of discourse at last becomes possible'

Hence, what is at stake in the relationship between science and ideology, as laid out in Althusser's reading of Capital, is reading itself, for each ideology has its science and reading is what makes that particularity legible.

My engagement of reading before, is thus based on this explicits Althusserian moment which has been suppressed in favour of a rather crude reduction of his theory of ideology to a theory of positioning. Positioning,is not really the point here - it is the refusal of stable position in READING ha is crucial.