All This, and Heaven Too

Anatole Litvak's 1940 film All This, and Heaven Too is a pretty good melodrama, though not nearly as successful as other Bette Davis vehicles of the same period like The Letter (my personal favourite), Jezebel or even the weirdly melodramatic Now, Voyager.

The film starts with Davis getting a job as a teacher in an all-girls school. The girls of her class however have found a newspaper report about an scandalous affair she was involved in when she was in France employed as a governess for children in the house of a duke (Charles Boyer). When the girls taunt her about her past she begins to tell them her life story and then we see the whole film in flashback. The story itself is nothing unusual or unexpected. The duke is exasperated by the nagging demands of his wife and his withdrawal has made her hysterical. The governess is unhappy and lonely too and exceptionally devoted to the children and, you know, the usual stuff...

What is interesting is that throughout the film their love affair (or non-affair) remains "chaste". They don't even kiss once! Davis keeps reminding herself and others (she is in any case telling a story) that whatever she did was for the children and she never had any ulterior designs on the duke but the director (and the audience) knows better. I think this is what makes it interesting. Like other women's films of that period, this also dramatizes issues which would interest feminists, like how insecurity and powerlessness find an expression in feminine jealousy. Also how unfair the distribution of power in a marriage is - the duke repeatedly denies his love to his wife driving her mad, bitter and vindictive and even leading to a cruel end.

Another interesting aspect of the film is its ending. In the end Davis is reunited with a young and good looking church minister who is interested only in an asexual friendship with her ("new kind of love", he calls it). I don't know in what ways this serves as wish-fulfillment for women audiences (most of classic hollywood melodramas were indeed wish fulfillment fantasies) but it is interesting to think about it.

Novel & Philosophy

I don't really agree with this dismissal of philosophical novel, much less with the idea that a novel can't change your thinking about life and the world. I wonder, if that is the case, why take the novel seriously at all?

Later in the post he mentions (quoting John Dewey) that, "our encounter with art can be the most alert and engaged of human experiences. In our free perception of the aesthetic ... we reach a level of pure experience, and a degree of self-awareness of experience as experience, unavailable in most other human endeavors." This is a great way of of describing the experience of reading (or any aesthetic engagement) but why shouldn't we see this self-aware experiences as adding to our knowledge or questioning whatever knowledge of the self and the world we already had before we started reading, and taking it further, why shouldn't we let this knowledge change our lives?

As one of the comments there also mentions, taking Dostoevsky as an example weakens the argument. Dostoevsky wasn't just emobodying extant ideas in plots, characters and incidents, he was actively thinking, questioning and critiquing the dominant intellectual culture of his times (the whole project of modernity). Alongwith Kierkegaard and Nietzsche he is an early existentialist philosopher, someone who also influenced the popular French existentialist thinkers of the 20th century.

This is not just embodying ideas in plots and characters, it is more about finding a grounding for ideas which would seem abstract, academic and irrelevant otherwise. This is what a philosophical novel achieves. We are surrounded by theories and facts and ideas but only in a novel can we find a personal stake in those ideas (without necessarily subjectivizing them). Reading in that sense becomes a process of making those facts and theories "one's own" and "authentic". (Reading Heidegger has been messing up with my mind recently.) I actually also like philosophers or thinkers who write as if they had a personal stake in whatever they are writing and thinking.

Contra James Wood?

There is a new blog which takes issues with the ideas and opinions of the esteemed literary critic James Wood. I found this post particularly provocative which makes the case for Wood as a (sort of) Blairite critic, promoting reification of literature by granting a phony respectability to the commodity of Novel by labelling it "literary":

"James Wood is the ideal critic for the era in which the novel comes to be defined by its marketing category; it is Wood, preeminently, who puts the fetishism back into the commodity. On the one hand, there’s a great leveling behind the scenes – “literary fiction” is just more product that needs to be moved, preferably in superstore bulk – but selling it is part of a system of “distinction” that depends on the appearance of hierarchy, so that customers get to consume status along with, say, the latest Claire Messud or Ian McEwan novel. Wood’s criticism stabilizes the hierarchy of genres by guaranteeing the literariness of “literary fiction”; his imprimatur allows the novel to appear to have transcended mere marketing. His reviewing functions as a kind of nominating process, in which select works of contemporary “literary fiction” are nominated into the pantheon of great literature that his essays about “classic” texts have already enshrined. Thus, to take just a few examples, Monica Ali, Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, and of course McEwan get to share the dias with Virginia Woolf, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. Those stacks of Ian McEwan’s Saturday that you see on that Barnes and Noble table have hovering over them a halo that forms the blurb, “This Is Not A Commodity” —James Wood. And it’s 10% off! "

A Babylonian Madhouse

An excerpt from Robert Musil's essay "Helpless Europe" collected in "Precision and Soul". More excerpts available on google books.

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[And] so we arrive at the present day. The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts. We are inundated by a jumble of facts from the past, facts from the specialized sciences, facts from life. Popular philosophy and topical discussion are either content with the liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress, or invent the familiar fetishes of epoch, nation, race, Catholicism, the intuitive man - all of which share, negatively, a predilection for sentimental carping at the intellect and, positively, a need to seek a foothold, to find gigantic skeletons, however ethereal, on which to hang the impressions that constituted our one remaining bit of substance. (This is incidentally, one of the literary disputes over culture versus civilization; it is also one of the major reasons why Expressionism was not much more than a charade: a soil that remained fundamentally impressionist could nurture it no further.) So timid have we become in matters of straightforward judgment and the shaping of reality that we habitually come to view even the present as history. Every new "ism" that crops up is hailed as the harbinger of a new humanity, and the end of every school year rings in a new epoch!

Thus everything belonging to the realm of the mind finds itself nowadays in profound disorder. Acting from tradition, and hardly aware of the reasons anymore, people attack the spirit of facts and numbers without offering anything but its negation to replace it. For if we proclaim - and who doesn't to some degree? - that our age lacks synthesis, or culture, or a sense of religiosity, or community, this is hardly more than singing the praises of the "good old days," since no one can say what cultures, religions, or communities would look like today if our laboratories and airplanes and the whole mammoth body of our society were to include them within their synthesis, and not simply dismiss them as outdated. This is merely to demand that the present surrender itself. Uncertainty, enervation and a pessimistic cast are today the hallmarks of soul.

Naturally this is all reflected in an unprecedented intellectual fragmentation. Our age accommodates side by side and in totally uncoordinated fashion such oppositions as individualism and social solidarity, aristocracy and socialism, pacifism and militarism, the lionizing of "culture" and the bustle of civilization, nationalism and internationalism, religion and natural science, intuition and rationalism, and so on ad infinitum. Excuse the analogy, but our age has an upset stomach, and it keep regurgitating bits and pieces of the same food without digesting it. Even a casual glance reveals that this kind of antitypicality - this posing of problems as pairs of opposites, this agglomeration, or these "either-or" formulations - means that too little intellectual work is being done. There is in every either-or a certain naivete, which may well befit the evaluator but ill-becomes the thinker, for whom opposites dissolve in series of transitions. And indeed, corresponding to this mode of inquiry on the practical level, an intellectual profile of our society shows a splinter-group collectivism carried to the extreme. Every reading circle has it poet; the political parties of the farmers and the manual labourers have their different philosophies; there are perhaps a hundred publishing houses in Germany, each with its more or less loosely organized circle of readers; the clergy has its network, but the followers of [Rudolf] Steiner too have their millions, and universities their prestige. I once even read something in a waiters' union newsletter about how the weltanschauung of the restuarant worker must forever be upheld.

It is a babylonian madhouse; a thousand disparate voices, ideas, and tunes assault the wanderer's ear from a thousand windows at once, and it is clear that individual is turned into a playground of anarchic forces, and morality and the intellecet disintegrate. But in the cellar of this madhouse we hear the hammering of the a Hephaestian urge to create; humanity's archetypal dreams are being realized, like flight, our seven-league boots; seeing through solid bodies, and an incredible wealth of fantasies such as in centuries past were the blissful magic of dreams. Our age creates these wonders, but it no longer feels them. It is a time of fulfillment, and fulfillments are always disappointments; our time lacks a sense of longing, a sense of some challege it hasn't yet mastered, but which gnaws at its heart.

Two Classic Films

Brief comments on two classic hollywood films with women protagonists both released in 1948 and both directed by Anatole Litvak. Both leading ladies even got Oscar nominations for their roles though none of them won. Olivia de Havilland would win the next year's Oscar for "The Heiress" (another great film, by the way). For Barbara Stanwyck it was just one of her total four nominations.

Anyway coming back to the first film. Andrea Dworkin in her book on pornography says that heterosexual culture under patriarchy is essentially homoerotic in nature. It is true that men do have sex with women but they reserve their love, which is based on mutual respect and admiration, for other men and that man's love for a woman is at its best a variation of paternalistic kindness and generosity (that is, when he is not busy beating, abusing, raping and murdering her).

Most of The Snake Pit feels like a conscious critique of this kind of heterosexual relationship. Virginia (played by Olivia de Havilland who is quite impressive and very pretty in an unshowy way) has had some "father-issues" while growing up as a kid because of which she is unable to accept the male love with its fatherly paternalism. The film begins when she is already in a mental asylum after suffering a nervous breakdown just after a few months of her marriage. She can't remember her past and her days go by as if in a haze. The doctor in charge of her "Dr. Kik" thinks it is a good idea to let her undergo eletroshock treatment which will help him establish "contact" with her so that then he can do his psychotherapy. Most of the story is then told in flashback as she reveals her life details to him and is then cured when she acknowledges all the messy details of her unconscious (usual Freudianism).

The tone of the film oscillates between that of personal psychological drama and a social problem film tackling the issues of mental illness in society and its proper treatment. We hear her monologues as voiceover (wonderfully voiced by Havilland) and we also see the doctors debating the proper course of treatment. Unlike many other films set in asylums it avoids cheap sensationalism and insensitive humour (it is still funny occasionally) while still maintaining a comfortable distance from truly harrowing nature of illness and treatment. (The electoshock therapy for example happens off camera). The overall effect then is much more palatable than Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, a film of the same period which deals with alchoholism.

Like most of the classical hollywood films of the period happy ending feels tacked on and mandatory. For most of these films one has to keep it in mind to truly appreciate the social critique the film offers. For example in this film, the whole story is how women are oppressed under paternalistic authority (even when it is kind and generous) but ultimately the good-natured psychotherapist cures her, to the extent that she even asks for her wedding ring from her husband when she gets out. The message being that women can maintain their sanity only when they give in and accept their position under patriarchy. Fassbinder, who was a huge fan of classical hollywood, said that he wanted to make films like the ones made in old hollywood but "without the hypocrisy." The ending in many of these old films feels hypocritical but as a viewer we can see it as demands of a repressive commercial ideology. It will also be interesting to compare it with Fassbinder's own Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear), which I wrote about here, his treatment of the same subject. Unlike the very model of sanity and rational composure and sensitivity, the psychiatrist in Fassbinder is a cold blooded villain who demands sex from Margit Carstensen in return of her medicine. A lot of the Freudianism presented in the film also seem dated even a little ridiculous. Fassbinder explicitly frames the image of Freud hanging from the wall to make it look like a stern patriarch looking down upon the hapless women, while in this film his image comes out like that of a wise and saintly figure. Anyway these criticisms aside, overall it is quite impressive in its treatment of a difficult subject, definitely worth watching.

I saw Sorry, Wrong Number last year but I thought I would mention it on the blog since it is not so well-known. This is the film you shouldn't read anything about before watching. Needless to say it has one of the most nailbiting and shocking climaxes in all of classical hollwood. (Very unlike the hypocritical endings I mentioned above). I am actually surprised that the censors even let it pass. Fans of Burt Lancaster will be in for a shock too, as he plays a craven minion, very unlike the macho-masculine roles he is famous for. Barbara Stanwyck is at her best here (and that is saying quite a bit). The film will feel very gimmicky in the beginning with its real-time story and flashbacks within flashbacks structure but the story really draws you in and doesn't let you go till the very end with the shocking revelation. This is a must-watch example of classic hollywood film-noir.

Heidegger on Idle Talk

Relevant to Steve's complaint about blogging, which I linked in the previous post, something I came across in "Being and Time". Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or "groundlessness", which he explains as talking about something "without previously making the thing one's own". At the same time he says that this mode of being is inescapably part of everyday reality for human beings. I couldn't find any commentary on it on internet but this gives a good overview.

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The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer.

Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein's Being and has a share in constituting Dasein's disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the entities within-the-world. To do this, one need not aim to deceive. Idle talk does not have the kind of Being which belongs to consciously passing off something as something else. The fact that something has been said groundlessly, and then gets passed along in further retelling, amounts to perverting the act of disclosing [Erchliessen] into an act of closing off [Verschliessen]. For what is said is always understood proximally as 'saying' something - that is, an uncovering something. Thus, by its very nature idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone.

This closing-off is aggravated afresh by the fact that an understanding of what is talked about is supposedly reached in idle talk. Because of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back. [...]

Idle talk, which closes things off in the way we have designated, is the kind of Being which belongs to Dasein's understanding when that understanding has been uprooted. But idle talk does not occur as a condition which is present-at-hand in something present-at-hand: idle talk has been uprooted existentially, and this uprooting is constant. Ontologically this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk it is - as Being-in-the-world - cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the world, with Others, and towards itself. To be uprooted in this manner is a possibility-of-Being only for an entity whose disclosedness is constituted by discourse as characterized by understanding and states-of-mind - that is to say, for an entity whose disclosedness, in such an ontologically constitutive state, is its "there", its 'in-the-world'. Far from amounting to a "not-Being" of Dasein, this uprooting is rather Dasein's most everyday and most stubborn reality.

Yet the obviousness and self-assurance of the average ways in which things have been interpreted, are such that while the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter.

Corralling literature

Steve Mitchelmore on blogging:

"Rather than facing up to books as unique interruptions to daily life, newspaper book coverage has corralled literature into the interminable chatter of culture. Blogging follows."

Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day

Are love and lust mutually contradictory ideas? Hannah Arendt (quoting St. Augustine) said that to her "I love you" meant the same as "I want you to be." Just affirming other's existence seems like nothing out of ordinary but there is something much deeper in the notion. Sexual desire by its very nature seems to imply that one uses other person for one's own gratification, which in turn is the same as denying other person's autonomy and identity as a human being. This was the main problem that Kant had with sex - he thought any non-procreative sex violated one of his categorical imperatives, which says "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end." (See here for more). He thought that recreational sex was morally permissible only under an explicit contract which to him was marriage and which he defined as, "the union of two persons of different sex for life-long reciprocal possession of their sexual faculties." Bummer, isn't it (and controversial too)?

Anyway coming back to the film in question, Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day takes the same notion of lust as extinguishing other's identity and autonomy to extremes. Actually the intellectual conceit in the film is nothing exceptional even though it may look like it at first glance. I mean one often hears the phrase "overcome by devouring lust", she just takes it to literal and very gory extremes. Yes, the film shows lust as (literal) cannibalism. Shane (played by Vincent Gallo sporting a terrific looking moustache) is in Paris for his honeymoon but there is an unspoken tension between him and his wife because they haven't consummated their marriage yet. He is harbouring a terrible secret that he can't speak of. Because of some mysterious experiment (never spelt out clearly) his sexual lust has transformed into a lust for flesh (literally). He is in Paris looking out for a certain Dr. Leos hoping to find a cure. The doctor is having a similar trouble at home because his wife Core (played by Beatrice Dalle, as usual at her nutty best) is plagued by a similar disease. She lures unsuspecting people using her body and then eats them. Talk about femme fatale!

As the story outline above would suggest the film is pretty extreme. I have seen two of her other films, Beau Travail and L'Intrus, both of which are similarly headscratching and very difficult films. Some would call her pretentious and deliberately frustrating (including me) but one can't deny the obvious skill and mastery of the craft on display. There is hardly any dialogue in this film, and even the few ones are totally non-expository. The editing is fragmented and full of narrative ellipsis so you will keep guessing what is happening and why someone is behaving the way they are. She doesn't explain anything in a straightforward manner. The other star of the film is her regular cinematographer Agnes Godard. She has such a great sense of texture and mood and beauty in surfaces. The other potentially frustrating thing would be to see it as a horror film. She does use motifs and ideas from horror genre but deliberately confounds viewer's expectations and not just because the tone is so distanced, cold and clinical. This will most certainly disappoint those who look for gore in horror films. There are actually only two scenes but both very graphic, which may inspire both disgust and laughter (at least it did to this viewer). Certainly a very interesting film and worth having an opinion on, even though one may not like it. I certainly didn't. May be David Cronenberg should have tried this idea. Crash - Part II? An essay on the film here which tries to place it in the horror genre.

Poster of the Day

Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (a very strange horror film, strange in over-the-top, flirting-with-ridiculousness sort of way)

Heidegger on Technology

This is an excellent tutorial explaining Heidegger's essay on technology, "The Question Concerning Technology".

The key word to understand the essay, as the tutorial explains it, would be "enframing" which as I understood it, means approaching the world through predefined categories rather than letting the world reveal or unconceal the truth on its own terms (which is actually the domain of art and poetry). This essay can also be seen as a critique of science itself though I think it is more valid in social sciences where methodologies and categories are more suspect and subject to constant questioning. Although it is also true that even in so-called "pure" sciences like Physics, modern advances have shown that previous categories are no longer valid or useful. The essay also makes it clear that techonological approach to the world precedes science and reverses the idea of technology as applied science. Somewhat related, an essay on environmental ethics which uses Heideggerian terminologies. I haven't read it in full but it looks interesting.

The Facebook Problem

More thoughts on instrumentality...

Randomly blog hopping I came across this blog in which the blogger talks about why we should all cultivate a diverse set of interests because it helps us meet lots of, what she calls, "interesting and important" people. The post contains quite a few choice quotes. Sample this (attributed to some marketing guru I think):"if your goal is to develop long-term relationships with interesting people, to focus on those whose “stock prices” are low but long-term potential high." So okay, I am now a stock ticker. After a while she herself says, "Because it involves changing oneself, rather than leveraging other people in your social circle or communities." Yes, you heard it right, "leveraging other people" and then in the next line in blithe ignorance of any sort of irony she drops the name of Tolstoy!

This is sadly nothing unexpected and out of ordinary. You see this kind of thinking and approach to the world everywhere though it is probably at its most evident and egregious on social networking sites like orkut or facebook. People create their profiles and put all sorts of fancy names just to garner a kind of cultural cachet. So David Lynch becomes "David Lynch", a signifier which denotes that he or she likes offbeat films, a tag which then helps him or her in self-advertising - or building "relationships" with "interesting" people as the blog euphemestically puts it. This way the person himself agrees in his own commodification and instrumentalization - it is as if to mean that my identity is there only in relation to other people. There is no place for authenticity here.

I personally find social interactions extremely stressful and painful but I won't deny that interacting with other people is very important for one's own intellectual and emotional growth as a person and isolation can often lead to smugness, incoherence and cause a different sort of pain, among other things. (I mean interaction with real people, not the people who talk through their books or artworks, in that sense I do just fine). I had written about some of these aspects here, briefly touching on the idea about how people like to form relationships based on "comaptibility" and "type" while at the same time completely discounting the idea that relationships can mean opening up one's intellectual horizons and willingness to see the world through a perspective which is not one's own which is in direct contrast to the kind of relationship based on facebook profiles or any other sort of instrumentalized identity. This rather epistemological and ethical idea of relationship and social interaction has been replaced with a completely shallow and materialistic idea, which I find rather sad and even a cause of despair.

John Searle on Wittgenstein

John Searle (trying to) explain Wittgenstein's philosophy on a TV program with Bryan Magee.



Lots of philosophy lessons available here. All of them look consistently brilliant and extremely helpful.

Two NYPL Discussions

The meeting of two very trendy "thinkers" of our time Slavoj Zizek and Bernhard-Henri Levy was highly publicized by the new york public library but the discussion proved to be rather disappointing. No fistfights, just a series of "I Agree But...". The audio recording of the whole session is available here.

More interesting is this video interview of Zizek in which he explains the difference between "subjective" violence, that is the violence that is perpetrated by a subject (a specific agent) which destroys the normal order of things and "objective" violence by which he means the invisible, systemic violence inherent in the system itself which helps maintain the normal order of things. As an example he says that violence in a communist society is easy to identify (even though it often leads to games about the origins of violence, "From Plato to Nato" as he says) but the violence that keeps the capitalist society going is harder to identify. He later says a few interesting things about "divine" and "mythic" violence. The interview is in five parts all of which are available on youtube.

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Next day's discussion was between James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn about the current state of the literary culture and health of mainstream criticism. Everybody seemed upbeat. At the end Mendelsohn makes some contentious points, at one place expressing his bemusement at the thought of how a million people with laptops all telling us their opinions on Moby Dick! He then mentioned a few words like authority and expertise and compared a normal person publishing a literary blog to him writing a blog about brain surgery! I will desist from expressing my outrage here. The discussion overall could have been better moderated. There was also a strange audience question asking if David Foster Wallace's suicide could be seen as a "literary gesture"!

Emil Cioran Essay

This is an excellent introductory essay on the apocalyptic and gloomy Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. The site contains a few other writings which are available in English too.

I have a second-hand copy of his wonderfully titled collection of essays called "The Temptation to Exist" with a characteristically brilliant introduction by Susan Sontag. I have read only parts of it but to me the book felt like a symptom of exactly the same disease that he is diagnosing - the disease of thinking. There is also a somewhat contradictory attitude towards consciousness and thinking. On one hand he rages against relentless intellectualization which has left everything in ruins and brought us to the end of the world and here he has a lot in common with romantic and "vitalist" thinkers, even those German intellectuals who supported fascism before the war (he was himself a fascist in his youth). On the other hand he revels in the apocalypse and gloom and thunders at everybody who seem to go on with their lives as if nothing has happened.

It is a very interesting book, but one probably needs to be fully aware of Nietzsche and Heidegger to understand all of what he is saying. As for negativity I like it more when it is done in fiction, may be we should read it as fiction too - as a mind asserting its power, nothing else.

Most of Susan Sontag's introduction is available on google books.

Intelligence and Difficult Writing

In the last couple of years or so I have tried to read philosophy but haven't been able to make much progress. Of course most of these efforts have been half-hearted and unsystematic but after all my struggle (and in most cases resulting in failure) with the texts I have come to the understanding that there are two things which are at the root of the problem: first, the technical background of my education in which we deal mostly with the "formal language" (consisting of mathematical symbols or something which can be transformed into that) which merely sounds like everyday English and second, is that we are surrounded by a culture in which language is used for the most narrow and shallow commonsensical purposes, like describing something which is obvious or expressing some proposition which can be verified and falsified by facts, or at best to play some games and have fun and other such things.

What we don't use language for is to use it to represent the process of thinking itself. What we also don't use it is to question the very foundations of our "reality." The commonsensical language already assumes things which are not obvious to these philosophers and thinkers. I had for example copied a passage from Heidegger which (understandably I think) outraged some of the readers. His language is so strange because he is questioning the most basic of statements that we make with blase indifference (like the statements starting with "something is...").

I think it is ultimately the responsibility of the readers to make that extra effort and be prepared to struggle to understand the texts. I remember reading an article about German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was notorious for being deliberately obscure and difficult, which defended his style by explaining that he was merely trying to resist the commodification of language, commodification that is so endemic to our culture, which one can see in newspapers, advertising and all the popular culture which are all built around systematic abuse of language. I can't find the link now but it was probably an article by Judith Butler where she was responding to being awarded a "bad writing prize." To call these writers elitists and obscurantist to me is not fair (though some of them may surely fit the bill.) Also sometimes you do need language which is merely utilitarian (in the shallow way) like in journalism for example and in that case surely one must avoid all complexities and potential ambiguities. (The "Politics and English Language" Essay by George Orwell is deservedly a classic making the same argument.)

Then there is the idea of thinking itself. Again as a victim of a purely technical education we are merely taught this most abstract and impersonal kind of thinking. It basically involves these two steps. 1) Take the problem and transform it into a language consisting only of mathematical symbols and 2) Use all the symbol manipulation tricks you learned in the mathematics class to transform the problem to some problem which you have already solved or to a theorem you have already proved. That's the only kind of thinking one does. (If it sounds mechanical that's not surprising. A subtopic in theoretical computer science deals with automated proving.) The one who is most efficient at doing this is called an "intelligent person". Thinking which makes one question one's personal experiences in particular and extract some general essence out of them is a completely foreign concept. The same is a thinking which tries to question the most fundamental of assumptions about what our "reality" is.

Coming back to philosophy I think the main problem also is that one needs to treat it as a whole subject and start from bottoms up like one does in science and mathematics. One needs to learn how to philosophize (that is learn to read from all over again), then only one can grasp whatever is going on in those texts. I also think it is extremely important for technical people to learn to philosophize (and not just because it helps in living an "examined life" though that is of course the most important) but it also makes their lives more fulfilling. For example if you get into an argument about ethics with these people you will be asked for "data" or "empirical proof". This is exactly the kind of shallow utilitarian rationality that philosophizing can cure us of.

Negative Thinking

The New York Times has a nice op-ed article by Barbara Ehrenreich about the value of negative thinking:

"Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work hard and still fail; you certainly wouldn’t get anywhere by adjusting your attitude or dreamily “visualizing” success.

Calvinists thought “negatively,” as we would say today, carrying a weight of guilt and foreboding that sometimes broke their spirits. It was in response to this harsh attitude that positive thinking arose — among mystics, lay healers and transcendentalists — in the 19th century, with its crowd-pleasing message that God, or the universe, is really on your side, that you can actually have whatever you want, if the wanting is focused enough."

If you haven't read her essay on the idiotic motivational self-help books, you must do so before anything else.

12 films I want to see...

There is a "meme" circulating in the film blogosphere about 12 films that you haven't seen and want to. (See here for Glenn Kenny's list). These are supposed to be obscure and difficult to see but in my case the selections are (comparatively) well-known, as befits a budding cinephile I guess. Actually quite a few of these don't seem to be available on DVD. Criterion is soon releasing the dvd of the Ophuls along with some of his other films which I hope I will finally get to soon. There are of course a lot more films I haven't seen and want to but these are the ones which came to my mind when I thought of films about which I am very curious and also which I feel are "gaps." Soviet cinema is of course a major gap, and quite unforgivable one. I have so far seen only Battleship Potemkin.

1. The Earrings of Madame De... (Max Ophuls)
2. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
3. Ivan the Terrible I&II (Sergei Eisenstein)
4. Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin)
5. Before the Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci)
6. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
7. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
8. Odd Man Out (Carol Reed)
9. Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
10. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
11. The Dead (John Huston)
12. Poison (Todd Haynes)

Defending Losers

This is an old interview of Amit Chaudhuri but I found this bit interesting and worth highlighting:

Q: Do you think Indian writing has also suffered as a result of the country's modernizing and globalizing zeal?

A: For me the position of the outsider is of great importance to the health of any society. For any cultural practice, whether it's academic or literary, the position of the outsider, the misfit, the daydreamer and even of failure are very important categories in the creation of a truly energetic and self-critical social and intellectual space. They are important components because of the latent critique of power that they have in constituting our imaginative life.

My anxiety is that in the last 20 years India, typically for a globalizing country, hasn't theorized a position for the outsider or for the misfit or for failure. Its rhetoric is concerned with success in various ways. So Indian writing in English or any other phenomenon is always spoken in terms of success and if it is not successful, it becomes invisible.

Right now we do not have a space for the irresponsible misfit, which means we do not have a space which is at an angle to power. Even those who speak against power are in some ways in powerful positions of their own. In India, everybody is some way in some kind of nexus of power. We need to regain that space for the irresponsible.

On Instrumental Reason

Listening to so many people these days, on blogs, in newspapers, in person everywhere in fact, it seems as if the only thing that is wrong with this world is that the "incentives" are not in the right place. Once you get the incentives right everything will fall into its rightful place! It makes me want to start ranting like Dostoevsky's Underground Man who was railing against the same kind of utilitarian and (shallow) rationalist thinkers in nineteenth century.

This is also I think reflects a general trend in modern societies - the growing influence of "instrumental reason" in human affairs and progressive rationalization of our social institutions. Even legal thinkers who should be concerned with ethical questions are more worried about material outcomes of any law. Also related to this is the fact that both people with backgrounds in Economics (at least those involved in policy and planning) and Management are in the positions of power and in control of the decision making bodies, two disciplines which are based mostly on instrumental thinking. (Engineering is of course the most prominent example of instrumental reasoning but thankfully they are generally not very influential, although many people in management do have backgrounds in engineering.)

One immediate effect of this has been the gradual disappearance of ethical vocabulary from the public sphere - it is as if our language itself has been depleted. I wanted to mention it in the post where I linked to an essay on "virtue ethics." Now it feels strange to even talk of something inherently good or virtuous or an act worthy of condemnation. You need to justify it in terms of the material outcomes of any action. On top of that all we get is the talk of "rights." Everyone has to right to do what he or she pleases to do so long as it doesn't interfere in the rights of others to do the same. This kind of liberalism robs us of our shared ethical precepts and vocabularies and it results in atomised society. One is free but it is a very lonely kind of freedom and a recipe of despair.

Coming back to underground man, his main grouse with people like Mill or Chernyshevsky was that their thought didn't take his freedom and identity into consideration. They didn't realize that one could choose to act even against one's own narrow material interests just to assert one's freedom and identity. In fact it is only in that choice that true meaning of morality lies. By the same logic an incentivized and rationalized society basically is an agent of dehumanization - because it robs human beings of their identities and freedom.

It is also from this perspective that I find the success of (pseudo-)Economics books which use the same homo economicus cliches to explain human affairs and the general public discourse which use similar language so depressing. If there is a more vulgar and philistine idea than "human being as utility maximizing automaton" ever thought by a human brain, I would like to know about that. The popular interpretations of Darwinian theories fall in the same category. Only this time it is not the material interests but rather biological interests (which are worse because they are supposed to be "hardwired" in the brain.) I must say that it is only the popularisers and journalists who interpret these theories that I find vulgar. I don't have any problems with these scientific disciplines or the real thinkers who must be aware of these philosophical issues.

All of this sounds very amateurish but this is also something that troubles me a lot personally. I think it is the primary source of alienation in our societies because it comes from the realization that our lives are instrumentalized as well. We are required to justify all of our actions in material terms as well, or some such notion defined in "rational" terms. This is also the reason why I find so much solace in art and literature and even blogging. You sell yourself everyday as alienated labour just so that you can buy some stupid shit. Blogging then feels like an escape, an escape into freedom.

Prince Friedrich of Homburg

Prince Friedrich of Homburg was the last work published by Kleist before he committed suicide. It couldn't be staged however as it was thought by the officials that the play could have demoralizing effect on the army. It was ironic because Kleist himself meant it to be seen as a patriotic play. His biographers believe that the failure of the play was one of the factors which aggravated his despair and was a decisive factor in making him take that drastic step.

The excellent introduction in the new directions press edition of the play also talks about his "Kant crisis". In brief, although he was always shy, awkward and hyper-sensitive as a young person, he basically had an optimistic temperament and believed in self-improvement and self-perfection through literature (which was one of the foundations of classical German culture). Then he came across the works of Kant, specially his distinctions between how things appear and how things really are. He interpreted it to mean that human mind could never reach the ultimate truth and will forever be condemned to live with lies and illusions. This philosophical despair combined with a series of failures in the real life led him to the end when he took his own life in a suicide pact with a woman who was suffering from a terminal disease.

Prince of Homburg is considered to be one of the key texts of German drama though I found it slightly underwhelming. It doesn't really have the shattering power of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck which came a couple of decades later (which I wrote about here). In a series of short scenes through multiple acts the play dramatizes how the eponymous Prussian prince wins the war against Sweden but is condemned to death by a military court because he didn't follow the military law by the book. (He basically took charge of the cavalry mistakenly thinking that the Elector was dead). Rest of the play charts his emotional state as it changes from abject terror and despair as a he faces certain death to exultation and feeling of glory after he rationalizes his death by seeing the law of the state as the absolute, objective law - kind of, state as the secular alternative for God himself. Modern readers can't help but think of German authoritarianism which lauded similar principles of individual subjection and sacralization of state and its laws. For this reason many critics think it is a proto-fascist play.

The introductory essay however says that this is a shallow and easier political interpretation and the real, more interesting way to read it as the dramatization of an individual response to the certainty of death, in a world bereft of transcendence.

Since man is psychologically incapable of dying for nothing, the problem facing the Prince becomes one of finding a way to affirm his death. For, if it is a noble pursuit to give one's life meaning, it is an absolute necessity to give meaning to one's impending death. The key to such a psychological tour de force is guilt. It is the affirmation of personal guilt before an absolute - be it God, the father, or the state - that makes it possible for the individual to walk rather than be dragged to the place of execution. By means of this psychological process, death is not only transformed into a just punishment imposed from outside, it also gives the guilty individual the welcome opportunity to atone and cleanse himself. In Prince Friedrich of Homburg, the crucial step in this process of "personalizing" death occurs when the Prince reverses his earlier protestations of innocence and outrage and admits: "Guilty, grave guilt lies heavily upon me."

The essay also compares the Prince character to a few others in German literature most notably in Kafka's story The Judgment. (Kafka claimed him as one of his influences and even called him his "spiritual companion")

By a process of voluntarily accepting guilt and punishment, these characters believe that their lives, previously marked by mere personal desire and petty whim, have been transformed and crowned by a higher meaning. Self-negation is the price of providing one's existence with transpersonal value, a value that can only be bestowed from outside by an absolute. Although the personal cost is the highest conceivable, the individual, by negating the self, liberates himself from the terrors inherent in the thoughts of personal extinction.

Finally a short extract from the play:

Prince: Life, as a dervish once said, is a journey and a short one at that. First we rise six feet above the earth and then lie six feet under. But I now want to settle down somewhere in between. Today a man can carry his head proudly upon his shoulders. By tomorrow it may tremble on his neck and lie the next day on his feet. They say, of course, the sun also shines in the next world and upon brighter fields than ours. It's only pity that the eye must rot before it can see such splendors.