09 March 2010

Heel of a shoe.

"How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave soldier!" That is where our inclinations come from, and our choice of careers. "What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!" That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc.

Pascal, Pensées 117 (1987: 38)

a really positive role

What I would like to get free from, is the idea that political power—in all its forms and at whatever level we grasp it—has to be analyzed within the Hegelian horizon of a sort of beautiful totality that through an effect of power is misrecognized or broken up by abstraction or division. It seems to me that it is both a methodological and a historical error to consider power as an essentially negative mechanism of repression whose principal function is to protect, preserve, or reproduce the relations of production. It also seems to me wrong to consider power as something situated in a superstructural level relative to the play of forces. Finally, it is wrong to consider power as essentially linked to the effects of ignorance. It seems to me that this kind of traditional and "omni-circulating" conception of power, found in historical writing and in present day political and polemical texts, is actually constructed on the basis of a number of outdated historical models. It is a composite notion that is inadequate for the real world in which we have been living for a considerable length of time, that is, since at least the end of the eighteenth century.
  From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power impinging massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous violence that some (always the same) exercise over others (who are also always the same)? It comes from the model of, or if you like, from the historical reality of, slave society. The idea that power has the essential function of prohibiting, preventing, and isolating, rather than allowing the circulation, change, and multiple combination of elements, seems to me a conception of power that also refers to an outdated historical model, in this case the model of caste society. By making power a mechanism whose function is not to produce but to deduct, to impose obligatory transfers of wealth and, consequently, to deprive some of the fruit of their work; in short, the idea that the essential function of power is to seal off the process of production and to make a certain social class profit from it, in an absolutely identical renewal of the relations of power, does not seem to me to refer at all to the real functioning of power at the present time, but to how we may suppose or reconstruct it as functioning in feudal society. Finally, in referring to a power that, with its administrative machinery of control, is superimposed on forms, forces, and relations of production established at the level of an already given economy, by describing power in this way, it seems to me that we are still using an outdated historical model that in this case is the model of the administrative monarchy.
  In other words, it seems to me that by making the major characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential function is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we do no more than constitute, on the basis of historically outdated and different models, a sort of daguerreotype of power that is really based on what we think we can see in power in a slave society, a caste society, a feudal society, and in a society like the administrative monarchy. It hardly matters whether this is a failure to recognize the reality of these societies; it is in any case a failure to grasp what is specific and new in what took place during the eighteenth century and the Classical Age, that is to say, the installation of a power that, with regard to productive forces, relations of production, and the preexisting social systems, does not play a role of control and reproduction but rather a really positive role. What the eighteenth century established through the "discipline of normalization," or the system of "discipline-normalization," seems to me to be a power that is not in fact repressive but productive, repression figuring only as a lateral or secondary effect with regard to its central, creative, and productive mechanisms.

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 50-52)

04 March 2010

the message of true love

"Love's highest need is to renounce its own power." This is what Lacan calls 'symbolic castration': if one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's love, one should renounce its centrality. Perhaps, a detour through the best (or worst) of Hollywood's melodrama can help us clarify this point. The basic lesson of King Vidor's Rhapsody is that, in order to gain the beloved woman's love, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (i) my professional career is what matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; (ii) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false, they lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to 'betray' him at the crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career)—only if he can survive the ordeal, and successfully accomplish his task although deeply traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and will she return to him. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace.

Slavoj Žižek, Why is Wagner Worth Saving? (intro. to Adorno, In Search of Wagner, xxii)

01 March 2010

the destruction of objects

Children in particular (and here I am supposing it would also be necessary to include grown-ups in certain cases) willfully plunge their fingers into coloring materials, into containers of paint, for example, so as to leave traces of their passage while dragging their fingers across walls or doors. Such marks only "seem to be able to be explained as mechanical assertions of their author's personality." And in that capacity, Luquet associates them with one of the rare means that children have of asserting their personality, the destruction of objects, the exploits of "butter-fingered children"...

Georges Bataille, Primitive Art (The Cradle of Humanity, 2005: 36)

human no longer

Beyond consent the convulsions of the flesh demand silence and the spirit's absence. The physical urge is curiously foreign to human life, loosed without reference to it so long as it remains silent and keeps away. The being yielding to that urge is human no longer but, like the beasts, a prey of blind forces in action, wallowing in blindness and oblivion.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1986:105)