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.

writing politics

The political as a field, as a territory, a modality of thinking, being, acting, is all too readily overcharacterised. The tendency to mark out and safely store away the political, as if it were a discrete field that can be held at bay so as not to spoil a nice day, or  get in the way of conspicuous consumption, is a symptom of a move to the right, of a move to a  vision of state that conceives of politics as always already harmful, a debased, tortuous discourse of vested interests fighting for a small and shrinking terrain: this ubiquitous disdain for the political, already dealt with a length by many political theorists, marks the victory of a right of centre populist notion of the political – 'ideology' is wrong, bad, marked out always as in some sense rabid, extreme, zealous and 'common sense', pragmatism, 'good house keeping' have come to obscure, obliterate what the right like to characterise as old-style political soap-boxing. This is, of course, a foreclosure. So, with this in mind, how might we explain the popularity of political bogs?

Much has been made in the press and other mainstream media recently about political blogging. In fact, 'recently' hardly does it justice – there have been regular references on national radios across Europe for several years now, and blogging is spoken about at the highest levels of government. One is tempted to observe that, as soon as the oligarchs and autocrats get to it, it is already done and dusted. But let's assume (perhaps in a not altogether too cavalier a fashion) that in this at least, the oligarchs and autocrats have embraced (or are at least become cognisant of ) something quite powerful and therefore useful to them in the blogging medium.

The blogging world continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by single-authored or collectively authored maverick spaces, or cutesy cat journals. The presence of the worst type of blog, the personal journal, akin to a form of  belles lettres writing or a degraded detail-laden obsessive cataloguing of pointless details of the everyday ego at work, has by no means gone away. Indeed most of the blogosphere continues to be indelibly marked by a kind of experiential aesthetic – what I did today, what I saw, how I felt and what I think will happen next.

Now, whilst the personal is always political (although its operation is inevitably veiled in the confessional tone of most blogs), it seems to me that the reason why blogging has caught the attention of the oligarchs and autocrats is because there are some blogs at least that seek to do explicit political work and, what is more, they are extremely popular.

So what is a political blog? What does it mean to blog politically?

Writing about politics is an extraordinary undertaking. I have attempted on this blog to address the political, but I always feel as if I am skating round it, dancing across its surface; I feel always as if I am struggling to grasp what it is to be political, what it is to write politically: some comments on this blog have pointed to a tendency to abstraction in mu writing whilst others have detected a certain tendency to avoid the question of agency, of who intervenes and how in political discourse. My instinct is to address these accusation with a refutation of a reductive or algebraic definition of the political: we are all quite familiar now, I think, with the subtle and persuasive work of theorists like Laclau, Mouffe, Žižek and Hardt and Negri for whom the political is a highly contested and dynamic terrain which swallows all in its wake, a totalising field of statements, actions, commitments, atachments and mappings of the friend-enemy binarisms; I am persuaded by this complex and dynamic imaging of the political and it is this, perhaps, that makes writing politically difficult for me.

Hence, I continue to operate with some unease and discomfort and find explicit political writing difficult. Yet many attempt it and succeed in varying ways in the blogosphere. I regularly read Lenin's tomb, for example, and she or he would no doubt chastise me for my bourgeois timidity, my luxuriating in the field when the field exists in order to have effect, to intervene, to exercise agency.

 

Where I have attempted in the past to write politically, I have fallen on a number of tactics which, I think, are not terribly unusual; in looking at these tactics, perhaps, I might begin to understand why writing politically for me is so difficult. Here are the approaches I have tended to take so far:

1. the use of hyperbolic or super-charged language, performatively positioned to exorcise anger, distress, trauma. The language I use here inevitably 'creaks' and is, to use one critic's term 'over-written'. What happens in this style of writing is that analysis is blocked or curtailed by the intensity of its execution. See this for example.

2. The use of strong language, insults, again driven by anger, but much more declamatory, more engaged in the act of shouting, of pointing, of wanting to cause harm: Lenin's tomb is much better at this than I am (see this for example). Here, thelanguage is focussed on engagement, on confrontation or on a perfomative attempt to engage a hidden or overprotected enemy. The frustration marked in this language also makes anaysis dificult but it does enact committment; it is marked by the enjoyment of that committment. (see this)

3. A tendency to speak in rationalising, calm and analytical tones, as if performing the reasonableness of my argument, attempting to operate as if there were no enjoyment, no sticking or clinging to this affiliation, no partisanship in my writing; write the absence of enjoyment, the lack of ideological ground, and you shall believe your commitment all the more. It is here I commit, perhaps, the greatest crime – to write as if there were no sticking to the traumatic kernel of my beliefs is to write as if dead.

Of course there is a mixture of these approaches in my writing, any number of attempts to find a middleground, and any number of strategies to hide what is really going on in this writing – I may seem calm but I am furious, I may seem angry, but I am going through the motions, I may seem analytical, but I am extemporising a falsehood in order to shore up the fantasy.

The crime I commit over and over, it seems to me, is to avoid the content of political discourse and obsess about its form, its operational structures and dynamics.

To blog politically, it seems to me, means overcoming this shyness and self-consciousness and to proceed to this 'content', the violence, the suffering, the injustice, the radicalised disengagement of rich from poor, the reterritorialising of the underclass into ghettos, and the drip-drop murder of thousands in the Middle East in the name of the fantasy of Western security. This is what politics is full of – of traumatic materials than cannot adequately be written,  but which must be repeated stubbornly over and over.

 

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.

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.

the political economy of sickness

I am sick. I have been now for several days and I do mean sick... (abdominal pain, vomitting - you get the picture)

I tell you this not for the usual blog-tick reasons (i.e. as if I wanted to share or unload or tell you all about me, me, me). That's part of it, of course – feeling sorry for oneself can be its own kind of delicious, even when it seems to be too overwhelming to get out of bed in the morning. No, the main purpose of my writing here and now is to try to make sense of something I've hinted at before and something that is beginning to really dig in for me – the cultural work of infirmity, or, perhaps more precisely, the political economy of sickness.

This week was going to be a crunch week – several crucial meetings with university managers about strategic matters, and a crucial meeting with colleagues about other crucial matters and so on. What has amazed me (and I say this not from some kind of unrelenting egotism, but rather from a position of genuine surprise) is that I am not indispensable and that, after all, the world continue to rotate and my not being at those meetings has not bought the universe crashing down around my ears.

Part of me of course is dismayed - what do you mean, you can all continue to function without me? I cherish being needed in ways that are bordering on the pathological. This is bad (very bad), but I can't help it. Perhaps it's about the joy of seeing another alleviated when you can help, or perhaps its really to do with my own ego (in both the informal and Freudian senses if the term).

Another part of me is intrigued by some of the ways in which the relations of production can absorb and  make room for sickness, even integrate it, account for it, make explicit provision for it whilst also nonetheless marking it out as stigma, sign, semiosis in excess.

What is particularly intriguing here, it seems to me is that, if my hypothesis that capitalism incubates a situation in which, for example, fat bodies are becoming increasingly transgressive, then why this extraordinary attempt to absorb sickness, to accommodate to it? Bodies are commodities, producers of labour hours, site of productive force; they situate for of the political economy of health that drives medicine; they are the material foundation of most cultural production. So.... why this accommodation?

I have colleagues and friends who suffer untold indignity and pain at the hands of their life-threatening illnesses. They bring to that suffering not just a simple stoicism (to call it that is to reduce it to the most banal and pointlessly comforting narrative), but a rage against it. They hate being sick; it makes them crazy; it impacts profoundly on their lives and their 'excess' lies far beyond what I am trying to articulate here. What is striking about their story is the extent to which they are not easily assimilable to a single narrative. Their excess, their sickness, is not reducible to mere plurality or ambivalence, but to an impenetrable and inassimilable whole, a unit so in and for itself as to refuse naming, refuse articulation, symbolisation. In that sense, its is an excess that threatens

Has the excess in sickness 'itself' been co-opted to the rhythm of the machine? Has infirmity become a kind of economy to itself?

There is something in Marx's theory of commodity fetish to help us here (but only as a starting point): capitalism fetishes and thereby freezes, paralyses what it cannot fully assimilate: excess, what falls beyond the body and cannot be transformed into surplus, is thus something in late capitalism that must be attended to. The excess (and for our purposes, lack and excess, over-abundance and paucity are structurally equivalent) is something which must in some sense be spiritualised, or, at least, enchanted. In this sense, the political economy of sickness is thus the political economy of one instance of aura, of the magic of the thing.

To be sick is thus in some sense to be hallowed: I have been struck at how many of my colleagues have been kind (they are always kind and they are good and decent people but the tone of that kindness is as in some sense hushed, respectful, conceding a space and place to me that is not there when I am well).

The political economy of sickness is thus Gothic in a very meaningful sense – with sickness comes the externalisation of anxieties about mortality, contagion, and the grim materiality of bodies, and a charging of those bodies with the sacrament of suffering, so central to he Judao-Christian tradition, and at the heart of the capitalist poetics of sickness. In hat poetics, suffering, which is invariably both an impediment to but also caused by capitalist production, must be taken out of the economy, magicked away to a place where the perverse hagiography of suffering can unfold itself without calling the general political economy into question. As in Gothic fiction, the capitalist poetics of sickness are thus a secretion of a simple exchange value, performatively reproduced back to us as if it were in some sense holy.

Blessed are the poor and sick for they shall inherit the world.

 

beginning to change

To begin again - this is the fetish of the academic year. I love beginnings since they promise much and bristle with expectation, hope and the promise of ideal outcomes. As terms start all over the Northern hemisphere, the possibility of less mess, of more constructive finishing, more focus and less hubris, is all over us. Yes we are anxious and worked up and hellishly worn out by the run into it all, but it does allow for a radicalising possibility that I want to try to seize as politically productive...

First the obstacles:

Yet, in the UK, there has been much in the news recently about corruption, back-handed deals and anonymous tip-offs and leaks to the press, all attaching themselves to our beleaguered Labour government and Tony Blair in particular. In the meantime, the shiny 'new' Tories go from strength to strength in the poles and Cameron's charm offensive begins to look startlingly familiar: Blair by another name, just as, in the run up to 1997, the Major government seemed hopelessly lost and weighed down by sleaze and infighting.

What is striking in the media's coverage of it all, though, is the perennial persistence not just of conspiracy theory, but also a certain intensification of the idea that humane and decent government might no loner even possible at all, ever. In he UK, as in other Anglophone countries (with the exception of Australia, for obvious reasons), the turnout at bi- and general elections continues to fall radically. One way to try to understand this, it seems to me, is to interrogate the discursive construction of 'apathy' as frame here: is 'apathy' something that follows political decline, or is it in some sense a proactive agent in the construction of a culture of political disengagement?

I don't pretend to have a simple answer here, but, it seems to me, the rise of the right, of a certain capitalist-fatalism, has, of course, meant that belief in change as "for the political good" has given way to a belief in change as a kind of open-ended sameness, a state of interminable uncertainty that will never go away: change has become sloganised, drawn into managerial patterns of social engagement such that it has become one of those words that crops up in the title of workshops and training sessions for middle-managers of the machine:

Coping with change

Change is good

How to manage change

and so on.

Now the analysis and, perhaps, even a solution?

I am, in a sense a nostalgic (to be left-wing in these times is always to be cast by the mainstream as in some sense ludicrous, atavistic, a dinosaur, part of 'Old Europe', perhaps), but I am also a radical nostalgic. I have never let go of the idea that government, for example, ought to take constant account of its mandate, ought to fear its citizens and ought to be ready at any moment to flea from office in order to make way for  a different way of seeing the world. As Zizek puts it, being left-wing now, is to be one who bears witness to the continuity, despite the ridicule one thereby attracts, of ideas of social justice, fairness and radical democracy (at home, in the workplace, in government and so on).

They sound like soundbites, but they must be said, thought and enacted. If apathy is anything other than simple, as the Greek would have it 'a state of being without passion', then he question remains now as to how to engage that 'passion' on he left again. The right has always been well versed at this and has always understood that passion can motivate and shape a populace, a political engine, very effectively. The left has always in some sense been frightened of this notion - that passion might, in the end, be what makes politics real, makes it come to life, tumble into the outside, the Real. For many of us, this notion seems like a kind of shamanism, a triumph of charisma over content, of personality over policy.

But perhaps there may yet be a way to flick that switch again, to make this notion (that indignation at injustice might motor a political change) again seem viable, and far from ludicrous.

Plans of action, then, usually involve a number of starting points, and I think the best any left-wing theory of change that does not succumb to the charm of its own narrative can do is to incubate the possibility of thinking other then the norm, to, as I heard it put recently by Haleh Afshar, to 'put the norm somewhere else'.

I like this idea, not least because it allows for intervention not as simply as a kind of mindless passage a l'acte, but as a way of challenging the paradigm, of reinvigorating the possibility of agency (however laminated, sedimented, distributed).

So the flicking of the switch might come from a decent plan, a decent and well-formed strategy which balances pragmatics with principle, structure with the particular. It is, I suggest, in the attention to how we engage the world, how we reproduce it, how we make it again and again and encourage our students to do the same, that a radical politics of political engagement might once again become the norm, and 'put somewhere else'.

Here, then, is my plan:

1. to engage this and other public domains in radicalising and interventionist moves

2. to work even harder than I already do, to proliferate the intellectual tools for thinking radically and actively

3. to engage at every micro-social moment as always already political, and to refuse the separating out of political and personal

4. to think and to act as in one instance

5. to network and make connections that intensify this action's effectiveness

6. to intervene again and again

The place where this will start is my place of work: I teach and this is my life. I will teach then with this in mind always.

Now we begin.

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...

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.