Eisenstein-Joyce

Eisenstein, so Kluge’s film tells us, came to Paris in November 1928 to see James Joyce, by then almost blind. The two spoke of the possibility of filming Ulysses. Later, Eisenstein would write in his diary that his other project, filming Marx’s Das Kapital, might copy Joyce’s model of a day-in-the-life story, only this time present an evening in the life of a labourer’s wife, a snapshot through which the entire set of social and historical conditions would be refracted. We then see Kluge and others reading passages from the Marx-Engels-Werke, interspersed with striking images of capitalist production. One scene in a car factory shows a large digital sign suspended above the production line which reads ‘Ought/Is’ (Soll/Ist); the digits show the production target alongside the actual number of cars produced. Composer Wolfgang Rihm provides the accompaniment. There follows a tragi-comic scene of 2 Stasi members trying to get their heads round what “communism=electrification+soviets” might mean, the viewer clearly meant to see the ridiculousness of Stalinist ideology. 1 hour down, 11 to go.

Secret Weapon

This article on Paul Celan in today’s Die Zeit begins, ‘It’s a bad joke that Germany at least won the philosophical war, with help from its secret weapon concealed in the Black Forest.” I couldn’t possibly comment on the author’s consideration of why the many “heideggernden Sprachmystikern” might have warmed to something in Celan’s poetry which was “dunkel, hermetisch oder monologisch“. Heidegger as we all know was a wholly dialogical thinker; it’s just his preferred dialogical partner was a local farmer sat smoking a pipe in the ski hut’s Herrgottswinkel.

Film

Have now dipped into the first part of Kluge’s Nachricten aus der ideologischen Antike, and it’s pretty interesting. Diary entries from Eisenstein concerning his plan to film Marx’s Das Kapital are interspersed with scenes from Potemkin, random other images, and all accompanied by the great Heather O’Donnell on piano. One clearly can’t watch this film all in one go, so I’ve been interspersing it with Volker Schlöndorff’s film of Max Frisch’s Homo Faber. Faber has lost his Swiss character from the book, and become more flippant than alienated, but a young Julie Delpy (this was 2 years before even Kieslowski noticed her) gives a convincing performance as his daughter [oops, spoiler]. More on Kluge later.

Bologna Process

Education strikes in Germany are escalating, as Die Zeit reports. Several hundred thousand students are expected to take to the streets today in more than 20 cities nationwide from Greifswald to Konstanz and Berlin to Würzburg to protest against the Bologna-Process, rising fees, and the devaluing of qualifications. Showing solidarity will be thousands of students from Austria, travelling north to join the German demonstrations. Christoph Markschies, Rector of Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität last week had his Adorno moment when he called in the police to remove striking students from an auditorium.

Sixth Extinction

The Depository has a copy of Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article from earlier this year, ‘The Sixth Extinction’, which apparently is going to be made into a book. On a related note, I liked this from a review of Christopher Booker’s MMGW-denying The Real Global Warming Disaster:

Suppose you are genuinely undecided on climate change and determined not to be guided simply by what you’d like to believe. If unpicking the real story demands so much effort and insider knowledge, how can you possibly make up your mind? Here’s an unscientific suggestion. Booker’s position would require that you accept something like the following: Most of the world’s climate scientists, for reasons unspecified, decided to create a myth about human-induced global warming and have managed to twist endless measurements and computer models to fit their case, without the rest of the scientific community noticing. George W Bush and certain oil companies have, however, seen through the deception.

Au fond de l’inconnu

§ Schopenhauer once wrote that metaphysics fulfils a human need. It would be important to recognise this need, not only in the general sense Schopenhauer intended, but also with attention to the particular needs which particular forms of metaphysics might meet, or appear to meet. One ‘need’ today would surely be a means of comprehending and addressing the place of humans in the cosmos, given the actuality of an ecological crisis which threatens humans themselves, a crisis which many feel is ignored not only in mainstream and even radical politics, but also in both mainstream and radical philosophy. The worldviews of those studying philosophy in an education system (and in a cultural, communicative environment) which has changed dramatically over the last few years are not easy to fathom for one who learned philosophy a generation before, but it seems that discontent with the philosophical resources available for comprehending the crisis is widespread. If this is true, it would make some sense of the appeal of philosophies which claim to challenge anthropocentrism in favour of a more wholistic approach, claim to think nature in a way which is impossible in traditional philosophies, philosophies which – dependent on the very humanism believed to have caused our problems – actually constitute a barrier to comprehending the crisis, if not being downright complicit in it. It would therefore be important for those of us critical of the turn to anti-anthropocentric (can we say geocentric?) philosophies, in which new forms of realism, monism and ontology all share a family resemblance, to recognise the legitimacy of the need expressed in this turn despite the turn’s many flaws, in order not abstractly to negate it in criticising it, but address the need which motivates it with an alternative, more compelling explanation. The implicit need – here, it is being suggested, for a philosophy which can make sense of the crisis and allow a thinking and action that could alter the current, dangerous path of human societies – might well be legitimate, merely taking misguided and problematic form.

§ A worthwhile philosophical task would not be replacing one bias – the anthropocentric – with another – the geocentric, as if that could right a historical wrong – but rather of tracing the difficulties when either is elevated. Critique of geocentrism does not have to reinforce anthropocentrism, it merely points out the contradictions in attempts to think in a way other than the human, all too human, along with the futility of thinking anything other than human political action can remedy the crisis.

§ Lukacs begins his Theory of the Novel with a poetic description of ancient cosmology, the epic writers’ assumption of an immediate connection between human and cosmos, the loss of which Lukacs’s book will go on to chart. But what if cosmology, the repressed of the modern period, returned when the destructive trajectory of modern societies became apparent? Philosophical talk might then symptomatically return to the topic of distant galaxies, or the light from long dead stars, to that which ‘blaut ewig‘, in impotent protest at the apparent humanisation of nature, hoping without hope for something else, something unsullied, beyond the fragile earth.

§ One metaphysical need is surely registered in Baudelaire’s famous line about the unknown and the new. Seeking to escape from ennui and despair the self would plunge into a search for novelty. The new is to be found in the unknown, and the unprecedented and unfathomable are sought out with passion. But what if it were completely different? What if novelty, novelty in an emphatic sense rather than a novelty which is abstract, ungrounded in actuality or history, were itself to be found in some new relation to that history, to the past, to tradition? Recognising how easily the abstract novelty is willingly produced by the same production-line societies which plunge us towards destruction might then prompt a new thought of novelty, one not adolescently rebellious towards the value of tradition, one not believing it can begin from scratch. It might also prompt more reflection on the academy which institutionalises abstract novelty in pursuit of “an original contribution to human knowledge” as the only means to an academic living, and thus produces acolytes and enthusiasts of the new.

§ Might philosophy learn something from music here, even though the two are clearly different? (I write this perhaps only because the radio just played a sublime recital by Ibragimova and Tiberghien). What is best there in the new generation, and what will perhaps grow and survive longer than the illusory search for the absolutely new, may be an approach which finds novelty in a new interpretation of the tradition, which does not lose itself in the depths of the unknown, is admittedly not itself immune to commodity-produced novelty, to the Reklamekultur, but whose value and critical capacity are not exhausted by it.

Anthropocentrism?

“Generalized accusations of ‘human speciesism’ invite us to overlook oppressions and divisions within the human community, and are ethically irresponsible if they imply that the cause of nature should be promoted at the cost of a concern with social justice and equity in the distribution of resources [the two causes may go hand in hand - Utisz]. The problem of the destruction of nature has to be located at the level of specific relations of production and consumption and cannot be attributed to some generalized set of human attributes or attitudes. Moreover, insofar as we can speak in general terms here, it is inevitable that our attitudes to nature will be ‘anthropocentric’ in certain respects since there is no way of conceiving our relations to it other than through the mediation of ideas about ourselves. To suggest that it could be otherwise is to be insensitive to those ways in which the rest of nature is different and should be respected for being so.” (Kate Soper, What is Nature?)

Artifice

Zizek’s argument that there is no such thing as ‘nature’ seems to me well-intentioned, but nevertheless wrong. Here he is rehearsing it, sporting a visibility jacket whilst psychoanalysing amongst the garbage pile (a great moment at 04:40, by the way). It’s well-intentioned in that it rightly sees through ecological piety or the smuggling-in of norms via ‘the natural’. But wrong in that by reacting so strongly against these temptations the only alternative he can demand is more alienation from nature, more artificiality. He swings from the reactionary pole to the pseudo-revolutionary and can’t see any other possibilities. There seems some overlap between his position and those who argue that all ‘nature’ is now man-made, capitalism-produced, which goes similarly over the top into contradictions. Zizek rightly points out that ‘nature’ isn’t a totality, but it needs repeating that ’society’ likewise is no seamless whole, no totality without ruptures, in this context no completed or unproblematic (witness climate change) socialisation of the non-human world. It’s tempting to short-circuit the philosophical-political argument that would be needed to refute such beliefs and propose a cruel experiment: the proponent of the artifice thesis could be dropped somewhere in the middle of the Boreal forest for a month without any supplies and be left to contemplate (if indeed they survive) whether it makes much sense to see this environment as fully socialised, wholly colonised by civilisation, whether instead all is ‘hybridity’ (as the alternative jargon runs), or whether the abstraction ‘nature’ retains a persistent actuality. Unfortunately, they may also emerge, if  rescued, even more committed to that ‘artifice’ whose insuperable dependence on and interconnection with ‘nature’ they overlooked.

Die belehrte Unwissenheit

Avant-garde? I think if I were avant-garde I would present my philosophy as that which will be common sense in a decade’s time, willing my acceptance and acclaim counterfactually into being.

In any case, the reader is wise enough to work out whether speculation can rest content with the visio sine comprehensione, with Cusan docta ignorantia or with Kantian noumena, or whether it rightly pushes on towards a no-longer-dualistic absolute.

Leaving the Trees

We’re back with the trees again. Some have never really left them since Berkeley. Trying to turn the tables on his correlationist opponent Harman must cover up the absurdity in his own alternative, the problem of our supposed essential “inability to “know” the tree in the full sense”, this “inability” which is to be turned into a virtue rather than what it actually is, a party invitation to the sceptic. But Harman’s problem will be this, and it is no mere word-play: how does he know that he does not and can never know the tree in the full sense? How can he pre-empt the attempt at knowing, the labour of the concept? Has he looked at this tree from all angles (Husserl)? Has he asked others how they perceive the tree, consulted all possible conversational partners and their claims (Habermas), whether scientific, artistic, etc. etc. (Gadamer)? What exactly is he comparing his supposed structural privation of knowledge to? What standard is it with respect to which, all possible claims having been discussed, evaluated and explored, knowledge must forever fall short? It can be only this – some noumenal side to the tree (or the President) which, so the prejudice runs (for prejudice it is), can never be known, something which (now Kant morphs into Heidegger) ‘withdraws’ by its very nature, a withdrawal the philosopher asserts, posits, “alludes to”. What exactly is he comparing his lack of knowledge to? Frustratingly for the realist, it can be only this: a full match between thought and a reality in the last instance independent of it – correspondence. Oh, ghosts of philosophies past that will not be exorcised!