As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 31
Connection between The Benefactor + Death Kit: Freud, at the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, seeking to integrate dream elaboration and its particular economy with the psyche as a whole: “Let us simply imagine the instrument which serves psychic productions as a sort of complicated microscope or camera.”
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“Man runs towards the grave,
And rivers hasten to the great deep
The end of all living is their death,
And the palace in time becomes a heap.
Nothing is further than the day gone by,
And nothing nearer than the day to come,
And both are far, far away
From the man hidden in the heart of the tomb.”
—Samuel ha-Nagid (b[orn] Córdoba, 993, d[ied] Granada 1056)
…
6/30/75 [Paris]
Cioran (5:30 to midnight)—
The only acceptable life is a failure (“un échec”)
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Sartre is a baby—I admire him and I despise him—he has no sense of tragedy, of suffering
A hubris, for which one will be punished, to give oneself more than one year
Après un certain age, tout craque [“After you’ve reached a certain age, everything falls apart”]
The only thing that makes life worth-while are moments of ecstasy
It’s not what you do, it’s what you are
Two kinds of conversation are interesting: about metaphysical ideas and gossip, anecdote
Writing as hygiene
The free intellectual: professors without students, priests without congregations, sages without communities
7/19/75 Paris
There is an essay—very general, aphoristic—to be written about speed, velocity. Perhaps the only new category in 20th century consciousness.
Speed is identified with the machine. With transport. With the light, slim, streamlined, male.
Speed annihilates boredom. (Solution to key 19th century problem: Boredom.)
Conservative Revolutionary
Past Future
Organic Mechanical
Heavy Light
Stone Metal
Certainty Unpredictability
Silence Noise
Meaning Pointlessness
From [the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti to
McLuhan. Contrast Ivan [Illich]’s critique of speed.
…
Seriousness Irony
Memory Forgetfulness
Repose Energy
Habit Novelty
Analysis Intuition
Slowness Speed
Sickliness Hygiene
How does this fit with fascist aesthetics? Fascism? Riefenstahl?
Genealogy of this idea. Nietzsche, etc.
Nature Life-as-theatre*
Pessimism Optimism
Sentimentality Virility
Peace War
Family Freedom
Relation of all this (Futurism, etc.) to Enzensberger’s idea of the industrialization of consciousness. Does Fascism industrialize consciousness?
One point is that there … really is a “fascist aesthetics.”
> Marinetti: “Everything of any value is theatrical.”
And probably there is no such thing as a “communist aesthetics”—that’s a contradiction in terms. Hence, the mediocrity and reactionary character of the art sanctioned in communist countries.
Official art in communist countries is, objectively, fascist. (E.g. hotels + palaces of culture of Stalinist era, [the Mao-era Chinese propaganda film] The East Is Red, etc.)
But what about Fascism’s sentimentalizing of the past? The Nazis made Wagner their official music; Marinetti despised Wagner.
Ideal communist society is totally didactic (the whole society is a school); every consideration governed by a moral idea. Ideal fascist society is totally aesthetic (the whole society is a theatre); every consideration governed by an aesthetic idea.
This is another way in which aesthetics becomes a politics.
Re “Aesthetic Judgment.” It always involves preference (implicit or explicit)
Is it understood that there are some categories upon which we must not exercise aesthetic judgment? That limitation is a constitutive part of the very idea of aesthetic judgment?
What happens if we decide we will judge anything aesthetically? Have we destroyed the idea?
N.B. Aesthetic judgment always involves preference, but preference doesn’t always involve aesthetic judgment.
Some can say “I prefer my mother to my father” without suggesting any unseemly emotional distance, a “merely” aesthetic judgment.
But if we imagine someone saying “I prefer the First World War to the Second World War,” we would think that wars were being treated improperly, heartlessly—that wars were being treated as spectacles.
…
7/22/75
Musical thinking. Magical thinking.
Elegiac.
Negative epiphany: Sartre’s chestnut tree (La Nausée). Positive epiphany: Augustine’s worm, Ruskin’s leaf. Few writers now have a real contact with nature. The standard for writing is urban, psychological, cerebral—the bottom has dropped out of the world. Nature in a positive sense is anachronistic, unmodern.
Nuance, discretion, musicality—that’s what I’m trying to get into my writing. What wasn’t there before. No sensuality. I thought I had to say everything I thought.
Harold Rosenberg: “To be legitimate, a style in art must correct itself with a style outside of art, whether in palaces or dance halls or in the dreams of saints and courtesans.”
It’s the prose of goys [non-Jews] like Elizabeth H[ardwick], Bill Mazzocco, Wilfrid Sheed, [William H.] Gass, + Garry Wills that turns me on these days. No ideas, but what music. Poor Jews!
I’m irritated with images, often: they seem “crazy” to me. Why should X be like Y?
My exasperation when N[icole] wanted to play le jeu de la vérité [the truth game—a variant of Truth or Dare] the other night. The subject: Christiane. Let me guess, said N. If she were a food? (But she isn’t a food.) If she were a car? (But she isn’t a car.) If she were a hero? (But she isn’t a hero.) Etc. I felt as if my mind were blowing a fuse.
Similes are something different.
8/7/75 Paris
(Cioran-like) essay: “Let the arts perish …”
Texts: [Henry James’s] The Princess Casamassima (w[ith Lionel] Trilling introduction—Hyacinth Robinson as a “hero of civilization” …)
The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf [French Jacobin publicist tried under the Directory] (+ Morelly [utopian writer of the French Enlightenment])
Chinese material
Babeuf, quoting Morelly … : … “Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.”
N.B. “wiser” China
…
Or is this the subject for a novel? James wrote The Princess C. in the 1880s. Do we know any more than he knew then? Would Hyacinth Robinson kill himself a hundred years later?
There are two subjects for a noble novel:
sanctity
the “problem” of civilization
Who would a modern Hyacinth be? Is culture still a “value”—after its back has been broken in the 1920s by Dadaism, Surrealism, etc.
[In a box at the top of the page:] Cf. preface of [Théophile Gautier’s] Mademoiselle de Maupin: attack on realist-utilitarian demands of republican journalism—“ … and thus royalty + poetry, the two greatest things in the world, become impossible …”
When Hyacinth goes to Paris, he doesn’t have to deal with mass tourism—the degradation of all the objects he admires. His fellow-workers in the book-binding shop now take vacations in Europe, too.
(Christianity wasn’t so good for art either—until it lowered its moral tone, got civilized, pluralistic.)
Little Red Book [of Mao Tse-tung’s sayings] teaches that everyone can think but negates the (traditional Chinese) idea of wisdom.
Trilling on The Princess C … . : “Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has its price, and a high one.”
—China!
8/8/75
Art Deco the last “international”—total—style. (From fine arts to furniture, everyday objects, clothes, etc.) All styles in the last 50 years have been comments on Art Deco. E.g. Art Deco straightened out, made rectilinear the vertiginous curves of Art Nouveau, the next to last international style; Bauhaus (Mies [van der Rohe], [Philip] Johnson, etc.) banned all ornament; but the structure remains the same.
Fascist architecture: parody + Art Deco ([Albert] Speer, “Mussolini”)
Why has there been no new international style in 50 years? Because the new ideas, the new needs are not yet clear. (Hence, we content ourselves with variations + refinements on Art Deco and, for refreshment + fusions, parodistic—“pop”—revivals of older styles.)
A new style will emerge in the last decade of this century, with the ascendancy of the ecological crisis—and possibility of eco-fascism
Low buildings
Caves
No windows
Stone
The skyscraper will seem like hubris, + it will be impractical
Most influential “painter” of our century: Duchamp. Dissolves the idea of art
Most influential poet: Mallarmé. Advances the idea of the difficult writer. There have always been difficult writers (e.g. ancient distinction between esoteric and exoteric texts) but no one before had ever advanced difficulty—i.e. purity—i.e. elimination of content—as the criterion of value. Mallarmé invented the idea (not the practice) which has been influential in a way that no practice ever could be.
1910s—art inherited political rhetoric (that of Anarchism) cf. Marinetti
1960s—feminism inherited political rhetoric (that of gauchisme) against hierarchy, intellect (as bourgeois, phallo-centric, repressive), the theoretical
rigged hopes, rigged despair
The “thou” which the self needs for its own fulfillment
Power of art = power to negate
…
fiction: schemes of enlightenment and redemption
obstacles:
problem (temptation) of pessimism, grief
break-up of cultural references
temptation of catatonia
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“Chaque atom de silence est la chance d’un fruit mûr.” [“Each atom of silence is the luck of a ripe fruit.”]—Valéry
versus
[Gertrude] Stein, “I cannot remember not talking all the time and all the same feeling that while I was talking … that I was not only hearing but seeing …”
versus
Jesuit silence; Trappist rule; Harpo Marx; Bucky Fuller
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9/4/75 NC
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PLEASURE—I have forgotten the rights of pleasure. Sexual pleasure. Getting pleasure out of my writing, and using pleasure as one criterion for what I choose to write.
I am an adversary writer, a polemical writer. I write to support what is attacked, to attack what is acclaimed. But thereby I put myself in an emotionally uncomfortable position. I don’t, secretly, hope to convince, and can’t help being dismayed when my minority taste (ideas) becomes majority taste (ideas): then I want to attack again. I can’t help but be in an adversary relation to my own work.
The interesting writer is where there is an adversary, a problem. Why Stein is not, finally, a good or helpful writer. There is no problem. It’s all affirmation. A rose is a rose is a rose.
Since Biblical times, to be connected with people sexually is a way of knowing them. In our century—for the first time—it is valued primarily as a way of knowing oneself. That’s too much of a burden for the sexual act to carry.
…
PLEASURE PURITY
A conflict?
Pleasure wards off “apatheia,” but is impure if not robust, is impure if willed
[The English essayist William] Hazlitt: “The American mind is deficient in natural imagination. The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers.”
Films seen NYC
Robert Altman, Nashville (1975)
Norman Jewison, Rollerball (1975)
[Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill,] Juvenile Liaison (1976)
John Ford, Mary [of Scotland] (1936)
George Stevens, Alice Adams (1935)
Woody Allen, Love & Death (1975)
**** Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible, Part I
** “” , Part II
Renoir, La Chienne (1931)—Michel Simon
Maysles brothers, Grey Gardens (1975)
Herzog, Every Man for Himself + God Against All (1974)—Bruno S.
Orson Welles, Touch of Evil (1958)
Bergman, The Magic Flute
[Howard Zieff,] Hearts of the West (1975)
Walter Hill, Hard Times (1975)—Charles Bronson, James Coburn
…
Kant the first to use the phrase “moral terrorism” (in a little book, published in 1798, called The Disputation of the Faculties, Der Streit der Facultäten)
Visit Paraguay for two weeks
“[The twentieth-century American writer] Iris Owens is like televison.” (Stephen K[och])
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1976
[Undated, February]
… Fits of lucidity
Grief can drive one mad
Foucault has wanted to do an essay on cemeteries—as utopias
… Every situation is defined by the amount of energy one puts into it—I put so much energy into my love, my hope—I am moved to put an equal amount into my grief, my sense of loss.
I must think about David—Yuyi [an Argentine friend in Paris in the period] said (rightly) that I don’t describe him, I describe my relationship with him (us)—when she asked me to describe him, I felt blocked—embarrassed—as she were inviting me to describe the best part of myself. That’s the key to the problem: I identify myself too much with him, him too much with myself. What a burden for him—all that admira-ton, that confidence that I feel for (in) him.
I am convalescent—je [me] traîne—I’m looking for new sources of energy.
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[The German-American literary critic] Erich Kahler wrote of [Thomas] Mann ten years before his death: “He is someone who feels a personal responsibility for the human condition.”
… Yes, I am a Puritan. Twice over—American and Jew
It’s not “natural” to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it’s more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.
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