Potlatch: today's tuesday love

"On July 7, 1883, Governor General Lorne (1845-1914) approved an order-in-council recommending the suppression of the potlatch custom practiced by the Native peoples of the northwest coast of British Columbia. Two years later, the potlatch was declared illegal, and the prohibition remained in force until 1951. The custom at issue involved an elaborate demonstration of social status through dance, oratory and the distribution of gifts. As the 1883 order-in-council by Sir John A. Macdonald (1815-1891) records, Indian agents and Christian missionaries equated the custom with a range of vices. However, the objection was ultimately rooted in the Euro-Canadian notion of cultural progress, which opposed the uninhibited distribution of material wealth. Macdonald accepted the view that, 'It is not possible that Indians can acquire property or can become industrious with any good result while under the influence of this mania'..." (at least the Canadians tell it like it was)

(from Libération)

Tuesday Love

I've been thinking. Three weeks after I made my new year's resolution, and already I'm mudslinging. Come on!
If they are worth anything, those pseudo-deleuzians I have been wailing about will, in their 'loneliest loneliness', suffer unspeakable torments of conscience. What should I care? If they try to thrust themselves upon me, I will turn away.
Maybe I haven't the right to point fingers, maybe I have. Maybe I don't really know who I'm pointing fingers at or why. One thing is certain: I have forgotten that I don't want to be a finger-pointer at all.

So today I wish to begin an occasional feature (a foil to The Weblog's Tuesday Hatred); to help remind myself of the things in life that I - we - mustn't neglect to celebrate.

For now, two things: 1) Gilles Deleuze's beautiful panegyric to his maître, Jean-Paul Sartre:

"To what is Sartre faithful? Ever and always to the friend
Pierre-who-is-never-there. It is his peculiar destiny to circulate pure air when
he speaks, even if this pure air, the air of absences, is difficult to breathe."
in Desert Islands p80.

Read it. Read it? Reread it.

2) Erik Satie's piano works. It is truly the most beautiful music I have ever heard.

Satie has inspired many artists, including Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. I hope that presenting a few examples of this will add to the general exuberance of the post.

Lookalike: Klaus Kinski and Karl Jaspers

Two great men: one a "sex-crazed maniac", the other a well-loved actor.

Joseph Beuys in America

"With methods meant to seize the ready-made, it [science] cannot in general enter into what is being done, it cannot follow the moving reality, adopt the becoming which is the life of things. This last task belongs to philosophy. While the scientist [...] is obliged to use craft with nature, to adopt toward it the wary attitude of an adversary, the philosopher treats nature as a comrade. The rule of science is one posited by Bacon: obey in order to command. The philosopher neither obeys nor commands; he seeks to be at one with nature." Henri Bergson, Creative Mind p126.

The Book of Pleasures

Last night, over the course of four hours continuous reading, I discovered Raoul Vaneigem:

"Sabotage, absenteeism, voluntary unemployment, riots, wildcat strikes, stealing for fun and doing things for the hell of it - the axe is laid to the commercial tree and I'm delighted. As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. If you are not resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged.”
The Book of Pleasures, p20.

"To drink, insatiably thirsty, at the 'cup of life' is the best guarantee of its never running dry. Children know it - they take everything as if it were an unlooked-for present. Lively senses make their world live, long before the economic imperative starts totting the bills run up by life; before they learn about reciprocity; before they set out to deserve their presents, demand their due, be rewarded for winning, or punished for a depreciation, or thank those who remove one by one the charms of an existence without opposition." Ibid. p38.

"Women have long shared with artists, children and madmen the privilege of shrieking, singing, weeping, throwing their arms about, offering any old thing in gift, and betraying what is usually kept quiet. Since industrialisation won them the priceless right to work in a factory, gain a wage, run a business and command an airborne division - while artists became civil servants and promoted culture - only children and the so-called mentally ill are left to give confused expression to the convolutions of language prised from the grip of trade." Ibid. p48.

"If someone strikes me on my left cheek, I will smack him in the teeth sooner than offer him my right. Is not my enemy whoever constrains me, threatens me or makes me feel guilty? I want to live what I specifically am, without norms and without always watching for someone waiting for me at the corner of the street. If I kill what represses me, it will be inadvertantly, as I stride out happily, without looking back." Ibid. p65

"Nothing is passionately interesting if you are counting the pennies or feel forced to do it. Only desire teaches us to live. You hear people all to often weigh their words and pause for you to admire profundity. Desire, on the other hand, leaves everyone to work out his own way in silence." Ibid. p92.

More mischievous troublemaking

"Foucault said once that with Deleuze philosophy became theatre. Well, with the English Deleuzeans it becomes circus. Philosophy for clowns."
So M.arc opens the comments to my previous post. Golly, dogmat has never seen so much activity!
Clowns, eh? Those sad, determined faces. There is no lightness, no real joy to be found in the circus - a heavy, frightening place filled with jeering laughter.

"...hope it is not going to go Nick Landish again…" whistles the anonymous Jean X, (the cadence of the passage suggests a certain regular commentator). Nope, I don't think it will. Nick Land and his 'movement' seem, with bleary hindsight, to have been able to laugh at themselves. With the new "Deleuzean mafias" (such a snappy catch-all phrase: thanks, Marc), I'm not sure fun poking is permitted.

Often I find myself fielding questions about whether I shall be taking part in this or that reading group or seminar. I tell my friends, "I am not interested in becoming a Deleuzian along with everyone else. I want to engage with him seriously when I am ready; and I am not ready." Their eyes cloud over with suspicion and concern. Someone brandishes a text at me, another lays a threatening/forgiving hand on my shoulder. Do I want my academic career to sleep with the fishes?

Rebels D&G: now the fashionable orthodoxy?

I'm talking about Deleuze and Guattari™

I was sitting peacefully in Raffles yesterday, reading Wittgenstein's Nephew (Thomas Bernhard), when two people sat down next to me. Mr O started to talk. His voice could only be described as the voice of someone who knows.
"Thousand Plateaus is a work of...[inaudible]...,"
He then tried to address his interlocutor's concern about the contents page:
"...transversality of concepts, you see..."
The hapless student tried to drag the discussion on to familiar territory - a novel he'd lately read involving 'virtual-something'. Big mistake, friend.
Mr O swept aside this impoverishment with a short speech about the difference between the possible and the virtual (I hope this is right - I am writing from memory, and my shameful ignorance isn't helping.)
The momentum built up during three minutes of continuous talking made him almost unstoppable:
"...Deleuze and Guattari™ are only interested in the aesthetics of composition..."
He didn't say "...my dear boy," but he could have.

Mr O has adopted the attitude of the expert. He has reached that point in his intellectual development where he is permitted to drop the hesitancy, and the tentative sounding remarks. He stops thinking for himself, but now has a duty to think for others. His role is pedagogical.
I took an immediate dislike to him.

The malady of the yes-sayer

A friend is ill. I am back in damp dark dank midlands. I don't feel like posting anything. "Looking away shall be my only negation."

Cindy Sherman

Who?

Six months of dogmatisfaction

Is this a meme?

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?
I began to write (essays, blog, etc) more regularly.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My new new year's resolution is below. I should also say that I don't want to put anything more on this blog about academic philosophy politics in 2006. I am not a gossip columnist.
I didn't have any resolutions last year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.

4. Did anyone close to you die? No.

5. What countries did you visit? Sweden and South Africa.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005? Excitement about returning to London to earn a living.

7. What date from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? None in particular.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? There wasn't any single achievement. I did one or two things which I am reasonably pleased about.

9. What was your biggest failure? Not working as hard at philosophy as I know I should've.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? No.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A book - probably Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It was whilst reading this that I felt for the first time that I was being serious about thinking.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? My brother's. He returned to school this year.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Ha! There are so many names.

14. Where did most of your money go? Coffee and fish-fingers.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, and (obviously, I hope) in a different way, New Orleans.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005? Bob Dylan's Maggie's Farm, just cos my Dad and my little sister got hooked on it over the holidays.

17. Compared to this time last year, I am... less interested in taking my own life.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? I wish I'd tried a little harder to connect with people, especially strangers.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? I could have done with less fatuous grumbling.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? With family in a town in the middle of South Africa, eating lebanese food.

21. Did you fall in love in 2005? I couldn't say.

22. How many one-night stands? Hmm, let's just say that my mind (and my body) doesn't function in a way that is conducive to drunken sex with strangers.

23. What was your favorite TV program? I was introduced to Arrested Development by my housemate Axel.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? Not really. Hatred, for me, is a fleeting emotion.

25. What was the best book you read? Tough. Two books which really opened up my thinking were Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis and Nietzsche's Gay Science. Another marvel was Thomas Bernhard's Concrete, which M recommended me.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery? There were quite a few. Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, so far as pop music goes. Charlie Chaplin's compositions, which provide the soundtracks to his films, were a treat (the music for The Circus - what beauty!). Plus 'live' classical music; something which I have never really enjoyed before.

27. What did you want and get? An education.

28. What did you want and not get? An education.

29. What was your favorite film of this year? I've not seen many new releases. The best film I saw for the first time was possibly Renoir's La Regle du Jeu.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I spent the time with my mother in London, I think.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? More reading.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005? Second-hand (including shoes, excluding underthings). Style never goes out of fashion and all that...

34. What kept you sane? Talking to close friends.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I found Judith Butler more than a little attractive. And then there was Alcibiades, in Plato's Symposium.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? I surprised to find that my warped weltanschauung was given credence by the events in New Orleans and Iraq.

37. Who did you miss? Various family members. My colleagues from the last job I had before taking up philosophy study full-time.

38. Who was the best new person you met? Brn.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005. Fuck that for a game of eggy soldiers.

With gracious thanks to Fort Kant.