Spurious

At a certain point - a point that is usually only discernible retrospectively - cultures shunt off into the sidings, cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. Theydon't die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving, like Baudrillard's deceased cyclist, only by the weight of inertia. Cultures have vibrancy, piquancy only for a while. Lyric poetry, the novel, opera, jazz had their time; there is no question of these cultures dying, they survive, but with their will-to-power diminished, their capacity to define a time lost. No longer historic or existential, they become historical and aesthetic - lifestyle options not ways of life.

Mark Fisher, Is Pop Undead, K-Punk

New long written interview with me by Evan Lavender-Smith at HTML Giant. 

Video of my lecture, 'Nietzsche, Music and the Burbs' as part of the BASF Webinar Lecture Series on Anglo-German Matters, Queen Mary’s. Chaired by Professor Rüdiger Görner.

Guest post by Sinead Murphy:

Don’t Be Fooled By The ‘Easing’ Of Restrictions 

The UK government’s grip on our physical lives is now, at last, to be ‘eased,’ at least in the sporting arena. It is announced that fans will be allowed back into stadiums, though in limited numbers – no more than four thousand at any event.  

Even those of us sceptical of Covid measures might be tempted to welcome this return, as a first loosening of the government’s stranglehold on our bodies. But we should not be fooled. ‘Easing’ is an old trick, and not at all what it seems.  

Anyone raised in the Catholic tradition will know this trick very well. It consists in allowing that which is to be curtailed to run freer, so that it may be more elaborately curtailed than it could possibly be if it were simply, straightforwardly, suppressed.  

When I was growing up, attending daily Mass and a Sisters of Mercy convent school, the flesh – as it is tantalizingly coded by men and women of the cloth – was the site of all evil; sin was of the flesh. So the flesh was hidden – right? Silenced? Nowhere to be seen or heard? Wrong. Nothing was spoken of more frequently. Nothing was dressed up more showily. Nothing was brought through such an elaborate round of beautiful contortions and cantations, like a slow-motion routine on Strictly.  

If something is suppressed, then you cannot constantly and with great inventiveness and to great effect suppress it.  

Mrs. Doyle in Father Ted captures this trick to perfection, when she condemns the racy writings of a novelist visiting Craggy Island, not by shushing all talk of them but by detailing in loud and lewd language their scandalous and contemptibly fleshy contents, luxuriating in the sins that she rejects. Nothing is so effective in the condemnation of the flesh as the constant and eloquent articulation of it as that which is reviled.  

This is suppression, not by silence but by talk, not by invisibility but by high visibility. You show in order to conceal the more elaborately. You say in order to hush the more successfully.  

The Victorians too performed this trick, carefully and intricately dressing even the legs of the piano so that they were, not hidden but hidden in plain sight, exposed as the thing that was to be concealed. Women, most guilty of the flesh, were attired in the infamous ‘crinoline,’ which caged their buttocks by way of emphasizing them and emphasized them by way of caging them. At the height of its trickery, the Victorian contour was dominated by the bustle, a bone-and-horse-hair exaggeration of women’s posterior that makes Kim Kardashian’s silhouette seem streamline: all by way of heightening condemnation of the flesh, provoking and foregrounding those urges most subject to censure. 

And now this old trick is to be performed on us; the sins of our flesh are to be multiplied and detailed and paraded for all to see, all the better to be pilloried. When the few thousand fans return to the stadiums, it will not be an easing of restrictions on physical life, but a new level of elaboration of those restrictions. The fans will be admitted on condition that they maintain a studied distance from one another. That they turn their masked faces away, in particular from those climbing the stairs and therefore exhaling more forcibly. That they do not stand. Or shout. Or sing. The whole event will be a deliberately choreographed denouncement of their physical life, much more intense than if they had simply remained at home. Will they also take the knee with the players and the officials, like those congregations in the churches of my youth? 

The trick will work too on those of us who remain at home. We have spent the last eight months with no crowd to hear or see, only a fake crowd, piped on the loudspeaker and printed on the banners. Now there will be a real crowd to hear and see, but it will be a silenced crowd, a submissive crowd. And we will partake in its mortification by being cast as its witness.  

Sins of the flesh: no longer staying home out of hearing and out of sight but ritually enacted before our eyes and ears. Not an easing of the attack on our physical lives, but a new and potent intensification of it.   

Here's a 4 hour class I taught for the European Graduate School on Creative Writing. It's called, 'Without Authority: the Solitude of Writing'. I begin by discussing arguments from Josipovici's On Trust, before moving on to a short 'chronicle' by Lispector, and then exploring Blanchot's 'primal scene', with reference to psychoanalysis. I'll be back at the European Graduate School in the summer.

Barbara Rose: In all your imagery, there is no death. ... It’s interesting that in all your years of producing new directions in your art, you have never gotten into death imagery. Is that something you ever think about?

Robert Rauschenberg: Not often. I have always said that life has nothing to do with death. They’re two separate things, and that’s the way it ought to be. If that’s innocent, so be it. Innocence is not like virginity. Virginity you can only have once. Innocence you have to nourish every day.

Rauschenberg, interviewed (cited here)

Writing for a newspaper is not so demanding. It is light. It must be light, even superficial. Those who read newspapers have neither the will not time to read in depth.

But to write something intended for a book often demands more strength than one seems to possess.

Especially if it means devising one’s own writing habits, as in my case. When I consciously decided in my early teens that I wanted to become a writer, I immediately found myself in a void. And there was no one to help or advise me.

I had to emerge from that void, to try and understand myself, and to forge, as it were, my own truth. I made a start, but not even at the beginning. The sheets of paper began piling up – nothing I wrote seemed to make sense, my frustration as I struggled to write something worthwhile became one more obstacle in the path of success. What a pity I destroyed the interminable narrative I then started writing under the influence of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I tore it up, contemptuous of my almost superhuman efforts to master the craft of writing and come to terms with myself. And no one knew my secret. I did not tell a soul. I lived through that sorrow alone. One thing, however, did occur to me. It was important to carry on writing without waiting for the right moment, because the right moment never comes. Writing has never been easy for me. I knew from the outset this was my vocation. Having a vocation is not the same as having talent. One can have a vocation and no talent – in other words, feel compelled to write without knowing where to start.

Clarice Lispector, a 'chronicle' for the Jornal do Brasil, 2nd May 1970

Note: Benjamin Moser partially translate the chronicle in his biography of Lispector as follows:

When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write - I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. […] Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go. 

Who in that age [the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - LI] could be strong enough to refrain from murder? Who didn’t know that the worst was inevitable? Here and there someone whose glance had during the day met the savoring glance of his murderer, would be overwhelmed by a strange foreboding. . . . The eyes of the dogs, as they looked up at him, were filled with doubt, and they grew less and less sure of his commands. From the motto that had served him all his life, a secondary meaning quietly emerged. Many long-established customs appeared antiquated, but there didn’t seem to be any substitutes to take their place. . . . And then, before the late supper, this pensiveness over the hands in the silver washbasin. Your own hands. Could any coherence be brought into what they did? any order or continuity in their grasping and releasing? No. All men attempted both the thing and its opposite. All men canceled themselves out; there was no such thing as action.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I died … There had been rehearsals … When the time came I knew all about the lung heavy with water that the heart could not negotiate, so that not enough blood circulated in the alveoli, and there was oxygen starvation as well as drowning … Let me see. What was happening when I died? My prayer had been answered. I was alive when I died. That was all I had asked for and I had got it.

Pencil notes by Donald Winnicot on the inner- flap of a notebook, discovered by his wife, Clare, on the day of his death, in 1971 (cited)

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke’s resistance to the forces of modernization is marshaled not as resistance against loss but rather as mournful resistance against the disappearance of the space and symbolic resources in which loss could still be experienced and worked through. The Duino Elegies are, in a sense, second-order elegies: elegies for the passing of the space in which elegy is still possible.

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life