Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kitsch

In Apocryphal Lorca, Jonathan Mayhew argues that "the American duende [is] a reduction of Lorca's complexity into an easily digested concept. The duende, shocking to say, is the form taken by Lorquian kitsch." I feel exactly that way about Heidegger's Dasein.

An interesting thought occured to me while reading one of Jonathan's seminar papers. Wittgenstein's key concepts "language game" and "form of life" are standardly translated, i.e., they are known by those English labels, not "Sprachspiel" or "Lebensform". This may have saved Wittgenstein's concepts from being reduced to kitsch.

"Dasein" and "Ereignis" are, of course, standardly left untranslated in Heidegger.

Heidegger's rich understanding of what we might otherwise have called "presence" and "event" remain largely unavailable to English readers, and whatever does reach us is mired in (inexorably romantic) German idealism, simply because his followers refuse to translate him. It would have been very hard, I grant, to translate "Dasein" as "presence" in every instance in Being and Time, but I think understanding what he meant requires that we try. In fact, I suspect that the whole "postmodern" critique of "the metaphysics of presence" lacks a great deal of background in the "analytic of Dasein", which could be read, precisely, as the analytic of presence.

One difficulty lies in the fact that Heidegger does actually use the notion of "presence" separately. He uses the German word "Anwesenheit". Another lies in the standard translation of "Vorhandenheit" as "presence-at-hand". I think these problems are surmountable. The question here is whether it would have been possible to apply Heidegger's insights to experiences that are already named in the English language, rather than using German terms or inventing quasi-English ones.

Kitsch here arises in the insinuation that only Germans can really understand the truth of "man's ownmost being". Similarly, Lorca's duende, when used in translation (and itself left untranslated), grants a strange priority to Andalusian experience. Heidegger, and, it seems, Lorca, had considerably less local, less "provincial", ambitions when they raised the issue.

Desire Unleashed

Power seeks justice as knowledge seeks truth. (Yes, their "arcs" may be "long", as the President might say.) Likewise, the highest emotion is love; it is the emotion towards which all other emotions tend or from which they flee. It is, if you will, the "master emotion". Love is the (ideal) tyrant of our emotional lives. Our intensity is beholden to our love. I don't think that's controversial.

It occurs to me that, in a similar way, desire seeks freedom. The basic desire, we might say ... pause to note the fearsome axis of symmetry that this esablishes with the highest emotion ... the basic desire is the desire to be free. The anarchist's watchword "Desire Unleashed!" is therefore, as it arguably should be, a pleonasm. To be unleashed is exactly what desire wants.

I think this goes a long way toward clarifying the interrelations of emotion and desire and, therefore, the working machinery of a good many poems. We can, for example, note that desire and emotion (freedom and love) can very easily enter into oppositional relations.

Now, if pangrammaticism is right, there must be a corresponding "philosophical" apparatus.

Love is to our emotions as ________ is to our concepts.
Freedom is to desire as ________ is to belief.
Our clarity is beholden to our ________.

Any suggestions?

In Support of Van Jones

Camus said somewhere that one must, in the end, side with the humiliated. Here goes... You don't have to be a Washington insider to think it is possible that the hijackers had a bit of help on the inside to pull off 9/11. But perhaps you have to be a Washington insider to declare that idea "absurd".

Is it possible that Wall Street has a "man" or two inside the Treasury Department?
Is it possible that the drug cartels "own" some corner (or at least one or another agent) of the DEA?
Is it possible, indeed, that the CIA has a mole rumaging around in al Qaeda's back yard?

Of course it is.

When something really bad happens, and when the authorities that are charged with protecting the population fail to do so, is it really so far-fetched to go looking for someone "inside" the system to share part of the blame? Blaming al Qaeda alone for the effects of 9/11 is a bit like blaming only Mother Nature for the effects of Katrina.

Van Jones was just asking reasonable questions. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with at least forty people who lost their loved ones that day. And if David Corn had helped Americans to understand the reasonableness of those questions back when they were being raised, rather than ridiculing a whole class of questions by emphasizing their most speculative (or, if you will, "tantalizing") variants, Van Jones would not have been so vulnerable today.

We have the names of nineteen individuals that David Corn thinks were "evil" enough, "ballsy" enough, and "competent" enough to pull it off. Expanding the list of suspects to include a few that happen to have American citizenship, security clearance and ... perhaps, perhaps, perhaps ... official titles is not at all unreasonable. I, of course, am in no position to suggest any names or speculate about what they might have been able to do for the bad guys. But it is puzzling that the received view of what happened on 9/11 so confidently rules out the possibility. An investigation has not even been deemed necessary.

Kooks and Poets

"Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?" (Allen Ginsberg, "America")

Reading Allen Verbatim the other day (I'm getting increasingly obsessed by the War on Drugs), a likeness between Ginsberg and Pound struck me. It's probably pretty straighforward imitation of the master but, like Pound, Ginsberg had the "low down" on the U.S. government. Pound believed that America had effectively passed into the hands of the "usury racket" in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was established. Ginsberg believed that the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 (AV, p. 40ff.) was the beginning of a federal drug racket.

There are lots of parallels and the argument has been made to connect the two rackets, tying both to the military-industrial complex or, more broadly, the media-intelligence-military-industrial complex. One person who has made this connection is Peter Dale Scott (AV, p. 71), a poet. He has argued that the CIA and other agencies have an enormous stake in the global drug economy. One figure I've heard, independently, is that something like 260 billion dollars of drug money are laundered through Wall Street every year. If drugs were legal this infusion of cash would dry up, which would cause a financial catastrophe.

Scott studies something he calls "deep politics". It is what goes on under the surface of official history and causes things like the JFK assassination and, yes, 9/11. It is interesting to me that some poets feel compelled to dismiss "the official narrative" so radically. Ginsberg's rhetorical question about Time Magazine and the emotional life of America is very telling.

Consider: how close is the fit between, say, the covers of Time Magazine, week after week, and the consensus of mainstream historians. Could a "history of the twentieth century" not be pretty straightforwardly illustrated by the covers of Time? And isn't that actually a bit too neat and tidy? Wouldn't we expect historians to uncover some "deeper" truths about history that would expose those "illustrations" as just so much propaganda? What would a history of the twentieth century that took its cue, not from Time, but from (just for the sake of argument) the poetry of Pound and Ginsberg, look like? What facts would it attempt to uncover? One thing seems sure: it'd be pretty kooky.

Foreign and Domestic: The Blog Post

Watch "Foreign and Domestic: The Movie"

"I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations—the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past—should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me." (Borges, "The Wall and the Books")

This post is not meant to be anti-American. The relevant Danish policies, in their necessarily minor way, are subject to the same criticism (Denmark is a member of the Coalition of the Willing, after all). Most Western countries, in fact, practice some version of the injustices that are lately outraging me.

The empire is defined, on its frontier, by the War on Terror, principally (or perhaps just most openly) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The existence of "evil doers" is cited to justify the invasion of entire countries, the total subversion of their civil societies. Men and children are gunned down in the street from the sky in broad daylight. "This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage."

The empire is defined, in its cities, by the War on Drugs. Marijuana is illegal, its possession a crime. In the name of this war, the state can search the homes of citizens, break down doors, disrupt families, and coerce citizens into the dangerous position of "informants". Parents and children are roused out of bed in the dead of night and their dogs are shot. "Columbia Police. Search warrant!"

Neither the arrest of an individual for the possession of a joint nor the bombing of a whole population for "harbouring" a criminal is just. The empire, however, claims the right to prosecute these "just" wars. No decent state would do such things.