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Thursday 25 February 2010

A question suggests itself: Derrida, Shields and Capitalist Realism

A question suggests itself -- and I'm certainly not the first to ask it: why in a book ostensibly about Karl Marx does Jacques Derrida divert himself, and us, at such considerable length, considering 'Hamlet'? If we choose not to accuse Derrida of bad faith or wilful obscurantism -- which, anyway, would only show our own bad faith, or an obscure lack of understanding concerning his project -- then we must take him absolutely at his word. We read Spectres of Marx and note that 'Hamlet' allows Derrida to think, and to think of Marx. 'Hamlet' supplies him with the metaphors that allow him to unpack Marx's own metaphors and allow us to see how these metaphors structure Marx, structure 'Hamlet' and could deconstruct (unstructure) our idea both of Marxism and the destructive reality of our capitalist present.

But is something more happening here? Should we ask: can the political only be thought about via/with fictional narrative and the metaphors it lends? Further, can we only think progressively about our collective present and other possible futures if the metaphors we use are deeply embedded in our collective life? Jacques Ranciere, in The Aesthetic Unconscious, problematises our understanding of Freud's use of the Oedipus myth. Did Freud use the Oedipus myth as a metaphor for the unconscious, or was the unconscious already shaped by Oedipus's story? Did Freud use the story or did the story use Freud? Bluntly, I don't think we can think without literature. I don't think we do think without literature. Further, I don't think we can possibly think ourselves out of our current impasse, and the impasse of our thinking, without it.

One of the very many obtuse things about David Shields' obtuse "manifesto" Reality Hunger -- an obtuse book which contains many wonderful quotes about literature and life and which could have been simply a very fine commonplace book -- is its obtuse and strident assertion that the line between the real and the fictive was in any way ever absolute and that the commingling of these two supposedly separate realms will save literature from redundancy.

Mark Fisher describes the foreclosing of (political) thought that could envision different (social) futures as Capitalist Realism. His short book is highly recommended: not least to someone like Shields who seems to think that reality is a given rather than a perpetually socially constructed fiction which we half-wittingly recreate each and every day of our lives.

If the recent banking crisis showed us anything it was that the make-believe is at the heart of what we tell ourselves is real -- and that fiction becomes fact when we have faith enough, or fear, in the (empty) lies that keep us in our places. Those who rule our world kill to maintain the presence of this absence every single day. Every day thousands starve or go cold, kids are bombarded in Iraq whilst neoliberal bloggers cheer, countless bore themselves stupid in offices -- all so that bankers in Saville Row suits are maintained and preserved, and maintain the fiction that thinking beyond a system predicated on their maintainance and preservation is an impossibility.

What is deconstruction? Or, perhaps, that better question from earlier: what was Derrida saying it was when he wrote a book about Marx that was actually much about 'Hamlet'? He was, surely, demonstrating -- more than that, he instantiated it in the very weft and warp of his argument -- that the political is structured by the fictive; is, indeed, always fictive, and needs to be read and understood like this to be undermined and disbelieved.

Things are ever not right here in the 'state of Denmark'. The palace stinks of corruption. The need for change haunts Elsinore; a ghost harrows the corridors and halls. And a spectre is haunting Europe, too: it is called fiction. It is reality's own bad faith. Pace Shields, there is no need to mash-up the fictive and the real to reinvigorate narrative, but there is certainly a need to read the real as always already fictional and thus detonate reality's murderous presumptions.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, philosophy, politics, rsb, william shakespeare

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Tuesday 23 February 2010

Self on Sebald (and Mitchelmore on Self and Bernhard)

The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bare witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bare witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention (more...)

Excellent post over on This Space which ranges from Amis through to Bernhard and W.G. Sebald...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, w g sebald

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Monday 22 February 2010

38 Plays: 38 Days

I'm not a great one for reading challenges (it is, as I've written before, sometimes quite enough of a challenge simply to read anything at all), but as 2010 has seemingly become my "Year of Shakespeare" I'm thinking of joining the folk over at 38 Plays: 38 Days in their effort at reading each of Shakespeare's 38 plays in as many days...

Yes, it is a somewhat brutal rush through a corpus that should be lovingly savoured but, at the same time, I'm rather excited by the idea that by early April I could have read the whole lot and then I might know which ones I need to return to (to do the loving savouring bit) sooner rather than later.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal, william shakespeare

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Monday 22 February 2010

Anthony Cummins takes Martin Amis to task

Much in the news of late (because of the publication of his new novel The Pregnant Widow), Martin Amis has regularly used the media opportunities he's been given to spout any amount of risible bunk. Here on ReadySteadyBook, Anthony Cummins takes Amis to task for his comments about J.M. Coetzee:

What’s most revealing about Prospect’s recent interview with Martin Amis isn’t his opinion of JM Coetzee – “he’s got no talent” – but the evidence he cites to support it. (It’s hardly a surprise, after all, that the cool wit of a writer whose PhD thesis looks at the manuscript revisions to Samuel Beckett’s Watt should hold no appeal for a man whose aversion to Beckett, vented after “a couple of hundred glasses of wine”, once drove Salman Rushdie to the brink of violence.) Put to one side what Amis says about the Nobel laureate being no fun, since that’s a matter of taste, and in any case isn’t exactly an original point to make about an author whose best-known book pivots on a gang rape. Of greater interest – because it suggests how blithely Amis can pass off wilful ignorance as critical rigour – is the moment where he tries to convince his interviewer, Tom Chatfield, that cliché is the enemy of literary value (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, rsb

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Friday 19 February 2010

Metro on Shields' "Reality Hunger"

I don't normally think of the London freesheet Metro as the place to go to read a decent book review, however I think Ben Felsenburg's dismissal of David Shields Reality Hunger is pretty spot-on here:

Whatever criticisms David Shields will attract for Reality Hunger – and he can expect plenty for a book as divisive as Marmite – no one’s going to accuse him of modesty.

This collection of 617 pensées is subtitled A Manifesto and sets out its stall in grandiose style: ‘Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.’

For some that line will be playfully provocative, for others ridiculous and infuriating; the same goes for all that follows.

Shields draws upon Ezra Pound, Eminem, Proust and Moulin Rouge as if they’re all knocking around one pick’n’mix bag. Wave after wave of quotes and Shields’s wearying pontification work that old saw about the way fiction and non-fiction are blurring into one.

Telly viewers know the concept – it’s called Big Brother. One surprise, though: Reality Hunger might be mistaken for the notebook of a naive undergraduate after a first encounter with Postmodernism 101. Shields is a middle-aged professor.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, literary criticism

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Thursday 18 February 2010

Colin Ward R.I.P.

It has just come to my attention (first via Booksurfer) that the anarchist writer Colin Ward has died. Sad, sad news:

Colin's contribution to anarchism has been invaluable - he founded, edited and often wrote Anarchy magazine for over ten years. In Anarchy, and a whole series of books and hundreds of articles he wrote about the practical application of anarchist ideas to social organisation. and outlined anarchism as a sociological theory. He is probably best known for Anarchy in Action, but every book he wrote provided new insights into the revolutionary potential of the way ordinary people organise and live their lives in the face of enormous odds (more...)

This via the Five Leaves Blog:

The anarchist writer Colin Ward, who died on the night of 11th February, was indirectly responsible for the existence of Five Leaves. We’d met years before, and like several people I later met, I’d been vaguely collecting Colin’s Anarchy (first series), still the best anarchist magazine produced in this country. A small group of us in Nottingham, publishing as Old Hammond Press, brought out a couple of pamphlets by Colin, one on housing, one on William Morris’s ideas of work. But in 1994 I got so fed up waiting for Faber to bring out the paperback of The Allotment: its landscape and culture that I offered to buy the rights. Colin said that as long as his co-writer, David Crouch, was in agreement he’d be pleased if Faber were to hand them over, and if it helped, the co-authors would do without royalties as they were simply pleased to have the book available in paperback.

Well, thousands of copies later Colin never regretted his generosity, and as well being the first book published by Five Leaves (though initially, for the sake of any bibliographers reading, Mushroom Bookshop), for years The Allotment kept the press afloat. We went on to publish Colin’s Arcadia for All (co-written with Dennis Hardy), Talking Anarchy (with David Goodway) and Cotters and Squatters. Colin also wrote the introduction to our edition of The London Years by Rudolf Rocker, who of course he knew. Rocker in turn knew Peter Kropotkin, whose Mutual Aid had such an influence on Colin as a political thinker (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics

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Thursday 18 February 2010

Minghella's stage adaptation of Josipovici's "Mobius the Stripper"

Via the BBC:

It is a year since the death of Anthony Minghella [well, he died in March 2008, so this has been on the BBC site for a wee while] had shocked and saddened those close to him as well as his fans.

Before his celebrated career in film winning awards for The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, the producer and director studied at the University of Hull and then became a lecturer at its drama department.

It was here that he produced his first piece of work, a musical stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper, which had broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside in 1976 (more...)

Happily, the BBC provide some audio extracts: Extract 1 from Mobius the Stripper; Extract 2 from Mobius the Stripper.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, theatre

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Wednesday 17 February 2010

Levinas's "Notebooks in Captivity"

The Forward has a good article -- and some very interesting book news -- on Emmanuel Levinas:

Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has grown in fame and stature since his death in 1995. Acclaimed for his philosophy of the “other,” which recognizes morality — and behavior toward others — as the basis for any philosophical thought, Levinas offers a decisive break with his onetime teacher Martin Heidegger’s comparatively individualist obsession with “being.”

In the murderous schoolyard of 20th-century politics, Levinas’s focus on playing well with others seems all the more crucial in retrospect. Moreover, as opposed to Heidegger’s notorious wartime embrace of Nazism, Levinas wrote of Judaism, and the Talmud in particular, as central subjects in the main stream of world philosophy.

This spring, a flood of admiring new books on Levinas will appear: Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption from Columbia University Press; Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies from SUNY Press; Levinasian Meditations from Duquesne University Press; and A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism from Stanford University Press. Yet none is as startlingly, indeed stunningly, revelatory as a new book from Grasset-IMEC Publishers in France containing Levinas’s previously unpublished Notebooks in Captivity (Carnets de captivité) the first volume of a planned series of his complete writings (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy

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Tuesday 16 February 2010

k-punk on Capitalist Realism and Royal Mail

The k-punk blog (written by Mark Fisher, author of the pithy and excellent polemic Capitalist Realism) has an interesting post on Modernisation, not neoliberalisation:

An excellent post at Lenin's Tomb, on Channel 4's recent, dreadful commentary on the Royal Mail, and on the response of the pseudonymous postal worker Roy Mayall to the progamme. As Lenin points out, Mayall's book Dear Granny Smith is a wonderful read. It's a great companion piece to Capitalist Realism, in fact, and anyone who has enjoyed Capitalist Realism's account of the immiseration of public service labour will get a lot from Dear Granny Smith.

Actually, another dimension of capitalist realism came into focus after reading Roy Mayall's response to the Dispatches documentary, and his reply to the producer's defence of the documentary. This kind of "undercover filming"-style documentary is one version capitalist realism. It presents us with an apparently unmediated, ostensibly depoliticised "reality", our perception of which is in fact shaped by the (misleading) "context" provided by "experts" (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy, politics

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Friday 05 February 2010

Josipovici's 'Everything Passes'

In a fleeting fit of energy midway through last year, I proposed to some fellow bloggers that a symposium, hosted here at RSB, on Gabriel Josipovici's superb novella Everything Passes would be a jolly good thing. Well, as I've discussed (in my recent Hamlet and Lear pieces) it quickly became obvious to me that, last year, I didn't have the energy to organise anything. So, I owe a sincere apology to those friends who wrote some wonderful pieces (which will soon see the light of day here on the site -- hopefully, next week) expecting the symposium to go ahead.

Happily, several bloggers have posted the would-be symposium pieces on their own sites. Richard Crary, Dan Visel, Steve Mitchelmore and now Waggish have all written pieces that expand upon the review Paul Griffiths wrote for me a couple of years back.

Please do read these excellent contributions, and then I'll have a few more up for you here on RSB next week.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, gabriel josipovici

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Friday 05 February 2010

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint (more...)

More on this over at 3:AM too.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review, nouveau roman, tom mccarthy

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Thursday 04 February 2010

Notes on 'One Dimensional Woman'

Richard has been reading Nina Power's excellent and provocative (if far too short) essay One Dimensional Woman (a recent Book of the Week around here):

I like Power's focus on work and the changes to work. And I agree with much of what she says about today's "feel-good" feminism, and in particular with her point that we need to address how "'feminism' as a term has come to be used by those who would traditionally have been regarded as the enemies of feminism". For example, those who defended the invasion of Afghanistan in the interest of "women's rights", among other allegedly Western values; also, the spectacle of Sarah Palin is relevant here, embodying as she does many superficial characteristics of mainstream feminism, namely the obsession with placing women in positions of power (Power spends a section discussing Palin in detail. I admit I don't find her terribly interesting as a figure. I am more interested in the implications of the widespread misogynist attacks on her from liberals—the "enemy women" phenomenon.). With respect to the problem of powerful women, Power notes the Margaret Thatchers and Condoleeza Rices of the world and observes that, "It is not enough to have women in top positions of power, it depends upon what kind of women they are and what they're going to do when they get there." I would go further and say that even that's not enough. What matters is the nature of the power and the structure of the system. Any woman who manages to rise to a position of power in such a patriarchal system as we currently enjoy is bound to perpetuate that system (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, feminism

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Thursday 04 February 2010

Howard Zinn R.I.P.

The American historian, playwright and author of the bestseller A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn has died aged 87. Lots more info via howardzinn.org.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, politics

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Wednesday 03 February 2010

Mitchelmore on David Shields' 'Reality Hunger'

You'll be hearing a lot about David Shields' supposedly iconoclastic Reality Hunger over the next few weeks (it publishes at the end of the month). It will be touted as the "one book of literary criticism" (or some such) that you absolutely must read and is, in the words of its publisher, an "audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future." Actually, it's a dog's breakfast that deserves a really robust response -- happily, Mr Mitchelmore is already on the case:

Reading David Shields’ new book – but in what way is it a book? – is a frustrating experience. As demonstrated by the previous sentence, on almost every page of Reality Hunger the reader is interrupted by responses, doubts and questions. "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time" it begins, "is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Why, one asks, half-aware of the question because one is trying to get into the book, does he use "artistic movement" rather than "artist"? The answer is soon clear: he is seeking to galvanise a new artistic movement by expressing his own concern with the relation of art to reality. It has an impact on the form and content of the book, so much so that it fails to become a book yet, as a consequence, ends up enacting part of Shields’ manifesto. However, what remains betrays it (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Tuesday 02 February 2010

Stanley Middleton celebration

David Belbin (thanks Dave!) tells me:

On May 8th 2010, the University of Nottingham will host a celebration of the life of one of its most widely respected alumni, the novelist Stanley Middleton. The Booker Prize winning author died in July 2009, a week short of his 90th birthday. The celebration will include live music, readings from Stanley’s novels, poems and unpublished letters, together with short talks on his life and work (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, deaths, events

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Tuesday 02 February 2010

Gently Read Literature

For those needing some poetry reviews in their lives, the February 2009 issue (number 23, don't you know!) of Gently Read Literature is now up online.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Monday 01 February 2010

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

Genius -- as ever -- from The Onion:

In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, internet

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