Source Criticism

"The standards of this criticism alter to the degree that historiography approaches journalism." (Martin Heidegger)

If it is not yet clear to you that journalism, i.e., the pursuit of "the daily news", is a ridiculous activity, consider the following headline in a major left-liberal Danish newspaper.

USA READY FOR MISSILE ATTACK FROM NORTH KOREA

The US has equiped Hawaii with a missile shield to counter North Korea's threats to attack on the American day of independence

Now, that's perhaps just vague enough to pass. But the article goes on to say that the word on the street is that

Secretatry of Defense Robert Gates has announced that the US is ready if North Korea makes good on its threat to send missiles against Hawaii.

This happened after rumours that North Korea is considering an attack on the US's western Pacific state on [Independence Day], July 4. (Politiken, 20.6.09, Sec. 1, page 10)

This sort of journalistic (and editorial) tone-deafness should confirm anyone's distate for the press. Journalists are content to describe world events as though they were watching a movie. In this case (involving, it appears, the diplomatic sophistication of two journalists and the editor of the International section) were somehow able to convert their reading of (I'm guessing) a few internet sources or newswires about the wholly abstract "threat" implied by a missile test and the wholly hypothetical act of "defending" oneself against it with a test of one's own, into an impending "attack" on America. This plan to launch an attack, then, (so think the journalists) can be casually proposed in public and reported in the news. How exciting!

"You are not going to fight modernism on its
own terrain because you will lose."

Jonathan Mayhew

The Mortgage

Though it has taken me some time, I have come to the conclusion that the theme of craftsmanship against usury is fundamental, not just to Pound's poetics, but to all poetry. Originally, we owned "the house of being" outright.

But something happened, some arch "bank" got into it and established a separation of credit and creation (finance and production). This involved also an alienation from death, which is why Lorca insists that true creativity occurs only in the proximity of death. It is a romantic notion to be sure, as Jonathan warns, but I think that it is exactly in the proximity such kitsch that art is produced. Good art must be produced at the risk of kitsch. (Something Flarf, if I may bring it up again, seems keenly sensitive to.)

This post is really just an attempt to tell a bad joke. If the duende is the true "master of the house", the "real owner", if Dasein seeks the event of its own appropriation, its authentic moment of coming into its own, the moment when I own what is, in each case, always already mine, and if this moment comes only in the face of the "ownmost possibility" of my being, i.e., of my death (in each case to be appropriated without being actualized) then my inauthenticity, my alienation, the real kitsch of my ideal craft, is the measure of my death, the gauge with which I plumb the depth of my dying, my dead pledge, my mortgage.

Death, Dasein and Duende

"In every country, death comes as a finality. It comes, and the curtain comes down. But not in Spain!"
Federico García Lorca

The connections just keep turning up. Perhaps the most direct connection between Dasein and duende is their connection to death. I think this connection is also one of "ownership": the possibility of death defines our "property-relation" to our body. We own our bodies in a distinctive way.

In Being and Time, Heidegger writes: "The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual" (H. 262). "Death is Dasein's ownmost possibility," he declares (H. 263). In his lecture on the duende, Lorca says: "The Duende ... will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death's house."

I know where I'm going with this now: there is an analysis of Norman Mailer's "American existentialism" (hip) lurking in this. (Jonathan Mayhew makes this connection also, though only in passing.) In his Existential Errands we find both a translation of Lorca and an account of a bullfight.

The Owner

"In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society,
but what it really means is - you're on your own."
Barack Obama

"We are ourselves the entities to be analysed.
The Being of any such entity is in each case mine."
Martin Heidegger

My thinking about Dasein and duende has led to suprising results. First, consider the following sentence as it appears in Heidegger's Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie:

Jede so eigens gebildete Weltanschauung erwächst einer natürlichen Weltanschauung, einem Umkreis von Auffassungen der Welt und Bestimmungen des menschlichen Daseins, di jeweils mit jedem Dasein mehr oder minder ausdrüklich gegeben sind. (7)

Albert Hofstadter, in his authoritative translation, renders this using the common practice of leaving the word "Dasein" untranslated:

Every world-view thus individually formed arises out of a natural world-view, out of a range of conceptions of the world and determinations of the human Dasein which are at any particular time given more or less explicitly with each such Dasein.

Gregory Fried and Richard Polt explain the issue in the introduction to their translation of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics:

In everyday German, the word Dasein is used just as we use the word "existence"; readers may always substitute "existence" for "Dasein" in order to get a sense of how Heidegger's statements would have sounded to his original audience. (xii)

We can do that with the sentence from the Grundprobleme:

Every world-view thus individually formed arises out of a natural world-view, out of a range of conceptions of the world and determinations of human existence which are at any particular time given more or less explicitly with each such existence.

I think that is very much to be preferred, and I wanted to know what Lorca's original audience would have heard in the word Spanish word "duende". To set up what I discovered, here's a bit more from Fried and Polt:

[The root meaning of Dasein] is usually rendered in English as "Being there," but when Heidegger hyphenates Da-sein, we have employed the equally valid translation "Being-here." Dasein is the being who inhabits a Here, a sphere of meaning within which beings can reveal themselves as meaningful, as significant. (xii, my emphasis)

Now, I've looked only very briefly at the corresponding "root meaning" of "duende". In Spanish mythology, it is a kind of fairy or goblin; it is clearly the personification (or at least corporealization) of a certain kind of spirit, perhaps (and for my purposes importantly) an essentially local spirit, a "spirit of the place". Lorca describes it in terms of an "earthiness". Saying that an artist or a work of art "has duende" is like saying it "has soul".

Wikipedia, which is where I'm so far getting my information about this, adds an interesting etymological twist, tracing its origin to "the Spanish word dueño, 'owner' (the 'real owner' of the house)." Now, Heidegger says somewhere that language is "the house of Being", but that is not all. His later work concentrated less on Dasein and more on Ereignis. That word has been either left untranslated or translated by a neologism (Enowning). But it means simply "the event". It connotes, however, (and this is why it has caused difficulties for translators) the act of making something your own (Er-eigen), i.e., appropropriating it. Taking possession of it.

But Dasein is je meines ("in each case mine"). Dasein, like duende, is the "the real owner of the house". There is more. Later.

Update: I must have skipped ahead to the end when I first got Jonathan's book. He closes the book with a mention both of duende as "dueño" and "spirit of the place" ("genius loci").