A Glimpse of Paradise

Noting and trying to understand the relationship of Benjamin’s discussion of “idea” in the introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Agamben’s discussion of “idea” in Idea of Prose, and particularly in “The Idea of Appearance.” Here appearance is “beautiful,” inexplicable in any further way than through a hypothesis which “saves” it — insofar as it can be saved, or needs to be saved — for “a different understanding which now grasps it as it is in itself, anhypothetically, in its splendor.”¹ The appearance is sensible, but not in a sense in which something sensible is “presupposed by language and knowledge, but rather exposed in them, absolutely” such that the appearance stands in itself “the thing no longer separated from its intelligibility, but in the midst of it, . . . the idea, the thing itself.”²

Regardless of what might be thought of this representation of the idea of appearance as representation, or as idea, or as truth, it seems to demand reading in light of Benjamin’s image of Adam’s “action of naming things” in Paradise as a direct encounter with things in their intelligibility so that it “confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words.”³

The struggle with the communicative significance of words — which Benjamin assigns to philosophy, and which is clearly philosophy’s political task — then explicitly characterizes a post-paradisaical state. No linguistic politics in Paradise.

On the other hand, the struggle with the communicative significance of words might be illustrated pretty well by the problem of the meaning of “die” in Genesis 2:17, 3:3, 3:4, and (negatively) 3:22. There are the coordinates of a paradigmatic story of linguistic politics and bad exegesis, suggesting that whatever fall out of the Paradise in which there was no struggle occurs earlier in the story. Just off stage? Or already with the setting up of an original need to manage communicative significance, in the encounter with a different subject of an encounter of things in their intelligibility.

Anyway, I uploaded my notes on the first few pages of the Origin etc.. Back to work . . .

¹ Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, translated by Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995) 122.
² Agamben, 123.
³ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1995) 37.

A Glimpse of Paradise

What constitutes responsible utopian discourse? How does a person, how do people, engage in responsible utopian discourse?

In this context, “responsible” means something like “telling the truth,” “offering hope without encouraging false hope,” and “taking action in a utopian direction, without atrocity.”

Obviously — perhaps to everyone but me — my interest in utopian discourse has a lot to do with my involvement in the church. It is an extension of the same old question I’ve been asking in various ways for the last 30 years. Where is the truth in this, and how do we [christians] embrace that, without perpetuating the untruth, and the harms and injustices that have been part of the life of the church since its inception?

Because the church, christians, are perpetually engaged in utopian discourse, part and parcel of christian messianic expectation. The existence of the church is an affirmation of the foolhardy wisdom of utopian expectation and pro-utopian practice. Christians are all about looking for and participating in the in-breaking of the kingdom of God in the world, and proclaiming the good news of that.

Or anyway, are supposed to be all about that. In historical and contemporary fact, we are not all about it, on many occasions we are visibly also about other things, like making the congregational budget, or “supporting our troops,” or doing ethnic cleansing.

Sometimes the messianic expectation gets lost in a thicket of theological complexity, or theological argument. Sometimes it gets portrayed as something to expect after death, as a prescription for resignation and the embrace of suffering in the present, without any efforts to realize good news in the context of life. Sometimes it gets so spiritualized that a person could forget that the kingdom of God is about food, and wine, and touching and being touched (Jesus touches people a lot, and Song of Songs was in the Bible long before 1 Corinthians).

The church, christians, really only have one story to tell. But how to tell that story, so that it remains true to its truth, and doesn’t get captured and coopted by the various alternative versions that in the end turn out to be “other gospels”?

This is one of those questions that we actually need to answer, and some answers are better than others.

A few links related to the day:

More info on stereotactic core biopsy.

More details on Transgender Day of Remembrance events in Louisville.

More coverage of the ongoing occupation of University of Vienna.

The latest version of the outline for revisions to the first draft of my dissertation.

A good corset can do wonders for a chronic and painful condition of the spine like lateral curvature

It’s possible to become accustomed to a given level of pain.

Say it’s relatively constant, something that never goes away. A person learns to live with it, to compensate for it, to work around it. It becomes part of the background. It becomes unremarkable, perhaps even imperceptible without strenuous efforts to bring it to awareness. It merges with the color of how things are. It “goes unconscious.”

I’m talking about a physical phenomenon, but it might be a metaphor for something less physical. Like an occupation that restricts a particular form of expression, that produces a cramped habitus. Like a social formation that systematically blocks access to some human potential, or some set of human potentials. Like social arrangements that weigh on some people, or that confine their movements.

(No coincidence, maybe, that using those turns of speech barely even sounds metaphorical. We make the equation between processes in bodies and processes in social relationships pretty casually. So casually that maybe we don’t really think about it.)

The problem with chronic pain is that it suppresses contrast: variation, fluctuation, difference.

Without contrast, a person might even come to consider that level of pain — well, that physical sensation — baseline, or optimum. Might never even imagine how it would be to live without it. It’s just normal.

This is a basic problem, maybe the basic problem, with implications for utopian thinking and practice: the inability to register pain as pain, the acceptance of pain as normal. That inability, that acceptance, often acquires the label “being realistic.”

Really want to just say “Fuck realism.” But — too dialectical for that. Because there are times, places, circumstances, situations, that make that a losing proposition. That make trying to do something more arduous, less dramatic — be realistic, but remember what “being realistic” means — seem like the strategy that might hold out more hope in the long run.

Have to say: “Keep awake.”

Or: “make art.”

In Vienna, main lecture hall still besetzt. From unsereuni. From Der Standard.at

Now that the occupation is approaching a week, the story has made it to Boston. Takes time to get across the Atlantic.

Student Worker Action Team at UC Berkeley has called for a strike Nov. 18, and has posted a petition and statement.

Read a book in the children’s library yesterday, while waiting for my daughter to look something up on the computerized catalog. She’s on fall break. The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, by Margarita Engle (New York: Henry Holt, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8050-7706-3). (Here’s a review by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center.)

The book is remarkable and memorable. It has gotten me thinking, again, as I fold towels and put away groceries, about poetry and freedom and the need to own up to the hideous legacy of slavery as one of the beneficiaries of the position of the holders and owners — the authors of Civilization, of “Culture,” of “Humanism.”

I love to say the ancient Greeks are the villains of western civilization. I get a lot of pleasure out of saying it, and I say it whenever the occasion arises, which is reasonably often. I love saying it all the more because of the asphyxiating hellenophilic bias of the western humanities, and the inexcusable hellenotropism of Christian biblical studies, both of which demand ceaseless, vigilant resistance. But I haven’t gone nearly far enough. I am thinking all the more today, that anything the ancient Greeks ever said about freedom, or about anything, has to be qualified by a determined refusal to forget that they accepted slavery.

Ditto the Romans.

Ditto the western Europeans and all their heirs — the pilgrims, the “founding fathers,” the padres who built all the missions of California on which I wrote reports in 3rd grade, the Confederate officers whose grandchildren were my mother’s grandparents, the whole lot of them.

Ditto the ancient Israelites, though it hurts me like a knife to say it, and though I hope to think that case is complicated by the Exodus narrative.

Ditto people like me who [with slavery and human trafficking on the rise globally] STILL have not stopped shopping at WalMart.

The practice of slavery simply ought to call the entire culture into question. No more polite “balanced” discussions about whether it is fair to demean the fine art and the drama and the poetry and the philosophy and blah blah blah “just because” of a failure of enlightenment on this one point — as if it is an understandable and excusable failure, on a small point, as if anything like balance is possible, and as if posing the question in the first place didn’t already amount to an admission of willingness to consider letting the culture-makers off the hook for their inhumanity, as if anything actually balanced it out. “It was a long time ago.” As if what needs to be learned from all this has actually been learned already.

Walter Benjamin is right. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”¹

Not facing up to it only prolongs the agony.

———-
¹ Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (VII), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 256.

The revolution may be televised after all, but reception varies

Thought I’d seen something about activities planned at Berkeley for this (past) weekend, related to the ongoing and developing occupations of university spaces. May have been misinformed, in any event, have not been able to track down any news of something like that to date.

Did, however, find this helpful discussion of the logic of the occupations at Anarchist news dot org.

Unsereuni reports on the ongoing situation at the University of Vienna, with more links, including one to facebook discussion, at CNN ireport; Der Standard.at continues to cover this event as well.

Here’s related word from Italy

Not like I didn’t know that mainstream media was selective in its coverage of “what’s happening,” or as if I thought I was actually well-informed personally, but the fact that this is a widespread and growing phenomenon and it is less than a blip on the giant news sources is more than dismaying. Here’s something going on that’s genuinely hopeful; it deserves wider awareness.

The news that students at Fresno State had joined the wave of school occupations interested me in particular since I have family in Fresno and vicinity, and have been accustomed to thinking of Fresno as “town” for a long time.

Occupy California passes on the report from Indybay, which includes video.

The Fresno Bee coverage was upbeat and optimistic: everyone coping bravely.

Vienna students still in occupation, and I still haven’t been able to find anything about it in “mainstream” media — not looking hard enough?

Big Media hasn’t caught on [yet? or just not planning to?] but the Chronicle of Higher Education is covering the student occupation of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Along with Der Standard and various alert bloggers. [from New School Reoccupied, Socialism and/or Barbarism, Occupy California, KSU]

Solidarity forever, and may your works praise you in the gates.

Reading and thinking

Liked this essay by Unemployed Negativity. No surprise, since it resonates with various concerns voiced by Adorno, Irigaray, and Agamben, all three: the closure of the imaginative space available for envisioning alternatives to extant reality, the problem of equating utopia with a return to “nature” as it has historically been understood or symbolized in the western humanistic tradition, and the problem of the fundamental concept of politics descended from Aristotle that is based on the definition of man [anthropos?] as speaking animal and the distinction between the bios politikos and the zoē associated with the oikos that structures the “state of exception” that constitutes the modern sovereign state. All that, and takes utopia seriously, so I thought it was worth reading, even though it put me a bit behind on my daily pragraph quota. Thanks to Box 3 Spool 5 for the referral.