There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive thei…
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There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive thei…
War
George Oppen to his sister, in 1965:
"I mean of course that 99 per cent of people should agree with me, and then they should act in the most rapid possible way to stop all action in Vietnam, pending public discusion. Whereas, on the contrary, they are going to get used to this war. The power of the fail accompli. And it is indeed - and horrifyingly - impossible to attempt a stand of moral indignation, or to talk of attrocity. I am not actually able to say I am opposed to dropping burning gasoline on people from helicopters. It is by now a method of war, and will be used until something more terrifying is developed."
Rosa Luxemburg in 1916, quoting a flyer in her own pamphlet:
"Thus the struggle against militarism daily becomes more and more clearly a decisive struggle between capital and labor. War, high prices and capitalism - peace, happiness for all. Socialism! Yours is the choice. History is hastening onward toward a decision. The proletariat must work unceasingly at its world mission, must strengthen the power of its organization and the clearness of its understanding. Then, come what will, whether it will succeed, by its power, in saving humanity from the horrible cruelties of the world-war, or whether capitalism shall sink back into history, as it was born, in blood and violence, the historic moment will find the working-class prepared, and preparedness is everything."
Angela Davis to George Jackson in 1971:
"My love for you reinforces my fighting instinct, and makes me want to go to war."
The Border in the Classroom
I teach on the BA Arts and Humanities course at Birkbeck College, University of London. In the week before the beginning of the new term an email to all teaching staff arrived from management. It informed us that each classroom had now been equipped with a new electronic register that we were expected to use. On attending our lectures and seminars, students are now expected to tap in with their university ID cards. Although it was not mentioned explicitly in the communications from management, the agenda for the introduction of these machines relates to the British government’s persistent attacks on international students, with the state’s unsubstantiated claims that student visas (or Tier IV visas as they are known in the UK) are being used for some unexplained nefarious purposes. All of this comes amid an enormous refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, which has been met with a heightening of popular anti-immigrant feelings, new and old strains of nationalism, and the sharpening of racist sentiments in the press. Meanwhile over the summer the Government quietly launched a new set of attacks on the conditions of international students, drawing on the strength of racism born of the refugee crisis. This year international students and their dependants (including spouses) have to deal with new limitations on their rights to work in the UK and to earn an income.
But the demonization of international students has been going on for quite some time now. Back in 2012 London Metropolitan University, one of London’s most working class and multicultural universities had its visa-granting rights revoked for 8 months. This attack inaugurated a government strategy of trying to force universities to undertake the work of the UK Border Agency and the Home Office. International Students with low attendance records would be subject to the same sort of force that UKBA and the state use against many other migrants: indefinite detention and violent deportation, normally administered by callous private companies in the pay of the government. It is the government’s plan that those of us who work in universities, as administrators and as teachers, are to report on our students to the state in this context, and are to become de facto, if not wholly de jure, border guards; bringing the border into our classrooms. This is the great effort of the government’s higher education policy: that the universities should become biopolitical apparatuses; and that the measures of control enforced by them should be diffused through the workforce. This is the case also with regard to the new highly contentious Prevent legislation that aims to undermine extremism in universities.[1]
For the most part there has been little resistance to these measures. But there have been small acts here and there. The introduction of machines like electronic registers are a means to undermine any resistance that we, as workers in the university, might take against this government crusade. Meanwhile the implementation of these policies is spearheaded by those who want to climb into management positions. Political resignation and utter contempt for your students is being made to pay.
As a teacher sometimes you hear from a student that they can’t make it to your class. Often this will be precisely because of the conditions that the government imposes on international students: that they have had some horrible dealing with UKBA, or that they are having to do some off-the-books work at the same time as your class, or they are having childcare issues, or the plethora of other problems – not least the sorts of mental health issues that are instigated by the permanent threat of detention, destitution, and deportation. It is the very least that we can do, in the context of the enormous ongoing humanitarian crisis and the violent racism of the state and the press which is now being extended to students, to tell our students that we will happily mark them as present regardless, and that we will resist government interference. This is a considerably lesser deed than those brave people who help migrants across borders, who offer up rooms for people to stay in, who try to stop violent deportations, or who physically protect migrants from the nightly violence of the gendarmerie in Calais.
But all of this has some pedagogic consequences too – and I include these last because they are strangely the least of my concern. In the humanities we are forever dealing with the question of borders. Since Kant’s great Critiques, written at the time of the French Revolution, the history of critical inquiry has taken up the language of the border, its policing,[2] and its transgression.[3] In our everyday work we deal with the expression of enormous suffering, of the cultural products and detritus of oppression, slavery, genocide, the fallouts of political and legal borders. We deal with texts that are the products of sexism and racism, and we try to teach our students about texts, theories, practices, and historical events that aim at the destruction of oppression. As one can imagine things are often sensitive in our classes, and at the same time things can be brutal. Sometimes my students must express their sheer hatred for things that have happened to them, things that continue to happen to them, they must talk about utter brutality to respond sensitively to the most difficult texts, or must take up the most brutal texts to talk sensitively about their life or our situation. Our students have to get to know themselves, and to get to know what they can’t know about themselves to understand their own reading and thinking, to reflect. All of this means that the work of running seminars in the humanities has a lot to do with the management of violence. Sometimes we need to face it head on; we need to know and to talk about things that are unbearable. But sometimes we also need to mitigate against it. Sometimes the reading of a text, never mind the teaching of it, can be made impossible by an immediate threat, like that of deportation. It is our training as scholars in the humanities to try to take control of that as best we can, or to talk our students through the fact that there is violence we cannot quieten, and suffering that cannot be undone. That is the work of teaching. And so the establishment of teachers as border police has a direct effect on how we can teach our students to read, and how we can read together with our students, how we can introduce them to the criticism of culture, and most importantly it limits what they can critically say to us as teachers. None of the government’s policies have been tested in this way. There has been absolutely no conversation about what they mean for teaching and learning.
I will not be using the electronic register in my classroom. I have heard that similar machines are being introduced in other universities, and I encourage others to resist this too. I imagine that I will have a conversation about this with my students in my seminar, which maybe will even lead to some learning. The response to this might mean that the UKBA will one day want to enter our universities themselves. But the best way to resist this is to build resistance now against these seemingly minor developments.
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[1] Incidentally the government’s definition of extremism is a misnomer: there is nothing more extreme than the capitalist world within which we live, that offers only the options of the working away of life into death under the most brutal technologies for the profit of another private individual or corporation, utter destitution or the perennial terror of the threat of it, slavery, and the sort of desperation that leaves thousands dead in the Mediterranean. The “extremism” that the government fears is at its worst only these conditions administered by someone else, and at its best something considerably more moderate with regard to its concern for human life and justice.
[2] Kant writes, “So far, then, as this criticism is occupied in confining speculative reason within its proper bounds, it is only negative; but, inasmuch as it thereby, at the same time, removes an obstacle which impedes and even threatens to destroy the use of practical reason, it possesses a positive and very important value. In order to admit this, we have only to be convinced that there is an absolutely necessary use of pure reason—the moral use—in which it inevitably transcends the limits of sensibility, without the aid of speculation, requiring only to be insured against the effects of a speculation which would involve it in contradiction with itself. To deny the positive advantage of the service which this criticism renders us would be as absurd as to maintain that the system of police is productive of no positive benefit, since its main business is to prevent the violence which citizen has to apprehend from citizen, that so each may pursue his vocation in peace and security.”
[3] As Hegel responds to Kant, “It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as ‘Cognition can go no further’; ‘Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’ But ‘natural’ is the wrong word here. The things of nature are limited and are natural things only to such extent as they are not aware of their universal limit, or to such extent as their mode or quality is a limit from our point of view, and not from their own. No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it.”
from ‘Three Poems after Katerina Gogou’ (by Sean Bonney)
I don’t really think of my friends as blackbirds screeching from the rooftops of Exarchia, of whatever’s left of Hackney, how could I, a target, with a tourist map in my hand and in my mouth, of the places where cocaine leaks into Marx, and plague works inside Bakunin. The streets are so narrow here, its almost like we’re all asleep in the same bed, trackmarks, bedbugs, love and I love my friends. I think of them as wires, strung from the rooftops of Exarchia, of Hackney, of Kobanî and Oakland, of where we awaken together, screeching choirs of wires, dressed in black because history made our red so foul, talking only in code because plain speech is fit only for asslicking. I haven't taken anything for five days. The kids round here don’t give a shit, but it freaks out the cops like hell yes I think of my friends as blackbirds, as screeches, as wires stretched from city to city, as tightening songs and your throats, you capitalist pigs, your pale throats.
Dalle 'Tre poesie dopo Katerina Gogou' di Sean Bonney
Non penso vermamente ai miei amici come se fossero i merli neri che stridano dai tetti di Exarchia, di ciò che resta di Hackney – come potrei, io, un bersaglio con una mappa turistica nella mia mano nella mia bocca – dei posti in cui la cocaina filtra dentro Marx, e in cui la peste lavora dentro Bakunin. Le strade qui sono così stretta, è quasi come tutti noi dormiamo nello stesso letto, brani, cimici, amore ed amo miei amici. Penso a loro come se fossero i cavi dai tetti di Exarchia, di Hackney, di Kobanî e Oakland, dei posti laddove ci risvegliamo insieme, i cori stridanti dei cavi, vestiti di nero perché la storia fu nostra rosso cosi turpe, parlanti a codice perché un discorso semplice è adatto solo per i leccaculi. Ho presa nulla per cinque giorni. I ragazzi da queste parti non si frega niente, ma quello manda i polizzoti fuori all'inferno si penso ai miei amici come se fossero i merli neri, i stridi i cavi allungati da città a città, canzioni stringenti e le vostre gole, suini capitalisti, le vostre gole pallide.
We have no virtue but this
Non abbiamo che questa virtù: cominciare ogni giorno la vita - davanti alla terra, sotto un cielo che tace - attendendo un risveglio. We have no virtue but this: to begin our life each day - in front of the earth and under a sky which remains silent - awaiting a reawakening. - Cesare Pavese, from Fine della fantasia, 1933.
Adorno, 'Great and Small' (1945)
Minima Moralia is not a set of aphorisms, but has a certain unity, each block of text composed within itself, but relating (often in opposition) to, and developing on, those which come before and after it. So it is worth mentioning at least that this block comes after one on the malicious character of intellectuals ('Diagnosis'), and before a critique of positivism (’Keeping one's distance').
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Great and small. – One of the disastrous transferences from the field of economic planning to that of theory, which is no longer really distinguished from the ground-plan of the whole, is the belief that intellectual work can be administered according to the criterion of whether an occupation is necessary and reasonable. Priorities of urgency are established. But to deprive thought of the moment of spontaneity is to annul precisely its necessity. It is reduced to replaceable, exchangeable dispositions. As in war economies orders of precedence are decided for the distribution of raw materials, for the production of this or that type of weapon, a hierarchy of importance is creeping into theory-formation which gives preference to either particularly topical or particularly relevant themes, and discriminates against, or indulgently tolerates, anything non-essential, letting it pass as ornamentation of the basic facts, finesse. The concept of relevance is determined by organizational considerations, that of topicality measured by the most powerful objective tendency of the moment. This schematisation into important and subsidiary categories follows the scale of values of prevalent practice with regard to form, even if contradicting it in content. In the origins of progressive philosophy, in Bacon and Descartes, the cult of the important is already contained. Yet in the end this cult shows an unfree, regressive quality. Importance is represented by the dog out on a walk: at some unexplained spot he stands and sniffs, tense, unyielding, earnestly displeased – and then relieves himself, scrapes the ground with his feet and trots on his way in unconcern. In primitive times life and death may have depended on such things; after thousands of years of domestication they have become an unreal ritual. Who can help being reminded of them when observing a serious committee weighing the urgency of problems before turning over the carefully defined and timetabled tasks to the attentions of their colleagues? There is something of this anachronistic doggedness in all importance, and to use it as a criterion of thought is to impose on thought a spellbound fixity, and a loss of self-reflection. The great themes are nothing other than primeval rumblings which cause the animal to pause and try to bring them forth once again. This does not mean that the hierarchy of importance should be ignored. Just as its narrowmindedness reflects that of the system, so it is saturated with all the latter's force and stringency. Thought ought not, however, repeat this hierarchy, but by completing, end it. The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it. The large themes will then also make their appearance, though hardly in the traditional 'thematic' sense, but refractedly and eccentrically. Philosophy retained the barbarism of immediate quantity as a legacy from its earlier alliance with administrators and mathematicians: whatever does not bear the stamp of the inflated, world-historical bustle is handed over to the procedures of the positive sciences. In this, philosophy behaves like bad painting, which imagines that the dignity of a work and the fame it earns depends on the gravity of the subject matter; a picture of the Battle of Leipzig is worth more than a chair in oblique perspective. The distinction between the conceptual and the artistic media makes no difference to this bad naivety. If the process of abstraction marks all its thinking with the illusion of greatness, it also harbours, in its distance from the object of action, in its reflection and transparency, the antidote: the self-criticism of reason is its truest morality. The opposite, in the most recent phase of self-governing thought, is nothing other than the abolition of the subject. The gesture of theoretical work, passing judgement on themes according to their importance, neglects the theoretical worker. The development of an ever-diminishing number of technical faculties is supposed to equip him adequately to deal with every specified task. Thinking subjectivity, however, is precisely what cannot be fitted into a set of tasks imposed heteronomously from above:it is adequate to them only in the sense that it is no part of them, so that its existence is a per-condition of any objectively binding truth. The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity.
From Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, Frankfurt 1951 (from the translation by E. F. N. Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 124-126, with some tiny alterations.)
Hannah P on all of the above, and the Courtauld family (the Institute, below).
Siegfried Kracauer ‘Looking out of the window’ (1931)
One can distinguish between two kinds of cityscape: first, those that are knowingly formed, and then those others which reveal themselves unintentionally. Those first ones spring from artistic will, realized in squares, vistas, groups of buildings and perspectival effects which Baedecker usually marks with an asterisk. The latter emerge, on the other hand, without prior planning. These are not composition which, like Parisier Platz or the Concorde, owed their existence to a uniform built meaning, but are the creations of accidents, which cannot be drawn into calculation. Wherever stonework and roadways find themselves together, the elements of which proceed out of wholly different directions of interest, such a cityscape is brought into being which has never itself been the object of any interest. It is as unformed as nature, and therefore resembles a landscape, in that it maintains itself unconsciously. Uncaring for its expression, it dawns over time.
In front of my window, the city compresses itself into a picture, as delightful as a natural display. But before I turn towards it, I must think about the position in which I stand, from which the picture opens up. It finds itself high up above the irregular layout of a square, which possesses excellent capacities. It can make itself invisible; it wears a magic hood. It is in the middle of a residential quarter, a meeting point for several streets; the small square withdraws itself so much from public attention that almost no one knows its name. Perhaps this fairytale skill has its basis in the fact that the square serves above all the traffic passing through it. Thousands cross it every day, whether by bus or tram, but it is just because they cross it each time without any fuss, that they fail to pay it any attention. It revels in this unparalleled happiness, allowed to live virtually incognito amidst the hubbub, and although it opens itself up outwards on all sides, it is nevertheless as if it is surrounded by a thick fog.
The cityscape itself, which begins with this small square, is a space of extraordinary vastness, filled with a metallic field of iron. It reverberates with iron railway tracks. They come from the direction of Charlottenburg station, from behind the large surviving wall of a tenement block, running bundled up next to each other and finally disappearing behind the common houses. A swarm of glistening parallel lines lie far enough below the window that its entire extension can be surveyed. With all its signal masts and sheds, the surrounding area gives the impression of a mechanical model which a small boy, who kneels somewhere unseen, uses for experiments.
In his game he allows the delightfully coloured trains to furiously and quickly slide in and out, chases each locomotive here and there, and sends heavy D-trains to famous cities like Warsaw and Paris, which have been constructed just around the next corner. The lights flash, the signals go, changing up and down, and the clouds of smoke linger behind. Happily, the boy tends to his work, the accomplishment of which is elevated through a noisy subway. It must have been difficult to pull the straight cords out from under the railway lines. But the effort was worthwhile, as innumerable carriages, which seemed to have doubled the velocity, unthinkingly run through the tunnel, The trains rolling by overhead and the floor beneath overrun with crossing lines of carriages: this trickle is not exposed even for a moment, and never disturbs the peace of the iron flats. Underground it will border a narrow, light row of houses, which stop it like nothing else, except a forest enclosing a meadow. One can barely distinguish window and balcony, so transcendent are the lines. The broadcasting tower stands over oneself, a single vertical line, which is drawn through a piece of heaven with a precision pencil.
In evenings, the whole cityscape is illuminated. Gone are the tracks, the masts, the houses - one single field of light shines in the darkness, made one from each part, which gives comfort to a traveller at night, for it promises him an early arrival. The lights are spread out over the whole space; they abide in stillness or stir themselves as on strings, and ahead, within reach, glows a blinding orange, with whose help a car warehouse widely disperses its own singular force. From out of the turmoil, which has no end, arises a sparkling tree: the broadcasting tower, which sends wrapping around itself, a flashing light which feels the night, circulating; and if the storm howls, the light falls onto high oceans, where the waves wash over the fields of railway tracks.
This landscape is the candid Berlin. Without concept it gives voice itself to that which has grown from within it: its contradictions, its harshness, its sincerity, its juxtaposition, its sheen. The knowledge of cities is tied up with the interpretation of the above mentioned dreamlike images.
from Strassen in Berlin und anderswo, Frankfurt 1964, pp. 51-53.
Embroidered bird (parrot) taken from a late 17th–early 18th century English bed curtain (wool yarns embroidered on cotton and linen twill).
Image and text courtesy MFA Boston
“And the secrets of the Creation have been locked up under the tradi∣tional, Parrat-like speaking, from the Universities, and Colledges for Scholars.”[Winstanley, 1649.]
Gothic Bloch
“The basic utopian goals of the respective so-called artistic aspiration in so-called styles, these ‘excesses’ over and above ideology, do not always perish with their society. Egyptian architecture is the aspiration to become like stone, with the crystal of death as intended perfection; Gothic architecture is the aspiration to become like the vine of Christ, with the tree of life as intended perfection.” (Principle of Hope, 1950s).
Image: Bewcastle Cross, Cumbria, 8th c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfzmDp-lQq8
James Baldwin, ‘The sunlit prison of the American dream’ (1949)
“Unless one's ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim of the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream [...]
“Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yes it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into the void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void – ourselves – it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us - “from the evil that is in the world.” With the same motion, at the same time, it this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape [...]
“It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to speak of a “new” society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with the Herrenvolk makes a truly “new” society impossible to conceive. What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places. But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community [...]
“Our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult – that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”
A few extracts from James Baldwin's essay Everybody's Favorite Protest Novel, 1949, his critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Below: Baldwin in 1969, photographed by his friend Sedat Pakay
In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Trauerspiel.
St Martin’s Cathedral, Ypres.
The best of you are those whose shoulders are soft in prayer.
Hadith collection of Abu Dawud (9th c.), n. 672.
I don’t know Arabic, but this late 12th c. manuscript probably contains the above line, as far as I can figure out. Princeton, MS Garrett 4999Y.
"'The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest', the doctor continued. 'It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way of laying hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.'"
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, 1936.
The Future City, 1959.
Grace Halsell, 1969. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/02/arts/grace-halsell-77-journalist-who-sought-truth-in-disguise.html