blah-feme

nationalism: a fragment

The element which holds together a given community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relationship toward the Thing ... This relationship toward the Thing ... is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our ‘way of life’ presented by the Other: it is what is threatened when, for example, a white Englishman is panicked because of the growing presence of ‘aliens’. What he wants to defend is not reducible to the so-called set of values that offer support to national identity. National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation qua Thing.[i]

The study of nation formation and nationalism, has become inexorably bound up with the liberal consensus of the Anglophone academy around the problematic nature of national adherence, allegiance or attachment. As Benedict Anderson has shown, nations, nation-states and nationalisms are relatively recent creations that belong to the later phases of the longue durée of modernity and are ‘cultural artefacts’.[ii] As a critical-discursive field within the academy, nationalism (and its attendant ‘artefacts’ of the nation-state, the nation and whatAnderson calls ‘nation-ness’[iii]) is only located in those territories that have a particular story to tell. The ingredients of that story are well known and invariably emphasise the contested relation of state and nation-ideal: nationalism is born, so the story goes, of a mismatch, a misfire or a hitch in the flow of political power; it is a kind of blockage that needs to be cleared, a crisis to be overcome.

In this hegemonic liberal academic discourse, then, nationalism flourishes,

1.        where public political discourse and the operation of statehood are perceived to be in radical discontinuity with each other;

2.        where political power is perceived as being exercised by agents external to the national, from outside of the ‘people’;

3.        where there is thus a strong martyrological discourse attending the ‘nation’ and its ‘culture’ (often linked to tensions between administrative language and the people’s language);

4.        where there is a vibrant vernacular culture (or the perception of it);

5.        where there is clear evidence of what Anderson calls ‘unisonality’;[iv]

This story of nationalisms is also a story counter-narrated against a much older and far less ambivalent story, with its origins in the European Enlightenment and in radical liberalism. That older story, narrated endlessly until the middle of the twentieth century, is a story forged in the heat of political attachment to the nation-ideal, the Kulturnation, and invariably imagines the rise of the nation state as the rise of the people: Herder’s declaration, ‘Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National-Bildung wie eine Sprache’[v] points, in this older-liberal imagination of the nation, to a logic of self-ownership, of sovereignty and autonomy and to an internally-facing imagination of the people as constituted among themselves as an ideal unit. What the later, more agnostic liberal stories share, especially after the second world war, is a desire to debunk the dewy-eyed optimism of that originary radical-liberal story: for the later scholar, that story, the story of the great collective rising up and overthrowing its masters, is one which has duped, radicalized and ultimately betrayed the people, led them to mass madness and driven them to a blood-thirsty frenzy with promises of the Sonderweg or blessed path to freedom. This is thus the mainstay of the contemporary critical discourse on nationalism (and in this, Anderson and Gellner can serve as exemplars): the nation state is a fantasy born of a seduction born of a blockage and leads to mass psychosis.

There are, within this pervasive critique of the nation state, also a number of loci classici at which, traditionally, nations and nationalisms have been seen to form themselves. These, inevitably, have tended to be located east, north or south of the old imperial seats of Britain, France,Germany and Austria-Hungary. Hence, much of Ernest Gellner’s discourse on nationalism, for example, focussed on Eastern Europe and theorisations since then have tended to imagine nation states outside Europe as following the same logics, the same pathways as those taken by European nations of the nineteenth century (the same routes to fruition and the same inevitable declines into disenchantment).[vi] That pervasive Eurocentrism has recently come under fire from scholars who, whilst attaching themselves to a similarly agnostic theory of the nation-state, nonetheless also seek to emphasize the rich diversity and complexity of nation states both within and outside the traditional European purview. These more recent theorists have also sought to distinguish, for example, between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’, ‘liberal’ and ‘organic’, and ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalisms, whilst also sketching out the existence of ‘transnations’, ‘internations’, ‘counternations’ and other cognates of the nation-state that occupy the space between the local on the one hand and the global on the other.[vii]

            Nonetheless, a pervasive agnosticism vis-à-vis the nation-state and nationalism in particular persists. What this pervasive agnosticism has consistently missed is the stubborn persistence of the nation (and of nationalism) in political contexts that display few, if any, of the ingredients listed above. The rise of ‘English nationalism’, for example, is a good case in point in which, far from representing a minority state, or even a state in any sense linguistically, culturally or politically ‘disadvantaged’, England is pointedly and poignantly re-framed within a new martyrological discourse around notions of ‘Englishness’ as ‘silenced’ or under some malign threat:

What is curious … is the fact that England has been forbidden. Venerable customs and wise institutions are under threat or already abolished: the grammar schools, the old House of Lords, the Prayer Book [sic] and the English Bible, English weights and measure, English currency, local regiments, the Royal Tournament – every practice in which the spirit of England can be discerned seems fated now to arouse contempt, not in the world at large, but in the English.[viii]

Here there is no threat to the linguistic autonomy of the English, no immanent invasion, no deadly crisis round the corner, no threat to their political hegemony, but, rather, a strongly stated sense of imminent and, crucially, self-inflicted decline. How can this be nationalism? And yet nationalism it certainly is in that it maps out a consistent story of the mismatch of the political reality and the imagined community of England. Notice, also, that Scruton fetishizes the markers of this imagined community: grammar schools, House of Lords, Common Prayer Book, the St. James’s Bible, imperial measures, sterling, and so on; they are all somehow connected, as if there were something, to put it in Alan Finlayson’s terms, that, ‘[gave] them cohesion’.[ix] For Scruton, then, the fetishes all stack up and point in one direction toward some thing, as yet (indeed always) unnamed, but imputed, suggested, imagined and produced in the obsessive-compulsive ordering of the fetishes of the nation. That Thing is the call to order, the call to connect, the call to desire.

Slavoj Žižek has shown how the persistence of nationalism in the European imagination in particular (but also in other contexts) cannot be sufficiently thought in the context of the liberal-agnostic thesis. What is striking in Žižek’s analysis is precisely this: that so-called ‘deconstructionist’ theories of the nation (what we have been terming liberal-agnostic theories here) have too readily ‘reduced’ the nation to mere symptom of an ideology, the ‘product’ of a certain Weltanschauung. As Žižek puts it:

A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure those practices. To emphasize in a ‘deconstructionist’ mode that Nation is not biological or transhistorical fact but a contingent discursive construction, an overdeteremined result of textual practices, is thus misleading: such an emphasis overlooks he remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency.[x]

In other words, the liberal-agnostic discourse misses precisely that element of national consciousness that enables its continued persistence, despite the widespread discrediting of its ideology: outside of discourse, outside of symbolisation, there must be some thing that allows subjects to constitute themselves as subjects, to conceive of themselves not merely as symptoms of the flow of semiosis, but also as corporeal fleshy beings, as instances, and it is precisely this that makes nationalism ‘sticky’. For Žižek, then, the kernel of enjoyment that sustains nationalism is bound up precisely with something that cannot be held in discourse, but which falls outside of it, as a nugget of jouissance. The ‘Thing’ that sustains that jouissance is thus something that sustains desire – the desire to adhere, the desire to believe, the desire to demonize the Other.

            We are in a position now to inflect the liberal-agnostic thesis of nationalism thus: whilst it is true that nationalism constitutes a fetishization of ritual, behaviour, objects and images around an ‘imagined community’ (for Scruton, grammar schools, the House of Lords, the Common Prayer Book, the St. James’s Bible, imperial measures, sterling and so on), the key to understanding the ideological structure that holds these different fetishes together is not the upper level of that structure (its ‘superstructural’ effects), but the enjoyment that that ordering delivers. In this sense, then, it is a matter of thinking attachment to nation as to something that promises to fill the lack in the Other. And here is something quite profound in Žižek’s theory not merely of nationalism but of the political field in general: the political is, to be sure, always constituted around fantasy, but that fantasy is not the ground, but itself a superstructural effect of what lies beneath, a huge dark and arbitrary (and therefore ‘empty’) structure that casts about for fantasies and which is never satisfied by them. That ‘undergrowth of enjoyment’,[xi] is a space that allows ideology to stitch itself into the Real. To understand nationalism, then, one must not seek to uncover the fantasy that lies beneath, but one must seek, instead, to uncover attempts to cover over the empty and arbitrary constitution of its ground and the erotic investments it makes in that undergrowth.

            What is striking in this context, then, is the extent to which the political rituals of nationalism consistently relied on the appropriation and redistribution of regional, vernacular and interior ‘exotic’ musical traditions. Music, therefore, is taken up as fetish, reordered, brought under the logic of the Thing that holds nationalism together and made to project an underlying cohesion which cannot be named: our music tells us who we are, but that is not all that we are – there is something else we cannot get at, an excess that music can only vaguely point to. Invariably, the music fetish is sustained where the threat of the Other seems most intense. Where, conversely, there seems to have been little or no contestation vis-à-vis the status of, for example, bourgeois music, where, that is, there seems to have been a clearly articulated and unproblematic match of a fully-fledged art music tradition with the national ideal, musical nationalism is infrequently in evidence. Where, conversely, the status of the national ideal is in stark contrast to a diagnosed political crisis (where, for example, one language territory is cruelly ruled by another), and where bourgeois art musics are aligned with internationalising tendencies or with cultures occupying the position of interloper or occupier (the Master, the malign Other), musical nationalisms tend to proliferate. There are, of course, some interesting exceptions, where the call of the Master seems to make itself felt even when the nation’s musical cultures are far from under threat. The case of Germany both before (as a Kulturnation or ‘cultural nation’) and after (as the Wilhelmine Second Reich) unification, is a striking case in point.

---

[i] Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 201, quoted in Alan Finlayson, ‘Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Theories of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1998), 145–62: 154.

[ii] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York, 2^nd edn 1991), p. 4.

[iii] Ibid., p. 3.

[iv] Ibid., p. 145.

[v] Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Riga and Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1785), p. 245. Misquoted in Anderson (67-8), this is quite difficult to translate precisely because the German contains an ambiguity that the English does not. The translation depends on the context (the ‘Denn’ refers back o what comes before). The context is as follows: ‘Endlich wünschte ich auch die Unterscheidungen, die man aus rühmlichem Eifer für die überschauende Wissenschaft dem Menschengeschlecht zwischengeschoben hat, nicht über die Grenzen erweitert. So haben einige z. B. vier oder fünf Abteilungen desselben, die ursprünglich nach Gegenden oder gar nach Farben gemacht waren, Rassen zu nennen gewaget; ich sehe keine Ursache dieser Benennung. Rasse leitet auf eine Verschiedenheit der Abstammung, die hier entweder gar nicht stattfindet oder in jedem dieser Weltstriche unter jeder dieser Farben die verschiedensten Rassen begreift. Denn jedes Volk ist Volk: es hat seine Nationalbildung wie seine Sprache.’ The complexity in rendering this into good English stems from at least three problems : first on the repeated  term Volk because the second would be rendered differently in English than the first, thus losing the emphatic repetition of the German; second, the force of ‘wie’ here is difficult to translate since it could mean both ‘like’ or ‘as if’ in English; third, the term Nationalbildung (hyphenated in the original Herder but now usually given as a single word) has an ambiguity in German that is difficult to render accurately into English – the second element Bildung has a complex history and refers to he notion of a ‘formation through culture’ or ‘culture as process’ and therefore the full term Nationalbildung could mean something like ‘national becoming’, ‘national culture’ or ‘national formation’. ‘Denn’ here is clearly a conjunction that expands the preceding sentence ‘Race leads to a differentiation of origin (lit. racial extraction), which here is either not the case or one [will] encounter a huge diversity of races in every small corner of the world under each flag.’ In other words, race is too crude a marker of nation since it leads either to a false splitting of the origins of a nation or will cause a multitude of peoples to crawl out from under each flag. We might thus render the final key sentence here as something like ‘Because every people is a people (i.e. a nation): each has its national culture (or formation) like [a] language’.

[vi] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (New York, 1983).

[vii] Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights, ‘Introduction’, Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Global and the Local (London: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 1–18.

[viii] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London and New York: Continuum, [2000] 2006), p. 247.

[ix] Finlayson, ‘Psychology’, p. 154.

[x] Žižek, Tarrying, p. 202.

[xi] Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 237.

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anger-passion-commitment ... as symptom?

Lacan is always there with a twist, a spasm, a neat and terrifying paradox to unthink the stubbornly always-already thinkable, to make strange what is given, to shake up and reorder the relations among power, ethics and selfhood. For anger, this might be particularly useful. Imagine it along Lacanian lines, then, if you will, as a symptom:

My anger, a symptom, is not a twitch, or a spasm, but precisely a symptom, a sinthome, even, in that it is not about le vouloir-dire (“wanting to say”) but it speaks only in so far as space is made for it in the analytical situation, in so far as we believe in the believing…. That symptom, my anger (at what?), is thus without cause and is real: it is in itself without ontology and must be made to speak by an act if wilful symbolisation; speak it, say it, let it out, we might say. But that simple modality of outpouring, of ‘freeing’ of ‘opening’, of touching and feeling is circular and without usefulness here since it shortcircuits the coming to be of the symptom in a way altogether unhelpful for the broader analytical arch of the symptom. To ‘understand’ the symptom, one must certainly make room for it: bring it into speech, certainly, but also bring it into silence, allow it to swell, to fill and tremble; nurture it, hold it close, take it on, make it yours, because that is precisely what it is.

My anger is my own, my special, my exception.

It is here that the so-called blindspot (seeing red) seems to show itself as not quite right, not quite the place at which anger as symptom works, too reduced to a mere structural ‘is-not’, to mere emptiness. This is too clean, too pure, too neat. If anger as symptom is anything it is never neat, never clean, but always contaminated somehow, always beholden, always already thrown, always already become, too real, too material. Perhaps blindspot (seeing red, going ape), then, is too glib a shorthand: let’s think it differently again.

If anger is a state of exception, as we have already suggested, then it is also, as symptom, paradoxically, the repetition of that exception, the greying over-and over that makes it want to say, to vouloir dire, to show itself in the space we make for it. In repeating it, in becoming angry again and again, the symptom is given space to be and it announces itself to us. Here I am; your anger; let us embrace.

This anger is not the the place at which you hide yourself from me, but the place at which hiding and revealing are endlessly repeated.

angry together...

I’m grateful to Jodi over at I Cite for picking up my post on anger. I must say, first of all, in case anyone was wondering, that I am not generally seen by my colleagues and friends as someone who suffers from a problem managing my anger; I am seen, I think, as someone with a certain passion and I can be a bit ‘spikey’, but I don’t use anger as a tactic or as a strategy (at least I don’t think I do).

Jodi’s absolutely right that I tend to think of anger not at all as useful, but as ‘a kind of blindspot’ and I’m intrigued at her characterisation of her own experience of anger as not about that blindspot but, perhaps, if I can paraphrase here, as a certain moment of visceral knowing, as precisely the opposite of that blindspot: a point at which all becomes clear, all opens up and the perpetrators of wickedness are lined up for inspection. I wonder how this works, this other kind of knowledge. It is not cool, not calm and rational, nor is it just about a giving oneself up to the heat of a feeling, the kind of ‘touchy-feely’ approach that both she and I have no time for. It might be a kind of insight that is fuelled precisely by indignation, by the passion and heat that drives political commitment, driven by that rumble of the Real that keeps us fixed, located, committed. This would indeed be a productive passion a magnificent obsession, a grand heat.

The trouble is, I never know what kind of anger I am feeling whilst I am feeling it: I am always in some sense blocked, shut down, held rigid by it. Perhaps this is a very English thing – mustn’t make a scene, hold it all inside and turn it into a neurosis like a normal person. Today in a meeting with academics from outside my own discipline, for example, I experienced anger as a radical and sudden alienation: all the words, all the terms of reference, all the rhetoric seemed suddenly to be pointing in one direction, towards an outcome that felt so hopelessly at odds with the needs of my discipline, so fundamentally alien to the epistemological ground of my discipline as to leave me in some sense short-circuited, cut short, and very, almost terminally, anxious. I had a sudden glimpse of an endless and dark hostility, and it was fired by an intense and almost debilitating feeling of absolute helplessness. I wonder if anger worked here as precisely that kind of visceral knowing, but not like the one Jodi speaks of – this truly was a getting stuck, a kind of sweaty rigamortis precisely because I glimpsed the awfulness of the Other’s malign intention.

I know precisely the kind of anger of which Jodi speaks – irritation at bureaucracy, rational and critical takes on public political discourse, suspicion of ideological duplicity… I understand and have felt all of those, but there is this other thing, you see… this debilitating and overwhelming spasm of the body that just comes on without warning and dissipates only after it has drawn blood; it is hungry and it stalks you like that dark sibling that Tippett speaks of – a kind of self-haunting, always waiting, always ready.

Anger works for me, then, as a kind of terrible potential. I am sure that my take on anger is culturally-specific. Middle-class English people are accustomed to showing prickly indignation through subtle and gently drawn nuances, and we are terrified of releasing the beast. I know there is much here that is similar in so-called WASP cultures in the States, but, if I am right, I think the English discourse on anger (note that I am not making claims for Scottish, Welsh or Irish discourses on anger) is a discourse of malfunction: to lose one’s temper is to break down, to become unfit for purpose.

I hate that view and resent it deeply, but it is so efficiently somatised in me that I cannot shake it. Then again, perhaps I am all too comfortable with it.

But isn't that precisely how ideology works?

Stand back, I’m about to go off on one (as they say up here in the North)!

anger and the Other

Anger can be one of those things that makes for good writing. Many blogs have made good use of it - irritation feeds passion, brings intensity, and a certain energy to the process of writing. We imagine the author inflamed, typing at speed, or knocking off the letter (irritated of Tunbridge Wells) with a certain gestural flourish befitting the depths of disquiet that brought the poor creature here in the first place.
Today it is I who is irritated. Indeed I would go so far as to say that I am furious. Incandescent, even (I imagine myself glowing like a sore finger).  It is one of those furies that starts in the pit of the stomach and rides upwards like a stampede of wolves howling at the moon in chase of something small, obscure and cute, but already lost, already mauled by what the Spanish would call the vicio of the hunt. There will never be enough to satiate the pack that rides like this; it is what it is because it lives only in that vicious chase for the furry cause of its desire.
This is the insight I have, today, I think - that anger, irritation and its various near cousins, are more often than not causally diffuse. They inevitably emerge with what popular psychology has come to term a trigger. But the trigger is a false friend - it leads one to think that it is precisely that which is cause. And yet it is only symptom, mere cipher of a state that is already here and rapidly passing, flux, flow, Strom; it is neither herald nor agent, but mirage of both, the trace of a process that is already at an end, gone, passed and the anger that follows is just the afterglow, the heat that is expelled as by-product of a chemical reaction that brews elsewhere and elsewhen.
I wonder how anger and cause really do relate, then. As I write, my anger, the end of the process hat I cannot grasp, is already dissipated. I don't know why I was angry, or at what, but that feeling, so intense and all-consuming, is nothing like anxiety, except, perhaps, only structurally similar. Anxiety can debilitate in ways that are unbearable - gut-wrenching, stomach-churning anxiety stops you in your tracks; anger can do this too, but it can also fire up, bring movement, transference, a traversing of that which lies at the heart of the fantasy that feeds it: I am NOT what you say, I am THIS (and the evidence refuses to play along); why don't you give me an ANSWER (and authority hides itself and never speaks); why can’t you see what I see (and the world hides from others the insights you bitterly wish to share); why am I so ridiculous (and the faint trace of a smirk on the Face of the other haunts and taunts and mocks)?
Questions, so many questions and yet no answers. In this instance, at least, anger accompanies a sudden glimpse of the blindspot that cannot be named and is nowhere to be spoken except in this: my anger is the place at which you hide yourself from me.

food and the erotics of feeding

I am told I should write about food. As if enacting my superego, all my friends that know about my blogging insist I should write about food. As if to say 'enjoy, write, enjoy, write, enjoy, write ...' (you get the idea).

Yet I have always found  this task precisely very difficult. I have often thought I would love to be a 'food writer', to write occasionally about food in a way that shows fidelity to food, to the ritual of making, and sharing, and to the erotic economy of that ritual. But I always seem to fall back from it.

Why is this? What is it about writing about food in particular that I find so difficult? This, one might say, is my symptom: the gap between who I think I am and who I am able to show I am. And with food, this gap is like an aching chasm, accusing, beligerent. I want to be the bon viveur, the open, serene and endlessly magnanimous creature hat can spread itself across endless plains of hostility and indifference; but I am too small-minded for that. I am peevish too. Food, and the gifting of food, is probably a way of ameliorating the worse excesses of my rather tricky personality. It's too close, to dear, too raw to be something that can be discoursed.. and yet here I go again.

Ah the agony of self-knowledge and the joys of self-forgetting!!

Go on: have another roast potato (roasted in goose fat of course).

blogging and the unconsciuous

I have been reading again Spurious's great posts on Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. What strikes me about the Lacanian universe, as I re-read those posts again, is that, although it speaks openly and often  of the unconscious, it seems to almost disavow that specifically Freudian notion, abandoning, as it were, the core apparatus of psychoanalysis, the unconscious as a kind of zoo in which wild beats prowl about. I do not want to suggest that there is no unconscious in Lacan, but that it is radically different than in Freud. Lacan is differently ill, we might say. We are all familiar with the notion that the unconscious is "structured like a language", but I wonder what we are to make, specifically, of this disavowal of Freud? What, specifically, of that textual relation? And what are the politics that motor it?

A post is no place for this kind of rumination, but I'll have a quick stab at it: there are two distinct approaches to Lacan's theory of the unconscious that characterise recent scholarship. The first is a textually conservative one which seeks to read Lacan closely and to elaborate the body of work on its own terms and within its particular milieu as a kind of system. The second is an appropriative modality that takes Lacan up and moves him onto ground his work only intimates. It is here, I suggest, that the most productive approaches to Lacan are found. This second modality is critical and open-ended, playful and radicalising.

In refusing the coherence of Lacan, we are, as it were, replaying the Lacanian disavowal of Freud: what motors that disavowal is the desire not just for a new space (not just for an Oedipal shudder) but for an engagement. This is how Lacan seems to want to work with Freud...

In an interesting and challenging short chat in the pub with L yesterday, we got talking to a certain book, written by someone we know. We both think it a very fine book, but  L seems to think that the kind of modality I am outlining here - that of critical reopening and  engagement - is always doomed to being, in the end, a kind of parasitism (I am deliberately over-characterising his much more nuanced point here).

L wants originality, I think, or perhaps he wants a mode of engagement that is less concerned with citation than  current practices in philosophy. It may be that his concerns about our friend's book are specific to a philosophy-related  crisis, or it may be that his  critique is actually in the end the soundest and the most damning: you have written a very interesting book in which you apply someone else's ideas. ouch!

Lacan's unconscious is certainly no re-run of Freud's; his 'take' on Freud, his engagement, is open-ended, meaningful but, crucially, it goes beyond application and builds something else without complete abandonment; critiques without obliteration, works without violence. If that is what L wants, then I am with him...

Is there a kind of struggle with the master that is not Oedipal?

 

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.

the end of analysis (CBTii)

Well it's all over. I had my last session of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) last week and that is it. Larval subjects very kindly offered to save me from it all and analyse me by ohone - I was VERY sorely tempted but I thought I would stick with this to see how it went (no doubt a residue of my Northern English protestant upbringing). Ah well, CBT come and CBT go. My counsellor (as we call them this side of the pond) was a quiet, smart and encouraging woman with an inner calm that was quite attractive to me – she seemed to radiate a certain kind of benevolent understanding, a rational, focussed and quite striking ability to get to the core of the thing.

Well actually that is not true. She was nice and I liked her a lot, bu the core of the thing? Well first of all there is no core and second, if only as metaphore. we got nowere near anywhere I wanted to go! What is exasperating about CBT (and my experience, admittedly, has been strongly coloured by the fact that my employers suggested I take this course of action to, as my provost put it 'see if you can't change your relationship with your work'. The trouble is, I LIKE my relationship with my work just as it is, thank you very much).

Perhaps, as my first experience of any kind of therapy (yes folks, I am a virgin), this was not what I wanted, needed or was hoping for. I have said before that I favour the Lacanian approach, since that therapeutic method is best placed to theorise (and help us make sense of) the incompleteness of the psychic system. This is what is radically refused in CBT: the process, it seems to me, seems to centre on 2 things – 1. speed of the process and 2. a kind of dampening system designed to turn the volume down. In particular, it struck me that the process was about reducing complex and highly malleable feelings, habits, reactions, symptoms, to a simple set of bad thought patterns: change the patterns and you'll change how you feel. Oh well, in that case... simple. 'tis done!

Ok, so enough whining about the process, What really interests me in this situation, though, is the process by which analysis ends. Freud, of course, has plenty to say of the subject. For Freud, in a late paper, ‘Terminable and interminable analysis’ (1937), the end of analysis is an ambiguous and highly contested moment in which the analysand can suffer some trauma:

Experience has taught us, [those who practice] psychoanalytic therapy, that the freeing of a person of his/her neurotic symptoms, constraints and character abnormalities is a long and arduous task. Hence, from the very beginning, every effort was made to shorten the length of analysis. These efforts required no justification but could call on the most understandable and useful motivations. But probably there was also a remnant of that impatient disregard with which an earlier period of medicine viewed the neurotic, as the superfluous results of invisible damage. If one now wanted to deal with them, one did so with the utmost speed (my translation)

And here it is – it's as if he were talking about my experience – hurry up little soldier, I have other people to cure – make sure you work at this and come back if you need me, but and let's be very clear about this, don't think you're so important as to warrant anything other than a cursory 12 sessions of analysis.

I'm sure part of this is my common of garden neurosis: but there is something beyond this I am sure  – transference and identifications aside, the process of analysis ought to embrace the continuum of analytical situations from the terminable to the interminable, without fixating on the timetable; to do so would be to reduce the analytical encounter to a simple exchange of time, of hours paid, of simple little rivulets of desire stamped into the fabric of the analytical furniture, made small, made material, made exchangeable. The sigh of time is the sigh of capital.

And so my stress has been comodified, made neat, manageable, and put into its little box.

Well that's good. I feel much better.

Now, where's my chainsaw?