SOME THOUGHTS (BARTHES) FROM LAST YEAR

3/11/19

I was thinking this morning of how the type of account I want to write should begin with a statement of main themes, that it’s not enough—as I tend to do in lists—to enumerate proper names with maybe a tagline to indicate critical orientation. Then, having had a look-in yesterday at Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art, I picked up this morning Barthes’ “Myth Today,” which includes, as perhaps ultimate inspiration or challenge, the lines: “In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry.”—with the two seen as “two equally extreme methods”: “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize.”

For me, the true poeticization is something like “Metro Lace” where language serves the purpose of asserting arbitrary relations to the subject and object—it is a bridge between two things, each with its own status, and the poem approximates moods only, making the capacities of language register presence—thus a sensual act because the writer is a locus of senses and sensory impressions in the act of operating language.

But a critical language needs history—which is biographical first because the utterance has to be placed in time and because the evaluation is retrospective. “Entirely permeable to history”—though—is more extreme than what I had been considering. And that’s where reading Barthes’s very lucid discussion may be crucial at this time. For I begin to see that what has hung me up all along is what I might call the particular vantage of my intervention. I’ve wanted it to be “autobiographical” or “lyrical” criticism, a story of becoming, à la Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes Who One Is,” but that is fraught with the difficulty of articulating who and where and what one is. The account creates its author, I don’t doubt, but that’s an intimidating prospect. As “lyrical,” the account allows for a love story, of sorts, and that might too easily become fan notes or the glib appreciations the internet is rife with. But Barthes’s concept of myth brings me to something I’ve been trying to suggest with such formulations as “exile,” “pursuit,” and “flight.” The point is that the perspective has to be one willing to excavate the myths built into the objects by their context (the historical imperative) and to witness the myths of becoming that each object bequeaths.

Here, then, we’re engaged in true critique, the type that would extract principles of becoming, not so absolute as an interrogation of essence by means of substance, or of form by accident—since I don’t think I will uncover Platonism at the heart of the endeavor, nor phenomenology, but rather a Nietzschean or possibly romantic irony, a gesture, in other words, toward art/poetry by other means. But if I am attentive to the myths built into, or incorporated by, the reception of the object, and how that reception creates or stimulates a certain subject—the subject as receptor/receiver/reader/viewer—then the point of the writer in the equation (what Barthes calls the mythologist) is to delineate the ideology at work each step of the way because, in Barthes’s terms, revolution does not occur. The failure of revolution is the real failure, or the failure of the Real. The arts are, at best, a gesture toward emancipation, but that impetus only exists to end up in art. So that even a “revolution of the word” or a revolution of ways and means within the artform still stops short of eradicating the art world and the history of art. This particular confrontation, compromise and concession has to be acknowledged within the objects, but also within the spectator—as observer, not actant. We are always watching a pageant go by, that’s the nature of the condition. What Barthes points us to is acknowledgment of the degree to which we take the “nature” or naturalness of our condition from the bourgeois world that dominates all critique and tables each intervention. As such, protest is always theater and acting out, unless one sets aside representation and manifests overthrow; that, at times, is the context by which the object is informed, but that gesture becomes encoded into its subsequent reception, into its status as a historic break or defeat.

See Barthes: “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types . . . . So it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixed this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight toward other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at least become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”

It’s clear to me, from the above, that for too long I’ve entertained the idea of enumeration, the weighing in the scales—this is more significant than that—for the purpose of creating “the universal order of the hierarchy of possessions”—to create that eternal analogue of my former life, the life I lived within the objects as “worlds” to explore. But I see in Barthes the challenge to objectify the myths of the things themselves, to write as a means to “take in hand and transform the Usage”—where the “usage” is the values gained from the museum, the library, the archive, the collection, the syllabus, the news bulletin, the ad, the prospectus, and the transformation has to come from the twin actions of ideologizing and poeticizing—where history is the autobiography (a life in time) and lyric is the acquired language/taste of a life lived in art.

RETRO READING: CAMUS

Re-read Camus’ The Fall, probably the first time since the 1980s. I read it first around 1974, I think, and it was part of the background I draw on when I recall my high school reading. The formative stuff. My recollection of it—the bar, the quays, the bridge—played a part in the initial “Axis and the Fallen Angel” composition of around ’76 or so. Reading The Fall now, I see in it the seeds of my conviction, fully ignited by reading Nietzsche in those days, that the purpose of life was a kind of mental clarity about one’s state—I suppose I would’ve accepted “spiritual state” as a good enough phrase for what I had in mind. Key to that intention was a need to do away with the teachings of the Catholic church in the name of something else.

In The Fall, the speaker’s insistence on judgment—to give it and to escape it—plays into that need. One could accept that one would be judged “sinful” by the arbiters of that law one was raised with, but the effort was to free oneself of that view, to find another way. The greatest risk was that one had wasted one’s time, one had squandered one’s gifts—and life, with whatever talents and intelligence one possessed, was the chief gift. One was indebted, from the start, but how to repay that debt? For the artist, the way was clear, in a sense: use one’s talents to the best of one’s ability. But there one encounters a question: how do we determine “best use,” how do we understand—or even perceive or conceive—what “talent” compels? It becomes “a blessing and a curse,” as the song says; it becomes a test of one’s mettle all along the way. One reason I want to go back to the scene of starting out is because I want to see again where I went wrong—but, even more so, I want to reshape the past for the sake of the present and possibly for a different future.

Returning to The Fall interests me because I know that the speaker’s insistence that “we need slavery” is something I grasped at some basic level back then—in two senses. One was with Rimbaud’s “we are slaves, let us not curse life.” A complex statement that says our slavery is built into the system we serve. We have our assigned tasks and we let them determine our identities, to a large extent. We are given money for this and so we cease to call it slavery—we are “free,” we say, to choose. But if we are honest, we know how little choice we have. Somewhere in that notion, as I received it, was Nietzsche’s “What, a great man? I see rather the play-actor of his own ideal.” That line, to me, undermined even the unique life of the artist or leader. Such figures were still slaves to an ideal, an intention, that governed them. We might wade through the biographies of everyone whom talent or wealth or wisdom supposedly freed until we come at the moment when they are ruled by something—call it love, call it God, call it need, call it—maybe even—justice. It doesn’t matter. It’s an ideal that shapes that person’s acts, making them, at best, an actor—pretending they “have it,” the ideal—at worst, a puppet, an automaton compelled by the ideal to—and here’s where Camus comes in—make excuses. For we all fail our ideal. And so must own up to it, or take it out on others. “No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing . . . .  In philosophy as in politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see, in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.”

So we come to the other sense of slavery—as the state of those who require masters, or a master. In other words, the Hegelian master/slave dichotomy. To me, coming from Catholicism, God was the ultimate master and we his slaves because he owned us—having created us for his own reasons. The Christian sense of this debt was simply that we should love Him, worship Him, do His bidding to the extent we could perceive it. But if that master is removed, then mastery itself becomes the task: to master oneself, to make of oneself a master to be loved. To the master who achieves this, perhaps, the mass of mankind would willingly be a slave. But the master? What kind of freedom is his? It’s the kind of freedom (from masters) that Camus’ Clamence calls “a chore . . . a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.” The master enslaved to his mastery.

This is not only the artist enslaved to his own ideal of mastery—of, perhaps, preaching a message to the masses via art—but also the task which Camus will imagine as the rock of Sisyphus. Pushing the rock up the slope, Sisyphus masters gravity; letting it roll to the bottom and pursuing it, he masters himself. But he is eternally enslaved to that struggle. There’s no freedom through tasks. Freedom from all tasks—that, I suppose, was the tact I took. The freedom simply to Be. To be, not only as “finale of Seem,” but Be as the only acceptable slavery. For one must exist. Camus also argues for the acte gratuit of suicide, as a gesture of mastery of the moment, and over life itself—which some find, no doubt, in the taking of other lives. But it should be clear that in the philosopher’s oubliette—or what Camus’ speaker calls “the little-ease” (a medieval torture confinement)—we are only concerned with the life we were given. (If one lets oneself become an executioner of the life of others one is indeed defined by the task, by the fact of lives one can end until someone or something ends one’s own life. Needless to say, all such acts are distractions—as is sex and appetite—from the existential emptiness at the heart of the endeavor, any endeavor.)

Granted, art or war—or maybe the art of war—are alike in their valuing a skill set that must prove itself again and again. At some level, the exercise of these skills may be an end in itself, but don’t we—the spectators of the world historical cases these exercises establish—want something more? Some like to speak of edification, but that’s a mighty abstract idea. Don’t we want, really, a rooting interest? A sense that there are stakes and that our hero-warrior or hero-artist or hero-ruler may fail mightily or succeed greatly? But in what lies that success or failure? Renown? The eyes of the multitude upon the acts, and the judgment—always the judgment of someone from somewhere—that it was “worth the time,” “worth the candle,” worth—if it must come to it—the whole world. And into that “world” we place the crying babies of need, and the misused and abused women and men, and all those who have shackled their fortunes to the side that lost, and all those who danced in the streets with the side that won, and all those who never knew comfort and all those who squandered riches untold, and all those who struggled to improve their lot or the lot of others, and those who broke every rule and yet thrived, or who reviled their betters or abased themselves for preference, or who lived pious, quiet lives, exulting in God, or who threw all caution to the wind and gave themselves over to every sensual pleasure and pain. “All” are subsumed in this Battle Royale of one against the very principles of existence.

Thus existentialism chez Camus.

NEW YEARING

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”—Rebecca Solnit

Writing should be that, at least. The idea I find in Solnit’s statement is the one that has been the driving force behind all the journal writing I have ever done. It’s saying to no one and, I would say, “anyone” things not meant for any particular someone. Not that I’m writing suppressed secrets or anything like that. For me, at the start, it was a case of needing writing to say anything at all. Most conversations aren’t aimed for much purpose apart from exercising the vocal chords or simply making time with some particular person. Argument is generally an airing of griefs rather than of views. Conversation has its place, but rare are its occasions, in my experience. Chat is much more prevalent and, in my youth, I had a knack for that only in very limited contexts. And I wasn’t particularly skilled at introducing a topic and developing it. That came much later, with teaching. In the days when I first began keeping a journal—19—I wrote because no one was listening and, even if they were, I didn’t have much to say, aloud.

It’s that “not possible” that we might spend some time discussing. What makes saying something “possible” or “not possible”? Some might think: censors, internal or external. But censors insist that something is forbidden to be said or maybe, in a sense, unthinkable and thus unsayable. But “not possible to say to someone” is the full phrase. The key idea it seems to me is that there is no “someone” poised to receive these intelligences. It’s “not possible” to think of a single individual. No valued listener or friend. More, perhaps: what one wants to write, needs to write, doesn’t necessarily need to be heard. It must be read, or forget it. This is what I took Solnit to mean because it addresses my own quandary about writing to be read. I have no problem with writing something I’m expected to write—the terms are, as it were, provided by the occasion. But writing what no one asked one to write, writing that isn’t simply—as in a notebook—for one’s eyes only or primarily, such writing demands a reader who is not oneself, and yet who could that person be? All “someones” in one’s life are foreclosed by that phrase “not possible to say to someone.” If there were someone one could address, one would write a personal letter, pick up the phone, send an email or text.

Perhaps tweets function in the way Solnit means. They certainly have a gang’s-all-here quality that means they’re for everyone, whoever, wherever. And they seem to be, rhetorically, a gesture more than anything, something that, if addressed to only one someone, would have personal meaning, but when flung into the internet become bits of observable phenomena, to be made of as who so will. But I don’t have much to say about that. Though, arguably, a blog post, and I’ve written a few of those, is just an overly long tweet. If so, then, yes, let’s just say that in this online format one is speaking to no one and anyone all the time. But is that what one is always doing in writing anyway? Perhaps, but to me the difference between online writing and a journal is that “anyone” factor. In time, should a notebook survive, anyone might come across it and read it, true, but it wasn’t written for that eventuality. A post already presumes an environment in which, potentially, anyone’s eyes might fall upon something, for reasons which remain obscure. So, while I feel that journal writing is for “no one” (except me), blog posts are for “anyone,” deliberately.

Then again, I think of Nietzsche’s subtitle for Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “a book for everyone and no one.” If Solnit is correct, every book could bear that subtitle, as any act of writing could. But Nietzsche meant it in a particular way, as though the contents of the book, while there for everyone to glean, had no immediate audience. No one was quite ready to receive it or read it. And yet it was written for them, for us, all.

That aspect of Nietzsche’s writing appealed to me greatly in my teens. That sense that “no one,” perhaps, had ever quite gotten it, so that “everyone” was missing the point. I have that sensation a lot. Most things I read, however perspicacious they may be, usually suggest to me some aspect of the question that the writer is not addressing, is missing. It was Nietzsche who first exposed me, repeatedly, to how prevalent is the fact that, in making a point, one misses a point. It’s not simply that there are two sides to the point and one is stressing one and ignoring the other, no, it’s more dialectical than that. It’s the fact that, in saying something, one creates a shadowy negative of what one is saying in the reader’s mind. A reader well-informed on the topic will have other facts and points already raised, mentally. But even someone just reading along will see the gaps in the logic and, sometimes fatally, the rhetorical sleights that create a sense of authority where there is only opinion or, worse, received opinion. We all drop the ball in writing and even more so in speaking. In fact, a lot of writing seems to exist for no other purpose than to sound the horn, saying “look out, I’m speaking here.” Some people have so much to say.

In our Trumped-up times, speech, as any kind of measured rhetoric, has taken a big hit. Public discourse may not survive the blow. Already it was weak in the knees. Obama, who speaks with a judicious weighing easy to parody, was a true anomaly in U.S. politics. It’s all banter, bluster and balderdash now, and one tweets to everyone and anyone what may not be reasonable to say to “someone.”

Which, I suppose, might be a way of saying—to anyone!—that one reason to keep writing, much as I hate to say it, is to stop one’s ears to all the worthless verbiage. If I’m writing I can’t be listening, or reading. And there’s only so much of the latter two acts I feel willing to engage in, at this time. Sure, it’s always possible to read writing from some other time, to engage the mind with more knowledge that, while not strictly useful, helps to offset the sense of wallowing in the worst excesses of the American public so far endured. To the extent that we Americans are all some portion of the body politic, we are all now numbered among the Unfortunate Stooges of America, played for patsies by a Clown Prince of Crime, à la The Joker.

During the election, I happened to see episodes of the old TV series Batman, starring Adam West, in which The Penguin runs for mayor and he’s kicking the incumbent’s ass, so they ask Batman to run, and he does, much in the measured tones of our outgoing Prez, which gets him nowhere in the climate of the Penguin’s sideshow razzle-dazzle. The Penguin’s rhetoric’s resemblance to Trump’s empty promises is uncanny, or would be except that the blueprint for how to say nothing and mean it has long been engraved into the national psyche, so much so that Trump on the stump was always the bad Reality TV version of what a scripted bullshit-slinger would sound like, trumpeting the message that the only people stupider than his listeners are the people who have been elected or hired to do the jobs they do. I’ve heard this “everyone’s an idiot but me” line my entire life, and it usually comes from someone who hates the higher-ups but who doesn’t want their tasks. Wants to snipe, not lead. Trumpy, however, sniped his way into a job. It’s a job he doesn’t really want—in the sense of its job description—unless he can do it his way. He was elected president, but he ran for monarch. So I guess we’ll see how that plays out. What else is there to watch?

Meanwhile, it’s a new year. I’d like to say it’s time, for me, for a return to writing, the kind of writing I don’t engage in often enough, to go back to whatever it was that got me interested in doing it and to find out if it’s possible to say what I wanted to say. I never had enough faith in big abstract things like “the American people” or “God” or “my fellow man” to be bitterly disappointed by the crap that comes down. In the Batman episode, ultimately, the people don’t elect The Penguin, showing that there was still an electorate capable of distinguishing between a snake-oil salesman and a person with at least a few commitments to something other than himself and his own will to power. But that was in 1968, which is when everything got broken and pretty much stayed that way. When I was in high school, in the mid-Seventies, I read this passage by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It seemed to say it all then.

I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
"Nothing."

At the time, that suited my view, as a teen without much connection to my times or my contemporaries. Later, when I was much better educated, I would try to qualify that passage. The “past million years” is too sweeping a generality. I still think so, but I would apply the formula to “the past 50 years,” easily. So it goes.