the stark stillness she has sought refuses to resolve, to become fixed in reality
it has passed over her dreams like some restless spirit, or a thought about leaving the stove on
but no means no in any language, even with that beat she allows to pass before speaking
Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.
Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?
"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).
Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).
Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).
Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).
We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.
Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.
---
Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).
WIP--Found poem
Something might have happened in the snow
it might have come unglued, unhinged,
or slowly rusted underneath the snow.
There might have been an opening I missed
a pockmark, a drip mingling with the snow
in the winter sun there's so much to be missed
Somewhere in the settling of the spring
came rushing water, fog and perfect mist
drowning leaves of grass in what had been a spring
Gentle rivers raze the fields unhinged
washing over seeds and rust and a thousand sins of spring
But here we watch the foundations come unhinged
Something must have happened in the snow
After going through my notes from my two meetings with Sandy Goodhart, I have successfully composed the following sort-of final prelim outline.
Topic areas, the major things the prelim will cover:
The rhetorical tradition of discourse on social change, including: dystopia as topoi, places from which to speak, a recurring position for a recurring concern. Aristotle's Rhetoric,
Plato's Republic and the tradition of rhetoric and utopia/dystopia. Burke's
dystopian/utopian musings, his assumptions about agency and symoblic action
leading to (or away from?) utopia
The literary tradition of apocalyptic or prophetic fiction: Judeo-Christian apocalyptic fiction and its rhetorical structures. Dystopia as tragedy for the postmodern era (including a critique of humanism and human agency)
Current transformations of that tradition and its relationship to PoMo's critique of causality, order, and master narratives: Dystopian film's adaptations of more the written fictions as problematic, particularly in conjunction with agency (The Matrix,
Blade Runner, Terminator series)
Yeah, no prob. Cough.
Reading List
Aristotle's On Rhetoric
Plato's The Republic
More's Utopia
Bacon's New Atlantis
Derrida's "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"
Various essays by Eric Rabkin
Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Buber: Paths in Utopia; and Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour
Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
Lyotard's The PostModern Condition
Jameison's Archaeologies of the Future
Burke: "On HellHaven", Permanence and Change, Phil of Lit Form, the Motives
trilogy
Blanchot's "Literature and the right to death"
Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground
Rousseau's Walden Two
Theatre of the Abusrd: Works from Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian Fiction and The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature
The popular dystopias of the 30s and 40s: Brave New World, We, 1984, Fahrenheit
451
The next generation of dystopian fiction (50s-70s): Lord of the Flies,
Clockwork Orange, Player Piano, He,She,It, The Dispossessed
The "postmodern" dystopias: Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep (and many other Dick novels), Gibson's first trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Feed, maybe Discworld
The Films: Filmic versions of the traditional dystopias, Terminator series (and
tv show), Blade Runner, some of the really bad ones like "The Island", Minority
Report, I am Legend, Enemy of the State (oh, let's just list all the Will Smith
films, shall we?)....and any others?
Yep. I'm a dead woman.
Alors, c'est un fait qu'il faut que, quand je lire Foucault, je faites des faults. J'ai fini les essaies, j'ai pensee trop, j'ai enonce mes penses a la monde. Alors, c'est fini, mais pas fait bien. Ce me laisse froid, le termine, et je ne veux que dormir sans les penses. Mes yeux ferment, et je me fait absente.
La langue, c'est belle.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007.
"In sum, the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result; being is what presents (itself)" (24). The multiple, as a presented element, is also counted. Thus, a mulitple is what gets counted in the count.
"There is another way of putting this: the multiple is the inertia which can be retroactively discerned starting from teh fact that the operation of the count-as-one must effectively operate in order for there to be Oneness" (25). To me, this makes the most sense mathematically. If we consider set theory as mathematicians do, sets are sets of numbers that are grouped according to a common rule (or two or three). These numbers in the set (what B calls "multiples") must fit into the rule to make the set "true"--to fit the definition. If we say "the set of all odd integers", we are giving not only a structure to the set, but anticipating what will be in the set. If we were mathematicians, we'd say that the set of all odd integers is represented by 2n +1--and the formula given allows for an infinity of multiples, and allows us to anticipate what is to come. The count is an effect of this formula, since the formula itself is what first determines what belongs to the "set of all odd integers". Of course, this formula itself can be counted, and the set of all odd integers has other subsets within it (including the elusive "set of all prime numbers"). In math, structure and the count are both easily represented formulaically, and we can predict easily what belongs once that formula can be found (except for the prime numbers one. Damn). Humans are not so easy to order with shorthand.
The One
"The one is not" (23). In "deciding" upon the problem of Western metaphysics ("what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one"), Badiou declares that the One--that is, the essence of Being, the unpresented Platonic Ideal, is not. Or, in English, that the unpresented Whole, is not available to us without first there being the parts (multiples) which are presented, which present "being" by there mere presence in our field of vision. Or hearing. Or some other method of witnessing.
"The fact that the one is an operation allows us to say that the domain of the operation is not one" (24). The one is a function of the count in that in counting what is present, we are presented with presentation--which is being itself.
"I term situation any presented multiplicity.....Every situation admits its own particular operator of the count-as-one. This is the mpost general definition of a structure it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, teh regime of its count-as-one" (24).
"Yet there is no situation without the effect of the count, and therefore it is correct to state that presentation, as such, in regard to number, is multiple" (25).
Count-as-one (compter-pour-l'un)
See Situation, above. The presented multiples must be counted. The count-as-one also forms the structure of the situation, is a definitional operation. It includes or excludes.
Presentation/Unpresentable/Re-presentation
"Structure is what obliges us to consider....that presentation is a multiple...and what authorizes us, via anticipation to compse the terms of the presentation as units of a multiple" (25). The structure, the formula, is what enables us to see that the set of all integers (the One, being) is Not--that there is only the multiples that occur after the count, after the presentation of examples (multiples, elements) that belong to a given set.
"...for presence is the exact contrary of presentation" (27). Presence is the Being that Plato imagines--being qua being. Presentation, however, is one step removed; it's the expression (interesting word, considering B avoids talking about the symbolic) of that ultimate Being. Presence's definition contains within it the idea that it cannot be presented--the English term uses the past participle for a reason, to show some kind of transformation has taken place, some displacement occurs from the original (Present) to the new form (presentED). Further:
"If there connot be a presentation ofbeing because being occurs in every presentation--and this is why it does not present itself--then there is one solution left for us: that the ontological situation be the presentation of presentation" (27). The situation (the count of, the structure of) being must have presentation within it, but what is it presenting, if not being itself (since being can't be presented?) It is presenting the very idea of presentation--which, again, contains within it the idea of some original Presence somewhere. Or when.
The Void
"...every situation implies the nothing of its all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation. For if nothing were a term that could only mean one thing; that it had been counted as one" (54). Every situation contains within it this void because "there is a being of nothing, as a form of the unpresentable" (in order to include, there must also be an exclusion. Every presentable, counted element of a situation also has an unpresented, unpresentable part that is the Being, the one, that is the operational result of the count-as-one) (54).
"The 'nothing' is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation" (54). See my above comment.
"By itself, the nothing is no more than the name of unpresentation in presentation" (55). As we discussed in class, the void has only one element--it's name, which names all of the unpresentables as unpresentable.
"I term void of a situation this suture to being. Moreover, I state that every structural presentation unpresents 'its' void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count" (55). The void is a result of a subtraction ( 0 only exists as x - x), the subtraction of the inconsistent multiple from the consistent--or is it the other way around?
"It is essential to remember that no term within a situation designtes the void" (56). It's not surprising, then, that the state is unable to name revolutions as such.
"The void is what bounds the inconceivable, and thereby forecloses itself from any other relation, including its self-identity" (Barker. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2002, P. 5).
And names: "The event has the nameless as its name: it is with regard to everything that happens that one can only say what it is by referring to its unknown Soldier" (205). The event, at the edge of the void, cannot be recognized by the state, for fear of the unpresented mass of the void. The name of the event is important, then, for what it can tell us about the multiples involved.
And the state: "The event occurs for the state as the being of an enigma" (208). The state, again, cannot recognize the event for what it is because the situation does not count the unpresented.
The evental site is "an entirely abnormal multiple, that is, a mulitple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation" (175). None of the elements of the site are presented, are not part of the legitimated count--thus, this is the space of possibility.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1991.
Definition "The purpose of Bourdieu's concept of field is to provide the frame for a 'relational analysis,' by which he means an account of the multi-dimensional space of positions and the position taking of agents" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).
As structuralist? "Here Bourdieu reveals the structuralist underpinnings of his theory. He posits that the field is not ontologicaly grounded, but rather constituted of ever-changing relations--it is not a static thing, but a dynamic process, in which fluid relationality is the source of structure. He also refers to a universal aspect of all fields, cultural and otherwise: each involves specific forms of capital, which the agents aim to accumulate and increase through their varying 'strategies'" (Hipsky 192).
Field, then, is somewhat similar to the field (champs) that Foucault describes--it is not simply there, but a construct of relationships. For Bourdieu, these relationships are economical (in that they relate to forms of exchange for strategic purposes).
Political fields: These specific fields are "the site in which, through the competition between the agents involved in it, political products, issues, programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts and events are created--products between which ordinary citizens, reduced to the status of 'consumers', have to choose, thereby running a risk of misunderstanding that is all the greater the further they are from the field of production. (Bourdieu 172)
Bourdieu widens the political field to not only politicians, but discourse about politics (as long as that discourse comes from an authorized subject).
Definition of: "Bourdieu's notion of capital, which is neither Marxian nor formal economic, entails the capacity to exercise control over one's own future and that of others" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).
Capital seems related to agency and power (pouvoir); how it differs from either of these is unclear to me.
Symbolic capital: "...functions to mask the economic domination of the dominant class and socially legitimate hierarchy by essentializing and naturalizing social position" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).
Why is symbolic capital special? "Symbolic capital might thus be said to have a dialectical relationship with the other forms of capital; as a concept it underscores the fact that none of the positive properties that circulate on the literary field ever permanently or objectively inhere in any of the individuals, groups, works, or literary forms that are held to partake of those properties" (Hipsky 192).
Symbolic capital is a mystifying (a la Marx) force--it allows us to misrecognize the other forms of capital as natural or necessary.
Habitus
Definition: "Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as a system of general generative schemes that are both durable (inscribed in the social construction of the self) and transposable (from one field to another), function on an unconscious plane, and take place within a structured space of possibilities (defined by the intersection of material conditions and fields of operation (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).
What it does: "Between the social structure and agents there is a high degree of correspondence, mediated and generated by the habitus. It is through the dispositions inculcated in the habitus as these unfold in the structural space of possibility that the relationship of individuals to a social structure is objectively coordinated....The possibility of historical change rests in the limited conjucture between a social structure and the actions of agents as mediated by the habitus" (LiPuma 16).
LiPuma posits the possibility of change as a side effect of habitus--habitus mediates between structural determinism and the free will of agents.
Symbolic power is created and maintained through structuring structures and structured structures.Symbols are imbued with associations, connotations, and thus power because of the symbolic system they arise from; these powers allow those in dominant positions to hold symbolic capital.
"Structuring Structures": Associated with the "neo-Kantian" tradition: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Durkheim, and in many ways Foucault, as "treats the different symbolic universes...as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects" (Bourdieu 164).
