Category: art

The Revelatory Texts of Kafka and Proust

I am starting to get into the swing of the one sentence a day translation project.  While it seems to be cluttering up my other blog posts quickly driving all-too-important blog posts down into the depths of scrolling where no will venture I will (for now) continue to pop them up here.  In any event, I find myself fascinated by the daily unfolding of these two writers.  What intrigues me is the stark contrast in the navigational world offered to the reader.  Proust from the outset allows existence to pour out its possibility shifting between dream-life and waking-life, exploring relationship with objects, consider light, sound, memory, clarity, obscurity, etc.  All is phenomena but phenomena is more.  Kafka on the other hand is revelatory in his limitations.  He offers a stranger we don’t know, a narrator we don’t know, a room they are in, an adjoining room with other people we don’t know, a predictable land-lady who is now suddenly unpredictable.  Revelation is a mystery in its depth according to Proust.  Revelation is a mystery on its surface according to Kafka.  Both draw us forward because we know, we know certainly that something will be revealed.  But just as importantly both styles instill in us an equal certainly that what they reveal is not all . . . there is more.

Debt, time, [and the new] wealth

Here is an extended quote from Franco Berardi’s The Soul at Work,

The postmodern domination of capitalism is founded on the refrain of wealth, understood as cumulative possession.  A specific idea of wealth took control of the collective mind which values accumulation and the consent of the postponing of pleasurable enjoyment.  But this idea of wealth (specific to the sad science of economics) transforms life into lack, need and dependence.  To this idea of wealth we need to oppose another idea: wealth as time – time to enjoy, to travel, learn and make love.

Economic submission, producing need and lack, makes our time dependent, transforming our life into a meaningless run towards nothing.  Indebtedness is the basis of this refrain.

In 2006, the book Generation Debt (subtitled: Why now is a terrible time to be young) was published in the United States.  The author, Anya Kamenetz considers a question that finally came to the forefront of our collective attention in 2007, but has been fundamental to capitalism for a long time: debt.

Anya Kamenttz’s analysis refers especially to young people taking out loans in order to study.  For them, debt functions like a symbolic chain whose effects are more powerful than the real metal chains formerly used in slavery.

This new model of subjugation goes through a cycle of capture, illusion, psychological submission, financial trap and finally pure and simple obligation to work.

. . .

Our young fellow signs the loan, goes to university and graduates: after that, his/her life belongs to the bank.  S/he will have to start work immediately after graduation, in order to pay back a never ending amount of money. . . . S/he will have to accept any condition of work, any exploitation, any humiliation, in order to pay the loan which follows her wherever s/he goes.

Debt is the creation of of obsessive refrains that are imposed on the collective mind.  Refrains impose psychological misery thanks to the ghost of wealth, destroying time in order to transform it into economic value.  The aesthetic therapy we need – an aesthetic therapy that will be the politics of the time to come – consists in the creation of dissipating refrains capable of giving light to another modality of wealth, understood as time for pleasure and enjoyment.

The crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has opened a new scene: the very idea of social relation as ‘debt’ is now crumbling apart.

The anti-capitalist movement of the future won’t be a movement of the poor, but of the wealthy.  The real wealthy of the future will be those who will succeed in creating forms of autonomous consumption, mental models of need reduction, habitat models for the sharing of indispensable resources.  This requires the creation of dissipative wealth refrains, or of frugal and ascetic wealth.

in the virtualized model of semiocapitalism, debt worked as a general frame of investment, but it also became a cage for desire, transforming desire into lack, need and dependency that is carried for life.

Finding a way out of such a dependency is a political task whose realization is not a task for politicians.  It’s a task for art, modulating and orienting desire, and mixing libidinal flows.  It is also a task for therapy, understood as a new focalization of attention, and a shifting of the investments of desiring energy.

Spiritual Mastery

Economic activity constantly seeks to transcend itself, not only by extending its domain into the artistic realm, but also in exertion within its own proper sphere, in its own inner dynamic.  It is striving to become not only one sphere of life, but the only on, or the ultimately definitive one, recognising no extra-economic or supra-economic court of appeal.  The result is economism as a fundamental perception of the world, a world-view.  Its class expression is ‘economic materialism’, a many-faced and many-faceted phenomenon, although it has come to be associated with the name of one its boldest exponents, Karl Marx.  Man is aware of his being in the world only as an economic subject (economic man, homo economicus), for whom economic activity is pure commercialism: economic instinct or egoism is laid down as the foundation of life itself.  This egoism is simply the pure manifestation of the universal, metaphysical egoism of creation as a whole.  Economic activity founded upon egoism in inevitably afflicted by disharmony and strife, personal and communal (‘class war’), and there is no possibility of any ultimate harmonising of this economic egoism which would lead it towards the ‘solidarity’ of which socialist thinking makes so much.  Economic egoism is an elemental force which is in need of regulation, both external and internal (spiritual and ascetical); left to itself, liberated from all restraint, it becomes a destructive power.  Where economics is concerned, it is just as wrong to turn away from it in disgust as to be enslaved by its concerns. Economic labour is imposed upon us as a penalty for sin, and we are bound to see it as a duty [obedience] laid upon all mankind.  There is nothing common between fastidious aristocratic distaste for economic activity and that freedom from economic concern which the gospel enjoins: this freedom aims not at neglect or contempt but at spiritual mastery.

– The Unfading Light; Sergii Bulgakov (1917)

I have not ventured far into Bulgakov but I am intrigued and hopeful in his earthy and fleshly spirituality and how it engages the world; the practice of spiritual mastery (as if I needed incentive to read more turn of the century Russian authors).

Dead Like Blake

So I was reading William Blake to my son in the cemetery . . . again.  I have definitely become intrigued by his style as well as what I take to be an inversion of whatever popular form of Christianity he was encountering with a consecrated notion of evil.  Mixed with this is a lingering taste of existentialism that I always have more than a slight craving for.  This readings selections;

The final fragment of The Everlasting Gospel

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like mine.
Thine is the friend of All Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the Blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;
Thy Heaven Doors are my Hell Gates.
Socrates taught what Melitus
Loathed as a Nation’s bitterest Curse,
And Caiaphas was in his own Mind
A benefactor of Mankind.
Both read the Bible day & night,
But thou read’st black where I read white.

Plate 14 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousands years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

The only problem I perceive encountering in Blake is his genius . . . it may be too much or too little for me I am not sure yet.

Before I Knew It . . .

I went for a walk this afternoon with Salem.  I usually head out to our local thrift store and check out the used books.  I picked up a collection of poems and prose by William Blake.  On my way back I often to stop at an area that has lots of shade and grass for Salem to crawl around on.  Before I knew it I realized that I was reading William Blake aloud to my 11 month old in a cemetery.  Pray for the boy . . .

A couple of excerpts from Blake though,

The Clod and the Pebble

“Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And “Though shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

I am slowly re-entering some poetic works but I find I need quite simple rhythm to feel like I am engaging them.  I know it is likely my inability or impatience that keeps me from further exploration but for now pieces like this are very satisfying.