Noted: Roland Barthes

Two from The Pleasure of the Text:

. . . any completed utterance runs the risk of being ideological. (p.50)

And:

Everyone can testify that the pleasure of the text is not certain: nothing says that this same text will please us a second time; it is a friable pleasure, split by mood, habit, circumstance, a precarious pleasure (obtained by a silent prayer addressed to the Desire for ease, and which that Desire can revoke); whence the impossibility of speaking about this text from the point of view of positive science (its jurisdiction is that of critical science: pleasure is a critical principle). (p. 52)

Noted: Roland Barthes

From The Pleasure of the Text (translation by Richard Miller; all italics in the original):

An entire minor mythology would have us believe that pleasure (and singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion. On the right, with the same movement, everything abstract, boring, political, is shoved over to the left and pleasure is kept for oneself: welcome to our side, you who are finally coming to the pleasure of literature! And on the left, because of morality (forgetting Marx's and Brecht's cigars), one suspects and disdains any "residue of hedonism." On the right, pleasure is championed against intellectuality, the clerisy: the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) "life" against (cold) "abstraction": must not the artist, according to Debussy's sinister precept, "humbly seek to give pleasure"? On the left, knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are drawn up against "mere delectation" (and yet: what if knowledge itself were delicious?). On both sides, this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect. Something neuter? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic.

Noted: Roland Barthes

From "Blind and Dumb Criticism", in Mythologies:

Why do critics . . . periodically proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty. [. . .]

. . . one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind. [. . .]

The reality behind this seasonally professed lack of culture is the old obscurantist myth according to which ideas are noxious if they are not controlled by 'common sense' and 'feeling': Knowledge is Evil, they both grew on the same tree. [. . .] To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism (for as it happens, it is these two philosophies particularly that one confesses to be unable to understand) is to elevate one's blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: 'I don't understand, therefore you are idiots.'

Related: "We lack jouissance"

We lack jouissance

A few weeks ago, I questioned the appropriateness of Leon Wieseltier's preface to the new edition of Reflections, a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin. In the offending passage I quoted from, there was a small fragment with which, on its own, I must admit some sympathy. This is when he writes: "I confess that there are many pages of Benjamin that I do not understand . . ." Unfortunately, he completes this thought with ". . . in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear", which seems, again, designed to exert undue influence on the reader approaching Benjamin for the first time.

Nevertheless, I also confess that there have been many pages of Benjamin that I have not understood, though I am not so eager to assign the blame to Benjamin. It's possible that many of his pages, which often amount to sketches or fragmentary thoughts, are less explicable to me because, in fact, they are incomplete and were not intended for publication. Perhaps he simply hadn't completed the work necessary to make himself more clear, either because he didn't have time, or because he gave up on the item in question. But the truth is, I have some of the same problems with parts of essays that are clearly finished and were published during Benjamin's lifetime, so this provisional explanation doesn't satisfy me. I've written here before about my experiences reading Benjamin, describing a "vertiginous feeling" I have while doing so. While there are great moments of lucidity, when it seems as if complex ideas suddenly come into focus, the fact remains that I often literally don't know what the words on the page are supposed to signify. I have experienced similar problems with other critics. I'm thinking now of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. I have great difficulty understanding what they're talking about. For the most part, the words look like words I should understand, but the sense often eludes me. It takes me several passes before I am able to decide what is being said in a given passage.

What is the problem? Are these writers simply obscure? Is it all gibberish? I think there are a few problems. First, note that each of these three writers wrote in a language other than English--Benjamin in German, Barthes and Blanchot in French. I read neither German nor French, which means that I am, by necessity, reading these writers in translation. So something is lost, something which perhaps makes it difficult for me, at least, to access these writings. Richard Howard writes in his preface to Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text:

. . . the French have a vocabulary of eroticism, an amorous discourse which smells neither of the laboratory nor of the sewer, which just--attentively, scrupulously--puts the facts. In English, we have either the coarse or the clinical, and by tradition our words for our pleasures, even for the intimate parts of our bodies where we may take those pleasures, come awkwardly when they come at all. So that if we wish to speak of the kind of pleasure we take--the supreme pleasure, say, associated with sexuality at its most abrupt and ruthless pitch--we lack the terms acknowledged and allowed in polite French utterance; we lack jouissance and jouir, as Barthes uses them here. The nomenclature of active pleasure fails us. . .

Howard goes on to discuss the solutions translator Richard Miller devised to bridge this gap, but the point here is the gap itself. Is it possible that these texts are simply not to be understood? Obviously this is not an acceptable answer. Others seem to be able to read them, and I consider it the height of presumptuousness to assume that readers are not actually reading, with pleasure or with understanding, what they say they're reading. (Ignoring for the moment the inexplicably popular writer, as well as those times in our lives when, perhaps, we do indeed claim pleasures in order to please others.) Though Miller generally supplies "bliss" for Barthes' jouissance, the latter is a term I've seen used by writers writing in English--one of those terms for which the translated word is simply not sufficient, so the original has entered the target language. Yet for it to do so, a body of readers would have had to understand the term conceptually.

In any event, too many people I respect consider these and other critical thinkers to be not just coherent, but of the utmost importance to them. One such person is Gabriel Josipovici, and if I'm able to profitably read Josipovici's critical essays, why then shouldn't I be able to read Maurice Blanchot's? Of course, Josipovici himself writes in English (and appears to be able to read French and German, not to mention Hebrew), so perhaps this is still the difference, for me? Or maybe that's only part of it.

As I might have expected, Steve Mitchelmore suggests a possible direction. This is only appropriate, since it was through This Space that I first learned of Josipovici. Last week, Steve posted a list of some of his favored texts of literary criticism, texts which he warns "may contain erudite literary argument." One of these is Maurice Blanchot by William Large & Ullrich Haase. (It also includes Michael Wood's wonderful The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, the only book on the list I've read.) In the comments to this post, Steve writes that he recommends the Large & Haase book because "it's a straightforward and memorable intro for English readers mired in English commonsense reading habits." That final phrase "English commonsense reading habits" jumped out at me, as if Steve had been reading my mind as I've been struggling with these issues and writers. (And as such, this book has been immediately added to the wishlist.)

"Commonsense": this word by itself says a lot, doesn't it? I think the idea of "commonsense reading habits" as related to what I was getting at recently in a couple of posts in which I lamented a kind of writing that I called "depressingly utilitarian", which I further identified as primarily Anglo-American. I said that this writing--journalism, columns, opinion pieces, not true essays--means to impart information. And we, as readers, expect usefulness; we expect information. We don't expect to work too much. We resent work. We might be conditioned to shout down someone who appears to be making an issue too "black and white" (usually when we simply disagree: everyone else is always more intractable than we are), but in reality, we have difficulty with nuance; ambiguity bugs us. I mentioned Anglo-American writing, but I can really only vouch for my observations as a middle-class, white American, with a lazy college degree, and a blandly liberal, yet politically conservative, upbringing. We expect writing to speak plain truths--we assume truths are plain. We want the language, in general, to be plain-spoken. If a book cannot be simply opened up and read and grasped by an uninitiated reader, then it must be bullshit ("gibberish"). Writing that is not plain-spoken is difficult and therefore pretentious. People who claim to enjoy supposedly difficult writing are poseurs (or, possibly, elitists). Philosophy is suspect. In my life, I've had more than one person say to me that they had no intention of reading philosophy, because why should someone else's random thoughts on life have any bearing on your own? What makes the philosophers' "opinions" more worthy of consideration than my own? What use could they possibly have? Or, why read philosophy when science has actual answers? (I realize these are gross generalizations and over-simplifications and that plenty of Americans do not subscribe to these attitudes. Forgive me.) My instincts tell me that this problem has to do with the culture of capitalism (and of course it has everything to do with education), but I have neither the time nor the energy to expand on that notion right now. (Having neither time nor energy being intimately related to said culture.)

Ok, I'm all over the map in this post (so it feels), and I'm going to have to come to an unsatisfactory close. Steve's recommendation and the acknowledgment contained in his "commonsense" phrase, these are reminders that some things do require work, pleasure among them. One must learn to read philosophical and critical writing. One must spend time with it (time which may be hard to come by). And those of us used to expecting utilitarian writing, used to a certain kind of reading, may need to teach ourselves how to read differently, better, and may need some assistance in learning how to do so as we approach certain kinds of writing.

Writing is Easy

In the interview that I linked to in my post about god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens was asked about his "prolific output"; he replied as follows:

Well, I find writing recreational. I used to do it to relax when I was a kid. I realized early on that there were a few things that I can do with any skill: write an essay and give a speech. I can do both of those very easily. Nothing to boast about, but I also have an extremely good memory. [. . .] to be absolutely frank, I don't find writing hard at all. I could in a course of a day perfectly easily write a column that's 1,000 words for Slate and a book review for the Sunday Times of London, for example.

This response strikes me as telling. He finds writing easy; he has a good memory. The problem, I think, is that Hitchens' typical form is the short column, and these tend to be disposable, polemical. An essay, on the other hand, should be about the writer making an inquiry, about trying to discover something in the writing, and a book, about such a weighty topic, should be as well. Hitchens doesn't need to discover things in his writing. He is here to tell you things, things that he doesn't have to look up or support, because he has a good memory. For him, this is writing. For me, this is decidedly not writing; it is, in fact, hackwork.

In her review of the book, Amanda Bragg writes that "there is no private compositional magic to be invoked here - we all know what his serious, considered work reads like." I don't mean to suggest that I can't recall much better written work from Hitchens, but even at its best, "private compositional magic" doesn't seem to describe it. That is, there isn't anything private about it, by which I mean, again, he isn't "essaying" a topic or an idea. He is informing or attacking or, perhaps, defending.

But I'm not here to dump on Christopher Hitchens again (or at least that's not the only reason for this post). And I don't mean to suggest that we don't ever need polemics. I wonder, though, if the short column, the newspaper op-ed, the opinion piece, certain kinds of blogging, if there isn't something depressingly utilitarian about these, as a form. Writing in this sense must be useful. I will only write something because I have something to tell you (and possibly because there's a paycheck in it). You will only bother to read it if you can make use of it. This seems to be the standard equation. No doubt I am simplifying matters enormously, but I wonder, too, if this isn't an Anglo-American tendency. If the tendency under capitalism is to reduce everything to commodity, writing is reduced to the bottom line (even if it's actually unpaid): what does this do? My reaction to the so-called atheist writers has been in part to what I sense as an overly empirical, overly utilitarian take on things.

In a sense, this post is also a placeholder. I want to explore this idea of what writing is and what essays are . . . a couple of posts back, I quote from Benjamin and Barthes; I'm thinking of them as examples of a something else I'm trying to access . . .

Restless, unnameable discomfort

In Marina Warner's TLS article on Beckett, much excited my interest, but there was one thing in particular which I didn't feel I could usefully explore in the last post, and for which this post is meant to only be a placeholder of sorts. Warner draws a connection between Baudelaire's writings on the "childhood imagination" and Beckett's work:

His essay-memoir is called "Morale du joujou" (Moral of the Plaything) – where joujou (not the usual word for toy, jouet) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a "teddy" or a "dolly". Baudelaire recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play, and wonders at children’s ability to play without props or models, through fantasy alone. "All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings." Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to say children also want "to see the soul" of a toy, and remembers how they will turn it about, shake it and hurl it to the ground, baffled, even enraged, by its stubborn inanimateness. His meditation hints that the primal loss brings with it an understanding of mortality, and that this takes place when make-believe fails and the vitality of toys vanishes: "But where is the soul? It’s here that vacancy sets in – and bewilderment". Around sixty years after Baudelaire, in his essay on playing with dolls, Rilke meditated in similar terms on the passions aroused by this relationship, on his fury when confronted by the doll’s mute obstinate solidity, and the onrush of compensatory fantasy.

This ambiguity about the soul of the toy – the doll or other object – haunts the psychology of play, and through play, the theory of language’s relation to the world, and the impact of imagination. Beckett’s work probes the puzzling boundary of consciousness, of animation and inanimateness, with ceaseless, patient, forensic curiosity.

Inevitably, this makes me think of Walter Benjamin. There is his Berlin Childhood around 1900, of course, but also, fresher in my mind, his Moscow Diary, in which he talks about his excitement at seeing collections of certain toys, but which also includes his short essay, "Russian Toys". Here he is on the spirit of those "primitive" toys produced by peasants and artisans:

The spirit from which these products emanate--the entire process of their productions and not merely its result--is alive for the child in the toy, and he naturally understands a primitively produced object much better than one deriving from a complicated industrial process.

And in Mythologies, in the piece "Toys", Roland Barthes writes of modern toys, "made of a graceless material, a product of chemistry, not of nature." That "the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch." Worse, toys "are supplied to [the child] ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish. [...] French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators."

Returning to Warner's article, Beckett's "babble" links the emergence of language with its falling away, and "[i]nfancy meets decrepitude in his meditations on existence" (Warner); and, for Beckett, "the physical presence of things requires that we listen to their voices somewhat like a child animating a roomful of toys through sighs, whispers, groans and burblings" and "nursery nonsense joins sound music through the noises of the body".

I want to tie all these threads together with my thinking on the Modernist project, but I'm struggling. In Proust, the narrator's memories recreate, condensed in a moment, a whole world, forever lost, but which in his reveries seem more real than reality. And Beckett, too:

The angle of view in so many of his works opens on to elusive glimpses of the past, a past that belongs to Beckett’s childhood, to his mother, his father, their parents and their sisters (Beckett’s beloved aunts): their customs, clothes, diction and doings haunt his works. As the title Rockaby evokes, the pain and plangency and occasional bliss of these echoes rising from the obscurity of forgetting return their declining, impaired subjects to a time of lullaby, while the rocking chair in which they sit or even the boat that moves from side to side in Krapp’s Last Tape recalls another motion that seeks to soothe restless, unnameable discomfort: the rocking of the cradle that settles the anguish of the baby.

When I've mentioned in passing about how the Modernist themes, as discussed by Josipovici, resonate with me in my project that is living my life, I'm thinking, in part, of this sense of discomfort. I think about modern life, the inexorable pressures of the capitalist system, the world that we bring babies into--where so little of, say, American life is amenable to children--and how all of this affects our perception of the options available to us as adults, stunted adults barely able to escape from a prolonged adolescence.

So much for a placeholder. More to come on this in the future, I hope.