Saturday, July 19, 2008
Verbal sequencing may be broken by an impulse–perhaps an impulse belonging to somebody–to think otherwise. Would such an impulse then be pathological?
Panecastic translation, to be communicative, would have to consist of something other than brute transpositions.
An idea of distributive meanings might be helpful, a distributive idea of distributive meanings. Disambiguate.
If one does not feel the impulse of a meaning, one is without that very meaning. That's a transposition. Does it leave room for questioning? Can we question that which has not been lost? In what sense is something lost when only its verity appears to be lost? Is there ever anything we can find by losing its verity? Does our transposition leave room for true ambiguity? Can we be true to ambiguity on anything like an equal footing?
The breach, when it's at home, means the impromptu thought. It means, among other things, thinking on the spot rather than on the basis of first principles. It is not a call for the destruction or negation of principles. It does call upon a capacity to step away from first principles, and an ability to think otherwise which may lead to a practical negation of first principles, were practice dialectical, a fact which would have to be posed and decided in practice, or, perhaps it might be said, in the breach. Just as the breach brings us to think urgency or exigency–and also a certain kind of indigence that would pull us back from the boundaries of thought–so it brings us to think the impulse. Do we give in to the impulse? A distributive idea of pulsation.
How do we let the impromptu be?
I say in a thousand ways that the aleatory encounter is a high ideal that few reach in practice, but when will I learn?
For what reason do we say that misunderstandings are pathological, abnormal, accidental, or, in the jargon of the sociologist, dysfunctional? When I call academic disciplines "curiosities" I am playing with the professor's mYrror. However, if things like discursive formations exist, we might rather wish to not represent a professorial self at all. On the other hand, perhaps we have evidentiary reasons to inquire after connections between distributive misunderstandings and professorial selves.
Who is the self we know through misunderstandings? How does meeting this person impact our habits of feeling?
My interest in the misunderstanding is not merely descriptive but rather therapeutic. I would like to alleviate the suffering that comes–perhaps indirectly, belatedly for sure–from having understood too much, even while knowing that I feel compelled to reach for further understanding. I should be careful of taking that feeling with me into any effort to understand. A compulsion to disappear.
Why wouldn't a distributive misunderstanding be therapeutic? Under what circumstances should we want to make an effort towards misunderstanding?
My problem with placing the iter-able before the iteration, which is generally a problem with intellectualism, amounts to this: I won't assume that the things I have made essential to my life are also essential to your life, because if I were wrong it would feel as if something essential between us had died. My world has more than enough grief as it is.
Labels: dialectics, improvisation, Kristeva, meaning, misunderstanding, panecastics, paths, pulsative function, repetition
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Kristeva views anti-Semitism as a rather literary psychological phenomenon:
Anti-Semitism, for which there thus exists an object as phantasmic and ambivalent as the Jew, is a kind of parareligious formation; it is the sociological thrill, flush with history, that believers and nonbelievers alike seek in order to experience abjection. One may suppose, consequently, that anti-Semitism will be the more violent as the social and/or symbolic code is found wanting in the face of developing abjection. That, at any rate, is the situation in our contemporary world, and it is also, for more personal reasons, that of Céline. Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Célinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier (see pp. 90ff.) the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact–which constitutes abjection.
In this sense Céline's pamphlets are the avowed delirium out of which the work emerges to venture into obscure regions at the limits of identity. If delirium is indeed involved, and Céline himself suggests that it is, that is also the nature of all anti-Semitism, the daily banality of which surrounds us; Nazi excesses or Célinian outbursts, which are cathartic upon the whole, give us a warning while we thirst for sleep and jouissance.
(The Powers of Horror, p. 180)
Hmm. What kind of problem is Kristeva's enjoyment of Céline? (Or my enjoyment of Kristeva?) Is it a question of being persuaded, of losing one's bearings amidst textual pleasures, delirium? Maybe not quite. The feeling of a dirty secret, relishing it. Its exposure. Can I speak of excess here without meaning mass murder?
Labels: abjection, anti-Semitism, Céline, Kristeva, pleasure
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
"Lacking illusions, lacking shelter, today's universe is divided between boredom (increasingly anguished at the prospect of losing its resources, through depletion) or (when the spark of the symbolic is maintained and desire to speak explodes) abjection and piercing laughter" (Powers of Horror, p. 133). Illusions are in fact ubiquitous, but what about shelter? (As I think about this, I find it necessary to note that I don't mean romanticize homelessness in modern societies or the plight of refugees.) Is the thinking person today without shelter? Does the poet find shelter in poetry, the astronomer in the stars, the psychoanalyist in analysis, the reader in books? Are these shelters more like temporary workspaces and less like homes away from home? What kind of forces is today's thinker exposed to? Is indifference a force? Is symbolic discourse a force? Is today a force? In a world of enduring grievous violence what are we to make of such forces? Must the situation of today's intellectual be either boring or risible and abject? I respect the capacity to take shelter.
Labels: intellectuals, Kristeva
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Kristeva says, regarding a shift from Levitical to Christic abjection, "What is happening is that a new arrangement of differences is being set up, an arrangement whose economy will regulate a wholly different system of meaning, hence a wholly different speaking subject" (Powers of Horror, p. 113). I would say that where a new meaning emerges, a new subject emerges. Well, perhaps the subject isn't very interesting anymore. Kristeva is really talking about a type of subject. Hmm. I am interested in the economy that would regulate a system of meaning. Perhaps it isn't enough for me to specify the heterogeneity of such an economy. I'm interested in the imperfections of its regulation, its slippages and drifts. Maybe for me then the question is not so much of a nomos as a logos, i.e. a heterogeneous ecology of relations.
Labels: Kristeva, meaning, subject
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Kristeva writes about "processes that underpin symbolicity":
Contrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. Fecal matter signifies, as it were, what never ceases to separate from a body in a state of permanent loss in order to become autonomous, distinct from the mixtures, alterations, and decay that run through it. That is the price the body must pay if it is to become clean and proper. Psychoanalysis has indeed seen that anal dejections constitute the first material separation that is controllable by the human being. It has also deciphered, in that very rejection, the mastered repetition of a more archaic separation (from the maternal body) as well as the condition of division (high-low), of discretion, of difference, of recurrence, in short the condition of the processes that underpin symbolicity
(The Powers of Horror, p. 108)
From my vantage point, which is rather removed, this is a case of the psychologist believing too strongly in her metaphors. I'd prefer not to doubt Kristeva's idea of an archaic separation, yet our separations from our mothers are many and complex. Here I question the belief in repetition not in order to supplant it with an idea of the ongoing, but rather to clear a space to question what it means to have faith in a metaphor. To be faithful to metaphor, what beliefs are required? Must we believe in source (mouth) and target (anus)? Must we believe that boundaries may be crossed, and if so, must we believe in boundaries? If we take seriously the defense of the psychoanalytic position, according to which the metaphor belongs to and is perhaps bodied forth by the in-fant, then must we also believe in conditions of processes that underpin symbolicity? Must we beleive in meaning? To use another metaphor, does metaphor ask us to become monotheistic or polytheistic in our beliefs? Possibly metaphor doesn't ask us to believe anything. Being faithful to metaphor expresses a commitment to expressivity or even a commitment to meaning, but such commitments do not require a foundation of belief. They require a sending with, but who can say what the truth of the sending is.
Since I don't believe in the clean and proper body (corps propre) its infinitude doesn't impress me. But I'll play along. Is infinitude an entailment of metaphor itself? Faithfulness to metaphor situates itself within the disorientation of metaphor, betwixt widdershins and deasil flows of sense. Neither difference of flows nor senses across boundaries hit me over the head with infinity, though disorientation does appear to carry beyond finite points. It's a mystery to me how finite ever got to be infinite, unless it was by a short cut–metaphor is the long way home.
The paradox of infinite becoming, i.e., the paradox of infinite identity, has not yet become a real problem for me (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, "First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming"). By the same token, I neither believe nor disbelieve in the pause. Possibly the pause is relative to the speed of metaphor, although the speed of metaphor is not constant. Metaphor is an upper mantle beneath a subterranean dualism of the hard and the soft, of that which receives and that which eludes the kneading of Dough. Metaphor can just as easily be a Tree. Metaphor disorients without asking that we be sent to infinity. Is this a paradox? Metaphor is a parable, a circumlocution. Would the infinity that metaphor would carry over to–were we prepared to believe it–be a meaninglessness? That might contain a genuine paradox, though I might still hestitate to call it a problem. The destruction of meanings is de rigueur in metaphor; it happens most casually. Does the destruction of meanings require a faith in meaninglessness or a faithlessness in meanings or neither. Perhaps a commitment to the destruction of meanings is concomitant to a commitment to expressivity. If only to clear a path. I remain agnostic about metaphor, though I follow its path.
Labels: Deleuze, infinity, Kristeva, metaphor, repetition
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Is Kristeva's jouissance an enjoyment of the remainder?
[T]he remainder appears to be coextensive with the entire architecture of non-totalizing thought. In its view there is nothing that is everything; nothing is exhaustive, there is a residue in every system–in cosmogony, food ritual, and even sacrifice, which deposits, through ashes for instance, ambivalent remains. A challenge to our mono-theistic and mono-logical universes such a mode of thinking apparently needs the ambivalence of remainder if it is not to become enclosed within One single-level symbolics, and thus always posit a non-object as polluting as it is reviving–defilement and genesis.
(Powers of Horror, p. 76)
Our eyes can remain open provided we recognize ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic–by language. Provided we hear in language–and not in the other, not in the other sex–the gouged-out-eye, the wound, the basic incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying concatenations. That amounts to joying in the truth of self-division (abjection/sacred)
(pp. 88-89)
I am resistant, though not impervious, to the idea that non-totalizing thought has an architecture. I rather imagine that it makes a place amidst diverse architectures that are not its own. What is the real difference, though, between a habitation and an architecture?
Labels: jouissance, Kristeva, language
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Some quotes about language from Kristeva's Powers of Horror:
But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseperable fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial ("I know that, but just the same," "the sign is not the thing, but just the same," etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking beings.
(p. 37)
Through the mouth that I fill with my words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying. . . .Language learning takes place as an attempt to appropriate an oral "object" that slips away and whose hallucination, necessarily deformed, threatens us from the outside.
(p. 41)
In abjection, revolt is completely within being. Within the being of language. Contrary to hysteria, which brings about, ignores, or seduces the symbolic but does not produce it, the subject of abjection is eminently productive of culture. Its symptom is the rejection and reconstruction of languages.
(p. 45)
Is there anything without being? Is being a container? A Russian doll? A colander? I can't decide whether being contains anything. I can imagine that saying is without being when I'm in the mood to misrecognize being. Being is not what I mean by saying "Being" (fetishist denial, but its "with-out" that I mean to problematize). Saying is plural and heterogeneous–plurality is my concern, heterogeneity is Kristeva's. When Kristeva refers to the "heterogeneous economy (body and discourse) of the speaking being" (p. 52) I take her to mean that such heterogeneity operates within the being of language. She has already argued that significance is inherent in the human body (p. 10). In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva makes clear that the both the semiotic and the symbolic are modalities of signification, and she holds that significance becomes a practice "if and only if it enters into the code of linguistic and social communication" (Revolution, p. 17). Thus there seems to be an unmistakable within to Kristeva's thinking about being (and perhaps another within in the case of the subject who can be threatened from the "outside"). There is nonetheless a plurality to Kristeva's within that distinguishes it from other withins, a plurality that is not the same as the heterogeneous economy, but is included in it. Yet is a contained plurality a genuine plurality? Could withoutness be our essence as speaking beings?
Labels: Kristeva, language, ontology
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
"Deprived of world," "weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside," "death infecting life," "the outside-of-meaning," "engulfed" in a loss "for want of the ability to name an object of desire": these are not the words of Lars Svendsen describing existential boredom, but rather Julia Kristeva describing abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982). There are some notable differences between the two. "Essentially different from 'uncaniness,' more violent too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory" (p. 5). If abjection differs from Unheimlichkeit, it nonetheless involves a rupture with the sense of place. "[T]he space that engrosses the deject [the one by whom the abject exists], the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic" (p. 8). The deject is a stray whose existential question is not "Who am I?" but "Where am I?"
"The abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that always already been lost" (p. 15, my emphasis). We might think of boredom as a kind of violence, something for which we would rather substitute dialogue, but boredom doesn't feel quite like a violence, not the way abjection does. The deject has swallowed up, instead of maternal love, "an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred" (p. 6). "The 'unconscious' contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established" (p. 7, Kristeva's emphasis). There is material here for an existential essay on the mood, the disposition, of dejection. Kristeva, however, draws us into the psychology of a condition and its literary and cultural elaborations, an essay on abjection.
Jacky Bowring asks, perspicaciously, whether loss has a form. I will ask, rather boringly by now, whether loss has a rhythm, and whether its rhythm could other than a brutal pulsative function. "The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth" (p. 9). So abjection has a pulse. It also becomes rhythm. Kristeva tells us that the abject is repeated. (I'll leave aside for the moment the problems of Kristeva's eternal return and of repetition;) One can bring abjection "into being a second time, and different from the original impurity. It is a repetition through rhythm and song, therefore through what is not yet, or no longer is 'meaning,' but arranges, defers, differntiates and organizes, harmonizes pathos, bile, warmth and enthusiasm" (p. 28).
Kristeva adopts a Freudian stance to the problem of abjection. She believes it causes a "sad analytic silence to hover above a strange, foreign discourse, which, strictly speaking, shatters verbal communication (made up of a knowledge and a truth that are nevertheless heard) by means of a device that mimics terror, enthusiasm, or orgy, and is more closely related to rhythm and song that it is to the World" (p. 30). The approach leads me outside, or rather off, my ambit, but I will let Kristeva call the tune because I am curious about this strange discourse more related to rhythm than to the world.
Labels: abjection, Bowring, Kristeva, pulsative function, rhythm, Svendsen, Unheimlichkeit
Thursday, August 16, 2007
I might be willing to think that alienation isn't among the worst things that can happen to a person. But what do we mean by alienation? Alienation of what, from what? No doubt alientation in its various manifestations causes pain. Nonetheless it may still be preferable to the alternatives. I'm not sure.
Jesper Hoffmeyer considers the alienation of one's own world from the worlds of others in the context of the evolution of semiosis. He specualtes on the origin of speech:
And this fact–that the spoken word is common property, that it is a tool with which to share a world is perhaps the real reason for its emergence. The idea that we all inhabit our very own umwelt, an umwelt which we take with us to the grave, must gradually have begun to show up on the mental screens of our well-developed, cognitive erectus forefathers. At some point it must have dawned on them that they were solitary beings, dissociated from the universe that had engendered them but from which they had broken free by dint of their increasingly emancipated models of the ups and downs of life. The dividing line between things, that fundamental "not," must have begun to have an effect: the recognition of the fact that the line between categories is drawn by "someone" (who can differentiate between A and non-A) and that they too were "someone" and, thus, alien. Because to become on with the world, "someone" would necessarily have to cease to be "someone."
(Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 112, Hoffmeyer's emphasis)
Hoffmeyer asks us to imagine Homo erectus as a being with language (langue) but no speech (p. 186-187), an interesting twist on the idea of Homo loquens. Does speech actually free us from alienation? Does it ameliorate the psychic effects of alienation?
Hoffmeyer draws an unusual idea from the arbitrary relationship between speech and language. What happens when this arbitrariness breaks down, and what does its breakdown tell us about alienation? Julia Kristeva, who poetically says that uncanny strangeness "irrigates our very speaking-being, estranged by other logics, including the heterogenenity of biology" (Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170), writes about the breakdown of linguistic arbitrariness:
Obsessional neuroses, but also and differently psychoses, have the distinctive feature of "reifying" signs–of slipping from the domain of "speaking" to the domain of "doing." Such a particularity also evinces the fragility of repression and, without actually explaining it, allows the return of the repressed to be inscribed in the reification under the guise of the uncanny affect. While, in another semiological device, one might think that the return of the repressed would assume the shape of the somatic symptom or of the acting out, here the breakdown of the arbitrary signifier and its tendency to become reified as psychic contents that take the place of material reality would favor the experience of uncanniness. Conversely, our fleeting or more or less threatening encounter with uncanny strangeness would be a clue to our psychic latencies and the fragility of our repression–at the same time as it is an indication of the weakness of language as a symbolic barrier that, in the final analysis, structures the repressed.
Strange indeed is the encounter with the other–whom we perceive by means of sight, hearing, smell, but don not "frame" within our consciousness. The other leaves us separate, incoherent; even more so, he can make us feel that we are not in touch with our own feelings, that we reject them or, on the contrary, that we refuse to judge them–we feel "stupid," we have "been had."
Also strange is the experience of the abysss seperating me from the other who shocks me–I do not even precieve him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him. Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences when I had been abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure. I feel "lost," "indistinct," "hazy." The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in situation myself with respect to the other and keep going over the course of indentification-projection that lies at the foundation of my reaching autonomy.
(pp. 186-187, Kristeva's emphasis)
In Kristeva's view "the sense of strangeness is a mainspring for indentification with the other, by working out its depersonalizing impact by means of astonishment" (my emphasis). Analysis, she says, "can throw light on such an affect but, far from insisting on breaking it down, it should make way for esthetics (some might add philosophy), with which to saturate its phantasmal progression and insure its cathartic eternal return" (pp> 189-190). Thus philosophy has for Kristeva a therapeutic (or even soteriological) function, but on condition that, as I am interpreting her, astonishment is subject to eternal return. Philosophy cannot liberate us from existential alienation; it can perhaps however ameliorate its pain.
I have to wonder what the reification of the signifier does to my own thinking. And I wonder what this might mean for a being with language but no speech. Was Homo erectus any more or less repressed that Homo sapiens? Would such a being have lacked the means of working out any psychic reality?
Labels: eternal return, Hoffmeyer, Kristeva, strangeness, Unheimlichkeit
Monday, November 20, 2006
I wanted to say something about Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves other than it perplexed me at times or that she had keen things to say about cosmopolitanism in the ancient world. Here is her main thesis, which is really rather straightforward:
The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which affinity and understanding founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns "we" into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, the foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.
(p. 1)
And there you see the problem. I can acknowledge myself as a foreigner easily enough, but can we? I think so, but then I don't believe the foreigner does make "we" impossible. The question remains, "Who is this we?" The hetero-ipseic we? Is it also a pragmatic we? A provisional we? Under what conditions can it become effective? (And yes, the thought occurs to me that it may be a very priviliged we. I don't know what to do with that.)
Before the recent elections in the United States, I would have thought that explicitly xenophobic sentiments were taboo. In any event, the electorate by and large repudiated xenophobia in its most extreme forms. If explicit xenophobia is indeed politically unpopular, is that pretty much the end of the matter? I'm dubious. I just don't know what to make of the persistence of xenophobia. It seems to come and go. We can recognize some of the conditions that accompany its recrudesence, but do we know enough to make it stop? Is there truly a historical trajectory away from xenophobia, or is that just wishful thinking? I really don't know.
For more on the topic, check out Eliot Benítez' Denial of Recognition of the the Subjectivity of the Other.
Labels: cosmopolitanism, difference, Kristeva, xenophobia
Monday, October 23, 2006
Some excerpts from Julia Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves:
A challenge to the very principle of human association is what is involved in cosmopolitan utopia: the rules governing exchanges with the other having been abolished (no more State, no more family, no sexual difference), is it possible to live without constraints–without limits, without borders–other than individual demands? Two possibilities are then open: either absolute cyncism based on individual pleasure, or the elitism of lucid, self-controlled beings, of wise men who manage to be reconciled with the insane.
(pp. 60-61)
Further:
Stoic cosmopolitanism adumbrates a new religion in which Greek individualism, the introspection of Egyptian piety, the banquets of Syrian communities, and Jewish morality merge together. . . From that moment the question arises as to whether cosmopolitanism is anything but a religious reality, without ever being capable of becoming a political reality. The question is still valid today. The flaw lies perhaps in the very project: "cosmopolitanism" means that the ideal of the polis, of the political city-state with its rights and its isonomy, is preserved but extended on a world scale, that the entire world finds its place in it. Now, it is possible that the erasing of differences can be effected only in the order of piety. On the other hand, the political order, which governs needs, can only protect its own, entrench disparities, separate disagreements, and, at best, administer the procedures intended to preserve differences.
In contrast with classical and Homeric times, Hellenistic Greece, however, carried out a cosmopolitan policy. In what way? While always distinguishing between those who are foreigners to the polis (that is, Greeks from another political unit) from those who are foreigners to the Greek world (that is, persons differing in race or culture), Greeks of the Hellenistic era acknowledged the community of the former through the birth of international law and living together, and that of the latter through the establishment of vast international or multiracial cities like Alexandria where intellectuals mixed Judaism and Hellenism, translated the Bible into Greek, and later integrated ancient philosophy into Christianism.
(pp. 61-62)
And finally:
More a center for spreading culture than a framework for political integration, the Hellenistic polis disseminated, along with its cosmopolitanism, Greek civilization more than politics. This means that the foreigner was still the citizen's other. But his role in the polis increased; this marked a retreat, specific to Greece at that time, of legal-political features as opposed to what is distinctive of an ideology, a mentality, or a way of life, which also, in increasingly better fashion, define Greekness. Without for that matter wanting to speak of a reduction of the political, let me say that accepting foreigners in the polis led to establishing among the members of a community identifying criteria that transcended politics by putting forward cultural and symbolic factors.
(p. 63)
Labels: cosmopolitanism, Kristeva