mills

Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre. I am not fond of Sartre, who defended Stalin long past the point when it was forgivable and whose language –as George Orwell noted- reflected his willingness to deliberately obfuscate the truth to arrive at fashionable ends. Making a show of his deeds after the occupation, Sartre “pretended to be brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre…lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense.”

Reading that sentence, I am closer now to understanding why James is a persona non grata in academic settings. Unafraid to suggest that Sartre was less a philosopher than a writer, and less a hero than someone living in terribly bad faith -to borrow Sartre’s language- James alienates those whose professional lives are invested in the exegetical treatment of the texts of the West (and who themselves may resent moral judgments of cowardice). Although he marshals substantial evidence to support his claim that because “Sartre’s autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know…his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose,” it remains hard to believe. Even when we read that Orwell and Revel considered him a fraud and his work devoid of meaning, we recoil: he is part of the canon!

I struggle in the same way with James’ dismissal of Benjamin, Derrida, and their ilk, and Noam Chomsky’s famous claim that these “theorists” were all empty charlatans creates a similar sense in me: simultaneous satisfaction that perhaps what seems to be nonsense, language tricks, gimmickry, regurgitation, and outright fraud might be just that after all (and not the sacred writing it is considered in academia) and a fear that maybe, Chomsky and James and I just aren’t smart enough to get what’s being said.

And this is a key point: no one who admits to thinking such writing is nonsensical will be taken seriously by those who maintain that we simply don’t understand it. But few who take expression seriously will claim that cultural ideas require such complexity of writing to communicate! I remain suspicious, despite Jace Cook’s excellent argument, that if something is obfuscatory, it is either through incompetence in craft or deliberate intent; and if the latter, something is being hidden (or perhaps it is that nothing is being hidden).

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. I went to look for where Joyce so describes television. The second attributed phrase -“soulskin with sobsconscious inklings”- comes from Finnegans Wake:

And who will wager but he’ll Shonny Bhoy be, the fleshlumpfleeter from Poshtapengha and all he bares sobsconcious inklings shadowed on soulskin. Its segnet yores, the strake of a hin. Nup. Laying the cloth, to fore of them. And thanking the fish, in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake!

To say that this seems not to comment on television is easy enough, although since I don’t understand Finnegans Wake I have to admit that it very well may; indeed, a long preceding passage begins with this, possibly setting the subject:

In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade.

Picking through this fascinating language like an uneducated neophyte at an antique shop, I gathered that “teleframe” and “metenergic reglow” and so on refer to television, and I can even sense what it is about Joyce that is so remarkable: this prose illumines especially despite seeming (because seeming) to obscure. It’s rather amazing.

But this reference to the “charge of a light barricade” is the closest he comes to “Charge of the Light Brigade,” at least anywhere I could find. But I don’t know Joyce at all and feel silly impugning McLuhan’s citation.

In any event: I think it’s rather beautiful.

William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.

Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.

Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.

Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.

I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.

“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.

Alfred Polgar. “You must help him to an awareness…” Derision is not help; brutal exposure of perceived logical errors is not help; sarcastic decimation of straw-men is not help. Also: neither agreement nor acquiescence nor victory are synonymous with awareness.

This relates to a previous post on moral vigilantism, and I think well-summarizes why much of what is written against those we oppose is merely intended to pleasure ourselves: rhetoric is often onanistic.

Eugenio Montale, quoted by James. This is not a condemnation of experimentation, but an observation about the relationship between an experiment’s purpose and its result’s endurance. The purpose must not be the experiment itself.

Milan Kundera said that the “sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

As a fan of much abstract and experimental art, Kundera echoes Montale: both assert that whatever the formal nature or concerns of a work, its attention and aesthetic must be directed towards apprehending or expressing something like knowledge or truth, and in a new way. The truth pursued is existential, experiential, human, by and large; this is the most important sort. Indeed, Kundera says that the obligation to seek it is moral and that art which fails to meet this standard is not just “pulp” or “ordinary” or “bad” but in fact immoral.

This is radical among men as modern as they because it is so traditional; in my view, it is also true.