Translation revisited

Last week, our friend BDR, in linking to Stephen Mitchelmore's recent meditation on Peter Handke's fiction, reported an opinion of a professor acquaintance who told him "if you can't read Handke in German don't bother since Handke's main interest is the language." With all due respect, I call bullshit on this. I cannot read Handke, or anyone else, in the German, but I would be much the poorer for not having read the English translations of Slow Homecoming, Across, or Repetition, to name only three from the 1980s. They are remarkable works in their own right. I'd go further and say that few works written originally in English from that same decade compare favorably with them. So to say I shouldn't have bothered? Nonsense.

On a related note, back in March, translator Daniel Hahn had a post at Words Without Borders in which he took issue with how translations are reviewed. He rants thus (emphasis his):

what makes me crazy is when the reviewer praises something that I did and gives the impression that I’m not there. By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible—as though those things in an author’s original simply reappear automatically after the mechanics of translation have been applied to a text—that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too. And if that’s what you’re reviewing, I want credit. (Or, for that matter, criticism.)

This strikes me as, frankly, wrong. All three of those Handke titles I mentioned above were translated into English by Ralph Manheim. Another of my Handke favorites is the memoir about his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which was also translated by Manheim. Perhaps it's simply Manheim I like! I think not.

I began reading Hahn's post expecting it to contain utterly banal points with which I would trivially agree. After all, it is all too believable that reviewers both tend to ignore the work of translators and have little understanding of what it is the translator does. But Hahn takes it further, appearing to claim that the translator is entirely responsible for "the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice". In fact, the translator is responsible for conveying as best as possible the original author's rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit. The translator makes the best possible decisions within constraints presented by the original work.

Along with those Manheim-translated works mentioned above, I've also read Handke books rendered into English by other translators, such as Scott Abbott and Michael Roloff, and have never gotten the impression I was reading a stylistically different writer. I have just begun reading Charlotte Mandell's translation, from the French, of Mathias Énard's recent novel, Zone. The last novel I read was, coincidentally, Mandell's translation of Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. Oddly, they have very little in common at the level of the sentence! And neither of them bear any obvious resemblance whatsoever to Mandell's translations of Maurice Blanchot, which themselves are instead stylistically similar to other Blanchot translations, for example, those by Ann Smock or Lydia Davis (meanwhile, Davis' own fiction is nothing like her translations of Blanchot). This point aside, which I am sure I have belabored, Hahn here, in so easily separating plotting and characterization from the language used, demonstrates as little appreciation of fiction as the standard mainstream reviewer.

Daniel Green, highlighting Hahn's post, agrees with him too readily, though he makes this excellent point, which is the point I'd originally thought Hahn was going to make, as I began reading him: "Too many reviewers make too many facile judgments of translations in which the translation itself drops out. . ." Unfortunately, Dan uses this as an opportunity to once again all but throw his hands up when it comes to translations. He writes:

This is the tragedy of translation: Many of us will read some great books only in their translated versions, and thus we won't finally really know fully what makes them great. It's also possible we might read some rather mediocre books that have actually been made better by their translations. Given the cachet translated fiction seems to have acquired among some readers (its very lack of widespread availability, its lack of attention from the major newspaper book reviews perhaps allowing the devotee of translated fiction to feel one of the enlightened few), I think it likely some translated books of this latter kind are getting more attention than they deserve--under the prevailing circumstances, any new translated work deserves notice. Making authors and their work available through translation is an entirely worthy service, but understanding their limits are also important. We shouldn't make claims about the underlying work--on which the translation is a variation and therefore a new work--we can't possibly validate without in fact reading it.

There are some good points mixed with the bad here. I think he's right that there is some excessive valorizing of translated works for their own sake, and it's of course trivially true that translations have their limitations, and that we should be cognizant of them. However, where Daniel Hahn wants to isolate plot and structure from the "rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit" of the language, Daniel Green insists, as he often does, that because we necessarily read some great books in translation, "we won't finally really know fully what makes them great" because of that distance. The problem with this is that it assumes that "knowing fully" what makes great books great is the ultimate object of reading.

There once was a time when a literate person knew and could read multiple languages as a matter of course. There are no doubt countless reasons why this is no longer the case, at least in the Anglo-American world. And, of course, literacy itself is more widespread. Anyway, regardless of the reasons, many of us rely entirely on translations if we are to read anything originally written in a language other than our own. There is undeniably a distance between the original work and its possibly multiple translations. Some of us, myself included, have looked on this situation with anxiety. How do I know which translation to choose? What am I missing? How will I ever know or understand the work in question? As such, we owe good translators a great debt of gratitude, and we should always remember what it is that they do for literature. And certainly praising any quality of the prose without mentioning its status as translation is opening a reviewer up to easy and deserved criticism. But the history of literature is rife with misreadings and poor interpretations and context-free assessments, not to mention misleading translations; indeed, the history of literature arguably is these misreadings. We do the best we can with what we have. That so many of us require translations in order to read most of the great works of world literature is no reason not to read them, nor is it a reason to refuse to critically engage with such works at whatever level we see fit.

As readers, we can never "know fully" any work, translated or not. We are always at some remove from the work. Treating art as a set of objects to be assessed and judged is finally little different than treating it as a set of commodities to be bought and sold.

"The wish was father to the thought"

At the very end of The Tyranny of Science, a book collecting a series of four lectures Paul Feyerabend gave at Berkeley in the early 1990s, this question is asked of Feyerabend:

In relation to what you said the first day, talking about the Furies, namely that the mother was seen as just a breeding oven, I would like to understand the reasons why in such an evolved society as it was in ancient Greece, women were not considered as such, as women.

Here is Feyerabend's reply:

In the play itself this idea is introduced by Apollo, who represents a new kind of religion. For the Furies the mother is not just a breeding oven, it is a blood relative. So there are two parties and the question is how the new party arose. I do not know that. Athena's solution is that both parties have made contributions to the history of the city and should be remembered by it. Was it implausible to make the assumption that women are a breeding oven? Not on the basis of what was known at the time. Women gave birth. They bore the child for nine months. They became pregnant as a result of intercourse. This was known and that is not being denied. What is being denied is, to use modern terms, is that women make a genetic contribution. That is a very subtle matter which at that time could only be dealt with by ideology.

This response is both interesting and unsatisfactory, in the way that the book as a whole is both interesting and unsatisfactory. The book is unsatisfactory, for me, because, as Feyerabend himself anticipates more than once in these lectures, I would have preferred a more "systematic" account of the "rise of rationalism" and his argument that (quoting the back cover) "some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life". He explains why he does not offer such a systematic argument (e.g., systematization is part of the problem; fair enough), yet I desire one nonetheless. I'll have to look elsewhere (any recommendations?). The book is interesting, in part, because Feyerabend tells stories, including the stories contained in some of the Greek tragedies, to illustrate some of the problems with the stories told by the early philosophers. He is also at pains to remind us of the context of the tragedies, as well as of such artifacts as Plato's dialogues, how what we read is necessarily only an aspect of how they would have been experienced in their own time. All this is very well and good. However, he is often unclear about the significance of some of what he relates, or perhaps he assigns a different significance than they seem to reveal to me.

But back to the question and response. I was amused that, after four days of Feyerabend's lectures, the person asking is able to innocently use the word "evolved", implying a telos of progress at odds with his thesis, or that the "rise of rationalism" is necessarily a good thing. When I first read the question, I admit that I read it as wondering how the "evolved" Greeks did not consider women as people, like men. I quickly read past the "considered as such, as women", which evidently has more to do with their biological function, as women, as those who give birth, etc. My misreading made me laugh (and actually provided the kernel leading to me writing this post), but the implied telos of progress remains and serves as a useful point of departure.

Interestingly, Feyerabend hints that the notion that women are merely "breeding ovens" is, relatively speaking, for Aeschylus, a new one. He notes that, for the more ancient Furies, the mother is a "blood relative", or in our scientific language, a genetic contributor. He notes that Apollo's idea overturns this. What he doesn't say is why that might be. He observes that the idea that women are merely "breeding ovens" is not implausible given the knowledge available to people at the time, but he doesn't say anything about why such a new idea would be appealing. I would like to suggest that the Oresteia is in a sense a dramatization of the domestication of the female, a manifestation of the hiding, the covering up, of the older matriarchal order. By the end, the Furies have been tamed; they have become "the Kindly Ones". (It is, by the way, entirely coincidental that I completed Jonathan Littell's astonishing novel by that name just prior to reading The Tyranny of Science.)

I've made the argument (or, well, assertion) multiple times already that the histories of philosophy and science would look a lot different if the experience of women were considered worthy of attention, or if those disciplines had been practiced by women, rather than by men off doing Important Work. I originally said this based on some reading, but really on little more than a hunch. Lately, however, I have been reading works that have both reinforced this conviction and deepened my understanding and appreciation of the problem. One of these was a book I read last year by the late Marxist historian George Thomson with the very dry academic title, Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean. To quote from the back cover, Thomson "traces the economic and social development of Greece in the Bronze Age and deals with the evolution of epic poetry" including "detailed discussions of such topics as matriarchy and land tenure." It's a boring, somewhat convoluted story as to how I ended up reading this fairly obscure book, but I'm glad I did: it's a fucking monster, deeply learned, incredibly erudite, often over my head, at times unexpectedly very funny (his occasional rants about bourgeois historians are frankly awesome), and fascinating as hell.

With respect to the topic at hand, one of the interesting things Thomson does is trace the roots of the Greek myths, including, among other things, how they were cobbled together over centuries from disparate stories about various local gods. Another is trace the attitudes the Greeks had towards others and towards their own past. For this, he surveys a variety of reports, from Herodotus, Eusebius, Strabo, Aristotle, Thucydides, with references to confirmations from Plato and Aristophanes: "The Greeks were well acquainted with the realities of primitive society":

Surrounded as they were by more backward peoples at various stages of savagery or barbarism and by the advanced but archaic empires of the Near East, the civilised Greeks did not fail to observe that the status of women in these surrounding countries was very different from what it was in their own.

Without going into great detail (or excerpting several whole pages), the upshot is that these peoples employed a wide range of matriarchal characteristics, from different rules for descent and matrimony to different configurations of property and labor to more egalitarian sexual roles. Thomson says, "There is no reason to discredit this tradition. Athenians would not have fabricated a story which represented their ancestors as savages" and quotes Thucydides thus: "The Greeks lived once as the barbarians live now." But, he writes, already reaction had set in:

The materialist view of social evolution was irreconcilable with the doctrine, fostered by the growth of slavery, that Greek and barbarian were different by nature. If such things as primitive communism, group-marriage, and matriarchy were admitted into the beginnings of Greek civilisation, what would become of the dogma, on which the ruling class leant more and more heavily as the city-state declined, that its economic basis in private property, slave labour, and the subjection of women rested on natural justice? If the writings of the later materialists, Demokritos and Epicurus, had not perished, we might well have possessed a more penetrating analysis of early Greek society than Aristotle's. But they perished partly for that reason. Plato wanted the works of Demokritos to be burnt, and his wish has been fulfilled.

No serious student can read Aristotle's Politics without admiration for the author's erudition and insight. If that book had perished, the world would be the poorer. But this must not prevent us from recognising its limitations. He knew that the Greeks had once lived in tribes, and he must have been familiar with the tradition that they had once been without slaves. He was presumably aware of the part assigned to Kekrops in the history of matrimony, and in any case he had before him the example of contemporary Sparta, where the rule of monogamy was so little binding that half a dozen brothers might share a wife between them and adultery was not punishable or even discreditable. Yet, accepting the city-state as the only possible formation for civilised life, he constructs a theory in which the original nucleus of society is identified as the married couple dominated by the male and supported by slave labour. The principle laid down by Thucydides was precluded from the start.

Where Aristotle failed, we cannot expect much of Herodotus. During all his travels the truth stated so lucidly by Thucydides never dawned on him. All he has to say of the Egyptian matriarchate is that 'sons were not obliged to support their parents, but daughters were'—alluding to the rule of inheritance; and the remark occurs in a passage where he is more concerned to divert his readers than to interpret the facts. Hence it is not surprising that he introduced his account of the Lycian matriarchate with the observation that 'it is unparalleled among the peoples of mankind'. The wish was father to the thought. The significance of this misstatement is that it represents what [...] the Greeks of his day were predisposed to believe.

In case my point in discussing these two books together is unclear, I'll finish up by simply observing that it has always been in the interests of ruling classes to naturalize their power and the social and property relations informing that power. Likewise, it has always therefore been necessary to avoid or obscure any history—specifically, the central role of women—that reminds us how things otherwise have been and still could be.

Righteous

Our eternal war with Eurasia needs no justification, yet has always been justified.

Update - 9pm: I learned about the death of Osama bin Laden during last night's long baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets, first via Phillies blog threads I participate in, then from the ESPN broadcast team. Soon, chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A" could be heard circling the stadium, no doubt to the bemusement of the players on the field. Much was made of the notoriously difficult Philadelphia fans' ability to "get this one right". As if they would be anything other than virulently patriotic. The threads alternated between patriotic, celebratory guff and half-hearted talk about the game at hand, which for once, it was said, was meaningless in the face of Important Good News. A few voices here and there expressed some ambivalence, but for the most part, patriotism brought everyone together, rallying everyone around Obama. Post-game wraps dealt with the game in a perfunctory manner: the Phillies lost, but it's ok, it was a Good Day. I was annoyed (I wanted to talk about the game!), and I felt, renewed, my isolation from the political culture at large. Why do I still allow myself to be surprised that there is still so much distance? The persistence, ten years after the fact, in most Americans' abject ignorance of any sort of coherent explanations for why things happen is, somehow, still, dismaying for me.

"To the extent that people are euphoric over Bin Laden's death, this is a measure of the permanence of his achievement." So says Richard Estes, at American Leftist, in his excellent post on the subject: "[T]here is a perverse, unacknowledged alliance between al-Qaeda, neoliberals and neoconsevatives, as all three groups are in agreement about the urgency associated with the need to marginalize and impoverish workers even if it is in the service of strikingly different visions of the future." He also includes some updates, with useful links on the failure of the option Bin Laden represented, its irrelevance to the changes shaping the Middle East now.

Again

And so we are bombing Libya. Again we are put in the position—or we put ourselves in the position—of having to "have an opinion" on some indefensible action the United States takes overseas (but, oh, yes, I forgot: this time it's a UN-sanctioned affair; Madeline Albright: "If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally."). Again we are asked to accept the notion of "humanitarian intervention". Again we are told that, in fact, such "intervention" can only be carried out via a bombing campaign. We are blandly assured that everything is above board. You know, just like the last time, and the time before that. Besides, they say, we were invited; how could we refuse? Indeed how?

We are admonished that it is important to listen to the claims or desires of actual Libyans. No doubt this is true, to the extent that we can know what those are. Nevertheless, it remains up to us to recognize and remember the character of our own putative leaders. We know damn well that they are neither trustworthy nor reliable, though too many of us still seem to need to believe otherwise. As ever, history is collapsed into a moment, context is obliterated, and we are presented with an urgent fait accompli.

Bombs kill people, and are meant to, and they destroy cultures and property. All are necessary, from the perspective of empire. We must not continue to forget this whenever another disaster flits across our television or computer screens. No post-World War II American military action has been either morally defensible or justifiable (and don't pretend that World War II was as simple as all that). No such action is possible, given the current configurations of capital and power. A knee-jerk anti-war response is the only acceptable answer.

When one thinks of death

"There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks of death."

These words come from Thomas Bernhard's "Speech on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Austrian State Prize", which appears in full in the recently published My Prizes: An Accounting. Bernhard readers will have already been familiar with the phrase, or at least the second half of it, in some form. It is, after all, the kind of thing he would say, and often did. In his "Speech at the Awarding of the Georg Büchner Prize", for another example, he begins

"What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us..."

And, for just one of many possible fictional examples, this blog's name, of course, is taken from a passage in The Loser, in which the narrator speaks of "the existence machine", into which we are thrown, without being asked; life is ongoing when we arrive, life chews us up, life continues when we are gone. We have no say in the matter. That is to say, all is absurd, when one thinks of death.

Some readers fixate on Bernhard's litanies of hate and despair, a vein through which one could look on the remarks quoted above and see a morbid, depressing writer. But it misses the fact that Bernhard is very funny. And, in fact, if we re-consider those remarks, they are kind of ridiculous. In the context of the book My Prizes, we get the impression he tossed the lines off in a hurry, as though they were meaningless to him, as he claimed the prizes themselves to be (except for the money, which he was more than happy to take). Words that we formerly encountered, most likely, in the context of a review or a profile of Bernhard, playing the role of characterization (like, dude, he's so hardcore, he scolded silly people about death at a frivolous award ceremony, that kind of color), become something more like a darkly comic practical joke. (Notice, too, how the word death is italicized in the first quote above. One can almost hear the hilarious contempt with which he no doubt spoke the word.) They serve the purpose of gratuitously puncturing the events at which they were delivered. So we must be wary of taking the remarks too seriously as a philosophy. Except insofar as it is absurd that humans toil and sweat and struggle and then just fucking die.

But this post wasn't supposed to be about Thomas Bernhard. Then what?

The fact is, I've been thinking about death. Not constantly; I'm not at all death-obsessed. But I've been thinking about our alienation from it. Mine anyway. An old friend of mine was in town recently. His mother died a year ago, so inevitably we spent some time talking about her and about how the last year had been for him. He'd also had a close friend die about a year previously, so he'd been confronted with death in a new way for him. He felt now that he no longer feared it. Whereas I've never had someone close to me die, other than grandparents, whose deaths made me sad in the abstract but which I was able to keep my distance from, because, I've always rationalized, they were old and had lived long, full lives. Of course, this is a blessing; I've been very fortunate. (It is also, to some extent, a function of privilege.) But I've thought a lot about how I'm not prepared for death, how I was sheltered from experiencing others' sadness and grief. Death is an intellectual thing, for me, distant. It happens to other people, in other places. To expand this "my" back out to a shared "our", it seems to me, though others have not been nearly so fortunate as me in their personal lives, that our culture operates in great denial of death. This is not an original idea, but it strikes me as important.

We've lately been attending a local Quaker Meeting with some regularity, and this past Sunday, some were moved to speak about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Death in this larger sense, then, was on everyone's mind. Unspoken, but on my mind at least, was the unfolding nuclear disaster. The terrible irony of this happening in Japan of all places. I thought about the different kinds of damages inflicted on impoverished countries, such as Haiti, versus the wealthier, more infrastructurally sound Japan, and about the reasons for those differences. Yet it is Japan that has nuclear reactors. Just now, writing this, this phrase from Bernhard, quoted above, appears more serious now, looms ominously: "our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us". Science, our faith. Capitalism, our religion. Civilization, endgame.

The first time I read Blanchot I didn't understand. The second and third times, too, of course, but the first was a different sort of not understanding, I think, than the others, or than continues to attend my reading of him. In this case, it was the fiction Death Sentence. There was something about that work that I could not quite get. Perhaps relate to is a better way to put it—I couldn't relate to it—though I'm usually allergic to that kind of formulation. But it was the way death hovered over the text. I couldn't relate to it as an immediate concern. As a concern. It was a new kind of not understanding for me. It somehow made it difficult for me to pin the work down (as though the work needed to be pinned down; I oppose reduction, yet I reduce). Or was one of the difficulties.

I am not making sense. Let me try something else. In the past I have written about a) the decline of a shared symbolic language and b) the kind of writing I have associated with contemporary Anglo-American writing, writing, fictional or not, that I have called utilitarian (also), which others might call journalism. In this kind of writing, much concerned with the facts, and with argument, death is a fact. It happens, we know it happens, we're not fooled (we're nobody's fools). But somehow it's not a part of life. It is controlled. It is offstage. (Or perhaps it is gruesomely violent, clinically so, but distanced, reported, fact-like, uninvolved.) Anyway, I've written of this kind of writing in part to highlight that it has been my own default setting, at least in the sense of my expectations as a reader, expectations which have made reading certain European writers difficult, slippery. I've many times mentioned Blanchot, of course, and I've talked about Barthes and jouissance and so on. What I've left unmentioned so far has been the way that death seems to figure in the work of so many of these writers. I often can't get a handle on it; it helps keep the work at a distance.

I think that I've had trouble with such writing, in part because I have not shared in the literary or cultural concerns shaping the writing. I have no neat and tidy explanation for how and why I've been alternating talking about literature and life in this manner, except to suggest that one shouldn't be necessary. Except also to wonder whether to no longer be able to share in a common language is to be somewhat less than fully alive. We appeal to literature for many reasons, though in our culture we'd more often rather be entertained. We do not learn to understand death as a part of life, even if we "know" it to be the end of life. We deny it. Our scientific enterprise, medical science in particular, seems to be, to a large extent, a mass delusion in denial of death, a shared delusion that it can be resisted, that it ought to be. We are not supposed to die in our own homes anymore. Just as we are not supposed to be born at home either. The whole process must be contained.

I arbitrarily took Illness as Metaphor off the shelf yesterday and read it. In it, Susan Sontag writes, on cue: "For those who live neither with religious consolation about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied." And later: "part of the denial of death in this culture is a vast expansion of the category of illness as such". So that disease can be explained, and death controlled.

But here's the thing. I have gravitated towards the writings of the French and German writers, who make the English and American writers seem so shallow. On the one hand, I am unable to access the language of death, for reasons suggested above. I resist the tendency of my own culture to separate death from life, to attempt to solve the problem. The United States and to a somewhat lesser extent England are merely the apotheosis of this general Western tendency (that is, I am far from excluding Europe from this, even as I oppose the continental writers to the Anglo-American). Those writers I refer to respond in part to this with some dismay; this is one of the problems of modernism. On the other hand, such writers do seem death-soaked. I am referring mainly to that set of writers that David Auerbach of Waggish recently, in his review of Lars Iyers' novel version of Spurious, called "deeply serious", "Creators who are searching, reaching, profound, bombastic". He goes on to quote a passage from Blanchot's essay "Literature and the Right to Death", which he says "could read as either pompous nonsense or the deepest truth, depending on the day." And, indeed, depending on the day, or week, or my level of sleeplessness, or whatever, I can read that passage and either glean something, or the beginning of something, deeply meaningful, or not understand it in the least. At times I have found it wearying having to work so hard against my not eradicated journalistic expectations. Bernhard is a tonic, of course, and perhaps a lesson, a reminder, that the others are not so po-faced as they may at times seem in translation, or at least on the surface. As, indeed, is Spurious itself (it is very funny). But even so, it is there.

And, as Auerbach notes in his review, they are unrelentingly male. This is not an unimportant point, and it brings me, finally, after much dithering, to my own point, or at least the point with which I will conclude these ramblings. I've suggested in the past that the history of philosophy would look a lot different if it hadn't been written almost exclusively by men, about men, for men, away from the concerns of women and children, away from the province of reproduction. I've similarly suggested that science would have come around to certain discoveries about childhood development if scientists had bothered to pay the least attention to children, and to the women who raised them. If such men hadn't been off doing Important Work, while life itself went on around and without them. In both cases we likely could have been spared a lot of nonsense about human nature (and perhaps, instead, have inherited other nonsense, but a healthier, more life-focused nonsense, I assert). But my point is that, though I gravitate towards those writers responding to the modern condition, now stretching back several hundred years (both the condition and the response to it), I resist the strong tendency in this tradition to see life itself as the misery. I wish rather, writing as the father of a beautiful little girl, to celebrate life. It is, at times, easy to do that. All I have to do is be in her company for a few minutes, and life is great. Life is great. But it doesn't take long, when away from her, when commuting, when reading about the problems of the world, to despair about the future world that awaits her. And I thus write with sadness and anger as I consider, as I often must, the death cult that is capitalism, its continued encroachment on and destruction of the natural world, and the immanent disaster "into which science has led us and abandoned us".

"like any addict, it continues to do the same things, while expecting a different result"

Speaking of Stan Goff, today he posted this piece at Feral Scholar, by way of introducing us to this article by Sierra Bellows at the University of Virginia Magazine. Stan says:

Meanwhile, unbeknown to most Americans, there are still 75,000 troops in Iraq – where yet another rebellion threatens to break out; Commander-in-Chief Obama continues to oversee a lost and cruel war in Afghanistan; the CIA continues its covert drone war against rural Pakistan; and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has successfully reflated a financial bubble, ensuring that the next crash – coming to a theater near you – is even more traumatic than the last. Then, we’ll see more Yorba Linda-like lunacies, because this is what middle-classes do when they are frightened.

I believe what the Irish bard said was, “the center cannot hold.”

The empire, in a word, has become unmanageable, but like any addict, it continues to do the same things, while expecting a different result. We 12-steppers call that “insanity.”

At last, I’ll get to my point, and link the article that this is leading into. Empires always become unmanageable, because they are inherently “addicted” to the exploitation of peripheries. As those peripheries are exhausted, the core must continually seek further and further afield to satisfy its habit. This core-periphery dynamic is, in fact, not only a feature of empire. Empire is one manifestation of the same process – an ecological one at bottom – that we call “civilization.” Because no core can continually feed on a periphery without materially exhausting it, no core can go on indefinitely. It will eventually overreach, and at that point, it loses the ability to manage its own system – a system that turns out at the end of the day to have created a fatal dependency on that periphery, even as it has pillaged it.

Noted: D.A. Clarke

From "Prostitution for everyone: Feminism, globalisation and the 'sex' industry", also collected in Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (the always excellent Clarke, by the way, is co-blogger/moderator with Stan Goff at Feral Scholar; it was, by the way, Stan's very good book Sex & War that led me to the Not For Sale collection; many thanks to him, as always):

The way we use metaphors of pimping and whoring reveal a profound mistrust, a perception (valid, in my view) that the intrusion of 'market values' into community life or intimate life is not a healthy thing. Yet we persist simultaneously in the fantasy that the relationships of literal prostitution, the trade itself, the original from which our metaphorical distaste is drawn, are somehow harmless. The disconnect is remarkable; it is as if we could thoughtlessly describe something wicked or corrupt as 'as bad as racism', and in the next breath accept last week's lynching or cross-burning as a commonplace—or even a healthy expression of free speech and democracy. Despite our loose usage of 'metawhores' in common speech and thought, we do not often consider far deeper correspondences between prostitution and the daily life and culture which is (for most of us) largely defined and shaped by corporate capitalism.

[...]

In our 'marketised' society, we must expect these analogies with prostitution to abound, and to expand and multiply. Since the working definition of a prostitute is 'someone who will do anything for money', and a monetist society is one in which money is the only thing worth doing anything for, a gradual convergence is inevitable: the 'rational actor' of neoliberal economic theory would never refuse good money for the sake of a mere point of principle. Second only to outright slavery, prostitution has to be the ultimate expression of loyal adherence to 'market values'. What interests me is that the analogies, as in the Albert Gore example [in which, during the 2000 election campaign, Gore was attacked from the left as a 'corporate whore'] seem to arouse more outrage and distress than real prostitution itself.

Noted: Andrea Dworkin

From "Pornography, prostitution, and a beautiful and tragic recent history", collected in Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (2005), an anthology of essays by various authors, edited by Rebecca Wisnant and Christine Stark:

One needs a political movement because something has to change and what has to change is not individual. It's not something an individual can change without holding hands with someone else and then another person after that. And in the collectivity of person-to-person, each person cannot do everything, but every person can do something. That is why one has a political movement: because a political movement makes it possible for people to do the thing they can do in a context that gives the doing meaning; because people then can give as much as they can give of what they know, of what they think; because people can give materially. No one has to—or can—do everything. It is appalling that in the United States people believe that an individual must do everything—that if one cannot do everything one need not do anything.

[...]

One of the worst parts of being an Amerikan is that if something does not happen fast, it does not happen at all; if one cannot make an issue, an atrocity, a tragedy palpable to people in five minutes, or in a sixty-second sound byte, one cannot communicate with other people. Amerikans don't have, or refuse to have, a sense of history, which is necessary in having a sense of endurance, duration—a sense of how hard it is to make change, how long it takes, how incredible it is that one moved forward an eighth of an inch, because then one gets the boot and one is kicked way back to the place where one started, but not quite, because one knows something that one did not know before. Political activism brings knowledge.

Scattered thoughts on children and learning; or: "children are born to philosophize"

Children and how they learn is a subject much on my mind of late. Play being of the utmost importance. (Piaget looms in the background, inevitably.)

We've received a book by Vivian Gussin Paley called A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. I've only just begun it, but it's got me thinking. The ways in which children use fantasy in order to explore certain issues, in order to become who they are, reminds me of what Chris Knight and his colleagues have said and written about the human revolution. Very loosely, how in a sense the ability to make believe is what makes us human. Language being the ability to use symbols that are not in fact what they refer to. The ability to hold ideas in our minds, which are in a sense, fantasies.

It is in this context, among others, that I've often felt, though I remain an atheist, that the so-called rational drive to ridicule or eradicate religious belief is remarkably misguided.

Which reminds me of something Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote towards the end of her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, about epigenetics, in which she wondered, speculated, at the possibility that those of our genes that have evolved enabling us to understand each other, and cooperate, both being necessary components of our becoming human, might at some point stop being "expressed", given the drastically changed and changing environment in which they have to operate on us, or to emerge. Which makes me double-back and think of our closed-off spaces, the unavailability of room for children to roam; and the current testing mania, teaching to the test, No Child Left Behind. How misguided, short-sighted, unsupportable it all is.

And the emphasis on play further reminds me of Gabriel Josipovici's work, and I think that literature is not a trivial matter, though we treat it like it is, though at the same time we nonetheless take it too seriously, too solemnly, when we take it at all, and that the best of it so often seems to embody a sense of play. The plays within plays of Shakespeare. The playfulness of Beckett and of Kafka (both all too often seen as dour). Kafka's work, and Borges', not unlike fables in their own way, in a sense, not unlike tales told by children, without the self-importance of literariness. . .

And just the other day, Skholiast noted the passing of two philosophers, J.T. Fraser and Matthew Lipman, only the former of which I'd ever heard, which means nothing. Both seem interesting, but Lipman is most pertinent here. "Frustrated by the apparent incapacity of college students to engage in critical thinking", he, among other things, wrote a series of novels aimed at pre-teens, intended, I gather, to explore philosophical topics. I love how Skholiast ends his post: "as a teacher of school-children I can confirm what probably ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it: children are born to philosophize, and what's more, ask far more ambitious questions than most grad students."

And I think, not for the first time, with some despair, that all of the elements are available, are accessible, for us to be better, but we seem bound and determined not to attend to what we know. We really don't know what we're doing, do we?

Late Thoughts on Egypt and Democracy

Egypt!

I look on the exhilarating, still unfolding events in Egypt over the last 2+ weeks with astonishment, and something like pride, with not a little hope and fear mixed in for good measure. My blog-silence over the same period is due to combination of factors, not least of which is that nothing else seems worth blogging about if I can't bring myself to blog about that. And yet what could I say? How could I keep up? (I've never been the kind of blogger who keeps up well with events, or who writes quickly.) My own tendency to want to summarize and narrate, if only to myself, to make sense of things, has been happily thwarted at nearly every turn. Almost the only thing I can do is watch and cheer and, I don't know, re-tweet stuff. (I post the above image in particular because it's an enormous gathering and it's from yesterday, more than two weeks in. Amazing. I took the picture from Al-Jazeera's site, though it also appeared at the indispensable Zunguzungu.)

I mention fear, because looming in the background, creepily, is the United States, which is not looking kindly on the prospect that its most important client state not named Israel might soon be unavailable for duty, so to speak. When will the U.S. act decisively? What kind of desperate power will it try to assert? Will the Egyptian people be able to continue to resist the "smooth transition" so much desired by ruling elites?

In a sense this fear is rooted in a tendency to think that the United States is all-powerful, that it can, and will, successfully assert its dominance. But, while the U.S. remains powerful, and is certainly unpredictable and crazy, it is nonetheless a power in decline, a decline that has been ongoing for most of my 40 years. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are indications of weakness, not power, their failures still further indications of that weakness. Regardless, all fantasies about the freedom-loving and Progressive Obama aside, the U.S. is certainly trying to assert its will now. How it will play out, what kinds of deals are attempted or accomplished to continue the client relationship as against any actual desires the Egyptian people might have, still remains to be seen. In the meantime, we are treated to a remarkable series of lessons in democratic action.

Naturally, we have also been treated to standard-issue Western ruling class and intellectual rhetoric about how Egyptians are not ready for or capable of democracy. As if they were incapable of making important decisions or using political judgment. Of course, it's true that this is in part blowing smoke, a distraction meant to ease that desired transition to a favored successor inclined to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, it is typically assumed by such elites, not to mention many policy-wonk liberals, that ordinary people in general cannot be trusted with politics (in any event, they cannot be trusted to do what elites would have them do, which amounts to the same thing). The contempt for democracy, and by extension for people, is never far from the surface.

Luckily for me, since there's not much, if anything, of value I can say about actual events in Egypt, this gives me the opportunity to do what I do best: quote from a book apparently unrelated to the question at hand. It happens that I am currently reading Ellen Meiksins Wood's Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. I'm halfway through, and it's fascinating reading. What Wood seeks to do is to situate the political thought of such figures as Plato and Aristotle in the social and political conditions of their times, to find the problems they were trying to solve, the questions that necessitated their answers. Plato and Aristotle were, of course, of the aristocracy, and on balance hostile towards the democracy, though their work was informed by it. As such, they, Plato in particular, originate the Western elite posture towards democracy and ordinary people. His opponent, usually implicit, is the sophist Protagoras. Here is Wood:

Epistemological and moral relativism, as Protagoras formulates it, has, and is intended to have, democratic implications. Plato responds to this political challenge by opposing Protagoras's relativism with a new kind of universalism. In the democracy, in the atmosphere of public deliberation and debate, there could be no ruling ideas, no individual or social group whose unchallenged dominance allowed it to claim universality for its own values and impose them on others. The only effective way of challenging the conventional wisdom of shoemakers and blacksmiths, and their ability to participate in public speech and deliberation, was to trump conventional wisdom altogether with some higher form of knowledge, a knowledge not of mundane empirical realities but of absolute and universal truths.

Platonic universalism is of a very special kind, and it is perhaps only in relation to this philosophical universalism that Protagoras's ideas can be called morally relativist at all. He certainly did reject the notion that there are higher moral truths accessible only to philosophic knowledge, but he put in its place what might be called a practical universalism, rooted in a conception of human nature and the conditions of human well-being. His argument presupposes a conviction not only that men are in general capable of making political judgments, and that their well-being depends on participation in a civic order, but also that they are entitled to the benefits of civic life. It is true that, in his view, the specific requirements of well-being will vary in the infinite diversity of the human condition in different places and times, and social values will vary accordingly. But the underlying human substratum remains the same, and the well-being of humanity does provide a kind of universal moral standard by which to judge social and political arrangements or to assess the relative value of opposing opinions, not on the grounds that some are truer than others but that they are better . . .

Both Protagoras and Plato . . . place the cultural values of techné, the practical arts of the labouring citizen, at the heart of their political arguments, though to antithetical purposes. Much of what follows in the whole tradition of Western philosophy proceeds from this starting point. It is not only Western political philosophy that owes its origins to this conflict over the political role of shoemakers and smiths. For Plato the division between those who rule and those who labour, between those who work with their minds and those who work with their bodies, between those who rule and are fed and those who produce food and are ruled, is not simply the basic principle of politics. The division of labour between rulers and producers, which is the essence of justice in the Republic, is also the essence of Plato's theory of knowledge. The radical and hierarchical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, and between their corresponding forms of cognition, is grounded by Plato in an analogy with the social division of labour which excludes the producer from politics.

I have previously sought to define democracy as a situation in which ordinary people have non-trivial say in decisions affecting their everyday lives. I like Protagoras's idea, as glossed by Wood, that "men are in general capable of making political judgments, and that their well-being depends on participation in a civic order, but also that they are entitled to the benefits of civic life". It's not just that we can make such decisions, that we are capable of making such judgments, but that, in fact, we must. Our well-being depends on it, and we are entitled to it. And so we watch an unlikely revolution unfold in Egypt, with hope and longing, as if, perhaps, it were our own. . .

Noted: Ezra Pound

From his preface to his book, The Spirit of Romance:

Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all of these things, the artist with that which flows.

Crazy

Not surprisingly, Stan Goff had an interesting take on the recent shootings in Tucson, as well as the kinds of responses they elicited:

Let’s start with the premise that Jared Loughner is crazy, not coherently political. [...]

I’ll leave the DSM-IV acolytes to put labels on what kind of crazy Loughner is. The fact is he wasn’t crazy on Mars or in a time warp.

He was crazy in Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, in January 2011. Jared Loughner could read and write in English. He watched television, listened to the radio, saw movies, and read newspapers. He knew how to buy a gun and call a cab. When he couldn’t get his ammo at one Wal-Mart, he had the wherewithal to head to the next one and try again.

Jared Loughner may have some problems with dissociation, however that is being defined, but he didn’t learn to load and fire a Glock 19 via some synaptic disruption in his cerebral cortex; he learned it from a culture. Last I checked, there is no evidence of a Glock 19 gene, though I expect the DSM-IV people to come up with a Glock 19 Disorder soon enough, and Searle will invent a drug to control it.

This may sound like I’m trying to make the US case against him, given the narrow legal definition of insanity; but I’m not. The legal definition of anything is always inadequate, because law can never anticipate the complexity of context.

The case I’m making is that Loughner – in his own mentally fractured way – was behaving exactly the way his culture demonstrated he was supposed to behave.

"Little else is worth thinking about"

The cheerful posts come fast and furious. Robert Jensen's words, excerpted in the last post, reminded me of Philip Goodchild's preface to his difficult and fascinating (and as yet unfinished by me) book, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. He describes the book's origins:

This book emerged from the tension between four powerful insights—insights bringing problems, not solutions. The last insight to arrive was the contemporary truth of suffering: a growing awareness that current trends in globalization, trade and the spread of technology are not only leading towards a condition where the human habitat is unsustainable, but the urgency and responsibility announced by this preventable catastrophe mean that little else is worth thinking about. Prior to that, research for this present work was initiated by the realization that the encompassing framework delimiting the production of thought and values in modern life, and exerting increasing influence, was simply the impersonal and self-positing structure of money as the measure of values. As a whole, however, my work is grounded in an 'idea'—or perhaps I should say an 'experience'—of what I will call 'God'. This 'idea' was so overwhelming and so distinct from our customary ways of thinking that, while intelligible in itself, it remains incommunicable until it has called into question and reformulated all existing categories of philosophy and theology. Finally, the work of the revaluation of values which may lead to the cessation of suffering was developed in the form of the 'murder of God'—the actual work of calling into question the fundamental concepts and values of the European tradition.

Each of these insights fractured my self-consciousness, exposing an abyss beneath all my thoughts and relations to myself, to others and to the world. I became a stranger to those closest to me as well as to myself. Each issue imposed itself as a dynamic force on thought, a problem of unlimited importance that I feel barely equipped to begin to address. Moreover, these are not personal but universal and global problems, imposing the responsibility on each person to find an appropriate way of addressing them. In the case of each problem, however, there is only a minority who feel the impact of its force, and those who are concerned with two or more of these problems are much fewer. The public consensus is engaged in a vast enterprise of evasion, sheltering in a wicked and lethal complacency. Yet each of these problems calls to and awakens the others. Anyone who carefully attends to the significance of these issues—and this book is an attempt to communicate their significance—may risk having their world shattered. Thinking is nearly as dangerous as complacency.

Hysterical and apocalyptic

At New Left Project, Robert Jensen (not to be confused with Derrick) writes about the pitfalls of online activism (e.g., the tendency to think that political information = political action) and the challenges facing activism in the face of immanent ecological collapse ("The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn’t time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world"). Towards the end of the piece, he writes:

Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me: (1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and (2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it. When I offer such as assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don’t feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I’m taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.

Addressing the role of online activism in all of this, he notes that "we’re used to talking about the people who don’t embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn’t the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology." Localism. Sustainability. Less energy and less advanced technology. An altered sense of what constitutes the good life. When do we think seriously about it? And in any case how is my thinking seriously about it going to do the trick?

Brief thoughts on A Language Older Than Words

If the two volumes of Derrick Jensen's Endgame were about, on the one hand, the problem that is civilization itself, the argument against it as such, and, on the other hand, meditations on the kinds of actions that might do serious damage to its ability to continue functioning, A Language Older Than Words is more about the world that we have lost access to because of it. That, in fact, it would speak to us if we would only listen, has stopped because we have lost the ability or inclination to listen. The book opens with an anecdote about the time he asked the coyotes to please stop killing his chickens, after which they killed no more chickens. There is another story about a duck that extended its neck out to be killed by him. There is a fascinating section towards the end of the book about a scientist who has done decades of research into communication with plants; well aware of the reception his work would receive in scientific circles, he doesn't even try to present it. (A question raised by and through the book: Why would the world speak to us in the conditions under which it is usually studied?)

Jensen is well aware that he is inviting your ridicule by telling such stories. He thought he was losing his mind. He tells other stories. He tells of conversations with indigenous writers and activists, recounting their words for how their cultures have experienced the world. He talks about his abusive father and how he learned to disappear when horrible things were happening, to not feel them. He quotes from accounts of the first European contact with North America, about the overwhelming abundance of both flora and fauna. He writes about the inevitability of story after story of our culture's contact with indigenous people. Extermination. Story after story recounting the despoiling of land after land. Desertification. He, again, concludes that we're all fucking crazy.

I'd offer quotations from the book, but I've already leant it out. However, by coincidence, I noticed last week that Skholiast had recently quoted a key passage from the book, in which Jensen reports the following words from Jeannette Armstrong, "poet, teacher and activist from the Okanagan tribes":

Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor. It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.

Skholiast, incidentally, while admitting that he has "many difficulties" with the book, says that "it is still written the way I believe philosophy ought to be written (with urgency and beauty)". I'm curious about his difficulties. I can imagine what mine might once have been (I agree about the urgency and beauty). Oddly (oddly?), I find I have no difficulties with it now, even if I am unsure how to process many of the stories found in it. I have no trouble whatever with Jensen's overall message about the insanity of our civilization, except insofar as I am already troubled by that insanity. Read his book, but read it with an open mind.

Technologically Advanced

How fucked are we? Pretty fucked. Ten all but ignored stories of further scientific evidence that "human civilization is on the precipice". All depressing, each on their own catastrophic. And still we remain utterly delusional. The introduction to the list closes with a quotation from Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." It may seem impossible? To whom?

Dunbar's number, etc

Last month Ethan linked to this Wikileaks-related post at Americana called "Pathologies of Scale". The Wikileaks stuff is pretty good, but I'm more interested here in the first part of the post, in which the author, Justin, writes about his personal experience working at a smallish company as a software developer, because it dovetails nicely with some of what I've been thinking and wanting to write about here with respect to the future and how to act, etc. Justin tells of some advice he received from an older colleague who was leaving the company on "difficult terms", to the effect that he "should get out of there as soon as possible" that he "would do best in small, loose organizations" and that he "should begin looking for a new job as soon as [he] heard talk of a security badge policy". His friend

was really describing sicknesses that are endemic to organizational growth, the point at which an organization reaches critical mass and begins experiencing new kinds of communication breakdowns from scale. Businesses often call these issues 'growing pains', where in the early days of an organization, it is possible for everyone to talk with everyone and as the company grows, open communication and unrestricted access becomes impossible and counter-productive. To function, the organization needs protocols, proper channels and badges because it is no longer possible for everyone to know everything and everyone. He could have chosen any one of numerous symptoms; help desk tickets, organizational charts, whatever, but he chose security badges, which was interesting because security badges are vaguely authoritarian, betray a puffed up sense of self-importance and neurotic insecurity approaching paranoia.

[...]

The unintended side effects of growth manifest as pathologies. The role of ‘proper channels’ in an organization is to synthesize raw data into actionable information for leadership to act upon. The problem is that any synthesis also, by definition, results in information loss. The information that is [lost] is partly determined by what underlings choose to report, which is influenced by their cognizance of the reality that no matter how rational they may believe themselves to be, leaders still sometimes resort to killing the messenger.

Other than simple recognition, two things in particular occurred to me as I read these paragraphs. The first was Dunbar's number; the second was the arguments put forth by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State. I've written about Scott's book in the past (here, and also here; heh, that second post reads like a dry run for, or perhaps a better version of, this post of mine from last month: I do repeat myself); here I want to talk a little about Dunbar's number.

Dunbar's number is a concept first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as "a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships"; "relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person" (Wikipedia). The number, it turns out, is roughly 150 people. I first learned about Dunbar's number by way of Stan Goff, and it so happens that Stan revisited the topic in a recent post at his essential Feral Scholar blog (seriously, Stan and his co-blogger DeAnander have been a crucial resource in recent years, in particular in such areas as gender and militarism and food praxis, among others; you should read them regularly):

. . .we ought to begin right now subjecting every institution to scrutiny, and work against the institutional tendency to transform from an in-itself into a for-itself.

Every time friends become a committee, we ought to exercise the precautionary principle; because our desire to get bigger and stronger to pursue tempo tasks can blind us to the more formidable strength we risk losing by neglecting – and underestimating – primary relations.

If we spend 80 percent of our time managing secondary relationships, then we need to figure out how we can flip that to 80 percent of our time nurturing primary relationships.

One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is that we are fragmented, yes, but cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.

It is not hyperbole to say, I don’t think, that Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary weak bonds for primary strong ones.

It only seems symmetrical to suggest that by restrengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist, but also to creatively adapt to, the forces that seem so threatening now.

When I first learned about Dunbar's number the idea made immediate, intuitive sense to me. Stan opens his post by linking to a short video in which Dunbar explains the idea and some of the underpinnings of it. I recommend taking a look.

(Incidentally, in the course of his brief lecture, Dunbar mentions almost in passing the importance of touch in maintaining relationships, something that science has pretty much completely overlooked. I naturally thought immediately of Gabriel Josipovici's book-length essay Touch, and again my sense that this all matters a great deal is mutually reinforced everywhere I turn.)

I don't have a lot of time to explore this topic right now, but I did want to throw it out there, in part in connection to the question of how we are to act, given the forces aligned against us and our own complicity in it all, the hugeness of it all. The battles before us seem massive, intractable, impossible even. The sheer scale of the problems we face tends to lead us to believe that large-scale solutions are needed. I admit that I am just as susceptible, if not more so, to this way of thinking as anyone else; I am an impatient git. And, lacking any personal connection to a tradition of political or social action, the tendency for me to just say it's impossible and do nothing is still all too strong. Nonetheless, action is possible. Lately I've come around to the idea that action must be local to have any hope of succeeding. But succeeding at what? Is a locally sustaining food economy going to arrest global warming? Well, no. Of course not, not when you put it like that. I don't honestly think anything will help when it comes to problems of that scale. We can only do what we can do. My position is one of both pessimism (we will eventually be forced to make do locally, so we may as well learn now) and optimism (we really do work better in small groups, live better when we know those around us, work better when we work together, etc).

As so many previous posts have been, this one is little more than a pointer towards future writing and activity. Localism is unpopular in certain quarters of the left, which tends to view it suspiciously as often so much mystical blood and soil fascist shit, and which itself is still very much wedded to the large-scale solution of state socialism. So this is another theme to which I hope to return. (Also: what does it mean to be left? or socialist? or liberal? or conservative? how meaningless are those terms?)

A Bernhard Moment

If in the early part of last year my reading was dominated by Peter Handke, I anticipate the beginning of this year to be dominated by his fellow Austrian, the late Thomas Bernhard. Not only did I receive for Christmas the two newly published collections of his writings, Prose (early stories just now appearing in English for the first time) and My Prizes (his various pieces commenting on his several literary prizes), but I already had three other volumes still awaiting my attention. These are Wittgenstein's Nephew, Woodcutters, and the final novel, Extinction. The relentlessness of Bernhard's mature style means that I am especially loath to read him when exhausted and so has meant that I have not been reading him much of late, except where shorter works have been available. The Voice Imitator, for example, or Three Novellas. The latter collection, of similar vintage as the stories found in Prose, I did read last year, and each of the three stories successively came closer to that mature style, with "Walking" in particular being very much like the later Bernhard, and so reminding me of the considerable pleasure to be found in his music. It feels like time to read him again. (A re-read of Concrete, my first Bernhard, may also be in order.)

There have been several new paperback editions of Bernhard's work in recent years, which is just one reason why reviews have been appearing at some of the more popular litblogs. I admit to some ambivalence about this. It's great that people are reading Bernhard and that his books are coming back into print (though, alas, the new American Vintage reissues are fucking ugly; fortunately, I already have the vastly more attractive University of Chicago editions for most of them; The Lime Works appears to be the only one I am missing). I suppose I'm being a bit churlish. Few noticed when others of us were talking about Bernhard in the past. I'm not completely beyond the tendency to care whether (more) people notice. But, to be fair, I don't have many actual complaints about the recent blog-commentary I've seen, which is more than can be said for either mainstream coverage of Bernhard or the traditional critical responses to him.

For the former, Dale Peck's recent item in the New York Times has received some attention. Since Peck is the author, you can bet there is something wrong with it, but in fact I wasn't quite as bothered by it as some, if only because I don't much mind the practice of "a reviewer [using] a book merely as a soapbox on which to stand and expound". You'll notice I have referred to Peck's "item"; this is because, though it is ostensibly a review of the two new books, he doesn't really review either of them, instead using the occasion to cluelessly talk up Bernhard in general. Which, again, in itself isn't a bad thing. It depends on the nature of the argument being expounded. Obviously, "soapbox" and "expound" are words carrying negative connotations, and Peck does little to warrant a defense (though he does once or twice veer dangerously close to getting it). He goes on and on about alienation. (The article sounds at times like a less interesting version of Zadie Smith's much-discussed "Two Paths" essay from two years ago, though Peck doesn't really explore the question he raises.) The soapbox-line comes from Terry at Vertigo, in his excellent evisceration of the Peck review (which he follows up with a fine review of his own of Prose).

With respect to the traditional critical take on Bernhard, a recent review in the London Review of Books of a new UK edition of Old Masters, by the well-regarded translator Michael Hofmann (translator of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, among many other important German-language works), is a case in point (my own review of Old Masters, from four years ago, is here; see also John Self's fine review last year at Asylum). Waggish handles Hofmann's review superbly. Waggish was disappointed in the review,

not only because it neglects the most important aspects of Bernhard’s work, but also because it seems to confirm so many preconceptions of him: the angry Austrian endlessly railing at everything, hating the country and its people and life and books and culture and everything. [...] [the ranting] is always contextualized. It is never ranting for its own sake, and the rants are never to be taken completely at face-value, no matter how appealing or justified the target.

The voice in Bernhard is so vital that one is often tempted to nod along in agreement. I can't tell you the number of times I have encountered a passage that seems to perfectly capture a given position, or perfectly expresses a thought, and I have stopped to underline or jot it down, or have even blogged an excerpt, only to see it negated or comically undermined further down the page, or on the next page, or perhaps 30 or 60 pages on, this negation or reversal also perfectly expressed, by the same character, in the same marvelous music. I am reminded, again, in these moments, chastened even, that the opinion is not the point (which is not the same thing as saying that it's completely irrelevant, either to Bernhard or to his art). (Of course, I underline or excerpt anyway.) (Coetzee is another writer who is constantly reminding us of this; we seem to need the reminders.) In any event, Waggish's post is an excellent discussion of the purposes Bernhard's characters' rants serve in the narratives which contain them (which appear to some readers to simply be the totality of those narratives, the characters merely stand-ins for Bernhard himself).

One aspect of Waggish's review that is of particular interest to me is the distinction he makes between the middle narratives, culminating in Correction, and the later, more rant-fueled books, which include Concrete, The Loser (again, source of this blog's name), Old Masters, and Extinction. I am partial to these later works, and at times found Correction rough sledding. Correction is often named as Bernhard's best and most important (Waggish agrees), most prominently by George Steiner, who tended to dismiss the later work as the product of a writer "succumb[ing] to a monotone of hate". Steiner, like Hofmann, missed the point. Here is Waggish again (his post is much more than the excerpts I'm quoting in this post and is very much worth reading in its entirety):

All the exaggerations, the name-callings, the generalizations, the hate? These are not things that one quite means. They are flourishes. The flourishes (here is where the “musicality” of Bernhard’s prose is apt) are all there are, as Bernhard is hellbent on avoiding such meaningful content as argument, logic, evidence, and proof.

And I think all this is fairly evident from Bernhard’s middle period, which isn’t all that rant-filled at all. Correction, which I consider to be his absolute masterpiece, is nothing but the turning-inward that falls on Bernhard’s ranters when they run out of venom. It’s about a man, or several men, who have nowhere to go, and yet are running at full throttle. I don’t think that the hermetic approach that culminated to Correction could possibly have gone any further, so Bernhard was forced to find a new direction, one dealing with the attempted evasions from the hermetic nightmare that consumes the men of Correction.

But the nightmare remains paramount.

Interestingly, from, say, the latter half of Gargoyles, through Correction, on through to the later novels, the musicality of Bernhard's voice, the refracted narrative, the repetitions, the negations, is so similar, so recognizably Bernhard, that I have to admit that I hadn't remembered that those of the middle-period are not "all that rant-filled at all" till Waggish pointed it out. Perhaps oddly, it's Correction that, for this reader, was the toughest to finish, and I think it's what Waggish calls the "hermetic approach" that helps to explain it. The later works, though superficially rant-filled, and certainly despairing, are at the same time lighter, and also funnier. I don't feel oppressed by the writing, even as it bears obvious similarities with the hermetic, oppressive writing of Correction. It is this lightness which, for me, elevates the later writing.

Now, on to the reading.

Books Read - 2010

As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2010, in chronological order of completion (with one exception); links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts; following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.

1. Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
2. Once Again For Thucydides, Peter Handke (Tess Lewis, trans.)
3. Our Horses In Egypt, Rosalind Belben
4. One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power
5. Repetition, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
6. Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
7. Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
8. After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici
9. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, David Graeber (also, also)
10. Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Maria Mies
11. 2666, Roberto Bolaño (Natasha Wimmer, trans.)
12. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, Peter Handke (Scott Abbott, trans.)
13. The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
14. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
15. The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
16. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
17. A Moment of True Feeling, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
18. Say Uncle, Kay Ryan
19. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi (Raymond Rosenthal, trans.)
20. Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks
21. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (Martha Dow Fehsenfeld & Lois More Overbeck, eds.) (also, also, also, also, also)
22. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson
23. Anarchism and its Aspirations, Cindy Milstein
24. Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose
25. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, Giovanni Arrighi
26. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards", Alfie Kohn
27. Runaway, Alice Munro
28. Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro
29. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Graham Harman
30. The Exquisite, Laird Hunt
31. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
32. Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean, George Thomson
33. Island People, Coleman Dowell
34. What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici
35. Only Joking, Gabriel Josipovici
36. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue, Michael D. Yates
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)
39. Corruption, Tahar Ben Jelloun (Carol Volk, trans.)
40. Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx (Ben Fowkes, trans.)
41. Spiderland, Scott Tennent
42. Portrait of a Romantic, Steven Millhauser
43. Three Novellas, Thomas Bernhard (Peter Jansen & Kenneth J. Northcott, trans.)
44. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
45. The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson
46. Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow
47. If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, Mike Marqusee

Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 40
Number of books written by women: 7 (!!)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 3 (both Dowells, Mosley)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 4 (Power, Fisher, Harman, Tennent)

Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 25
Number that are poetry: 1
Number that are memoirs: 2 (two of the Handke books are memoirs of sorts)
Number that are re-reads: 0
Number of authors represented: 16
Number of books by female authors: 4
Number of female authors: 3
Number of books by American authors: 6
Number of American authors: 5
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 8
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 6 (Coetzee, Josipovici, Belben, Munro, Bennett, Mosley)
Number of books in translation: 11
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Spanish)
Most represented foreign languages: German (9: 7 Handke books, 1 Bernhard, 1 Mann)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 4 (Beckett—for his Letters, counted as non-fiction, below—Bellow, Coetzee, Mann)

Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 0
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 0
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 3 (Bellow, Bernhard, Mann)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 8 (Millhauser, 5 of the Handkes, both Dowells)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2009: 9
Number of books from 2010: 0

Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 22
Number of books by female authors: 3 (Power, Mies, Milstein)
Number of books in translation: 2 (Levi, Marx)
Number that are biographies or letters: 2 (Knowlson's bio of Beckett; Beckett's Letters)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 2
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2 (Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Ricks)
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 11
Number about pop music: 1
Number about science: 0
Number about parenting or education: 2

Comments & Observations:
Overall, I completed just over half as many books this year as I did last year. There are a few reasons for this. First, I spent a lot of time reading volume 1 of Capital and watching David Harvey's lecture series on it. Second, a few of the novels I read were long, or took long to read. Doctor Faustus, for example, or 2666. Third, I read a lot of partial books. Fourth, I do almost no reading at home anymore, because of my commute and the need to spend time with my family and my re-obsession this year with baseball and my inability to put my computer away. Fifth, and most important by far, in the middle of the year, I suffered from extreme sleep deprivation. All too often, I was simply too tired to read.

The concentration of links in the reading list is just another indicator of how quiet this blog has been for the last six months. I hope to be a little more active in 2011, though obviously I can make no guarantees.

Other general notes on the numbers: the ratio of men to women is higher than ever; uncharacteristically, I read no fiction published prior to 1948; non-fiction was dominated by economic history; fiction was dominated by Peter Handke, with Alice Munro and Coleman Dowell and Gabriel Josipovici the only other authors represented by more than one book; my intention to read a lot of feminism this year did not come to pass, though Mies' book is an important feminist perspective on capitalism (see below). . .

Which brings me to my main reading goal for 2010, to finally read Capital, volume 1, which I did in fact read. Marx's book is not exactly a walk in the park but far easier to read than I'd once feared (as is so often the case). My view of the history of capitalism was further deepened and complicated by Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, and Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation. I rate all of these very highly, and I hope to synthesize in writing what I've taken from their arguments, though I have, admittedly, been very slow to get moving on such a project.

I had difficulty with fiction this year, which isn't too unusual when I'm having trouble sleeping. The early part of the year was dominated by Peter Handke, and I'd expected to follow my meta-Beckett hat trick with some of Beckett's shorter fiction. Unfortunately, that was the exact moment my troubles began, and I have no intention of doing half-assed readings of Beckett. I never did get back to him once my sleep returned. Anyway, fiction highlights for the year included Handke's beautiful novel Repetition (my third attempt finally proving successful), Coetzee's Summertime, Bolaño's much-hyped 2666, and Bellow's apparently notorious Mr. Sammler's Planet. I also enjoyed, as I always do, the Josipovici fiction I read this year. And allow me to mention with some affection Alice Munro. Her stories are more conventional than I normally read, but they are enjoyable and did ease me back into the reading of fiction this summer when nothing else seemed to do the trick, for which I offer thanks.

Once again poetry was hit-or-miss for me. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud were all, again, the most common poets I read throughout the year. I read for the first time the American Kay Ryan, and I was delighted. I read her short volume Say Uncle several times with considerable pleasure. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future (and, hey!, I received her shiny new selected poems for Christmas; excellent). (I am grateful to Patrick Kurp for his several posts in praise of Ryan, who I may not otherwise have read.)

Brief interlude to include list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing:

Blanchot, The Book to Come and The Infinite Conversation
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time
Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Thoreau, The Journal
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (I may not yet have finished reading this book, but I did write two posts on Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I read last year: one, two)

I finished just two books of literary criticism, but both were marvelous: Christopher Ricks' Beckett's Dying Words and Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? Of course, my love of Josipovici is no secret around here (and, yes, I do still have something in the works in response to his book, including, for once, some criticisms; what ever those end up being, it remains an essential volume), but Ricks' book was the first I'd read from that great critic. I doubt it will be the last. On a related note, the first volume of Beckett's Letters was a wonderful reading experience; I found Knowlson's bio Damned to Fame by turns fascinating and tedious (and certainly overlong: hate to say it, but I don't really care all that much about the many different productions of Beckett's various plays, just as in the editorial apparatus to his Letters, I could have quite done without the excessive minutiae about the works of art he viewed while visiting Germany in the 1930s). These were the first such books I'd ever read (that is, published letters or literary biography); I'm not rushing out to immediately add more to my reading list, but I welcome a good recommendation, and I'm happy to have read these.

You'll have noticed that my list of unfinished books is top-heavy with philosophy (including the inimitable Blanchot's philosophical literary criticism). I hope to get further along with philosophy this coming year; in aid of that, I read another "guide" to Heidegger, Graham Harman's very helpful Heidegger Explained. Coupled with Timothy Clark's excellent, though more literary-focused, Martin Heidegger, read last year, I feel I have a decent idea of how to best approach, for my purposes, that philosopher's often difficult writings. (I also, for months, have had in mind a post about an epiphany I had while reading one of the later sections in Harman's book, which I hope to publish early in the year.)

Finally, of the rest of the non-fiction that I read, Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved is a fascinating and moving meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust; Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and its Aspirations is the best book on the topic I've yet read; David Graeber's Possibilities is a stimulating collection of essays on anarchism and anthropology; Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve is an excellent book on education (though Mike Rose's Why School? is, alas, of very little value); and blog-friend Scott Tennent's Spiderland, his entry in the 33 1/3 series of books about classic albums, is an engaging narrative effectively contextualizing the mysterious Slint and their great album.

Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.