This is a reply to comment by Mr. Alex Reynolds in a previous blog entry explaining my position as a fan of the Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The introduction to the said blog entry was, of course, something of a joke, a play on the postmodernist commonplace of how no narrative can be privileged to explain the complexity of life and history anymore. Thus the juxtaposition of Žižek’s cultural theory and Maria Ozawa’s pornographic videography. Consequently, an excess meaning can be traced in the demonstration of how in this era of late capitalism what has been described as the condition of postmodernity inaugurates a multiplicity of (and often contradictory) identities.

Coming from a university with a culture of student activism, I join immersions in impoverished communities, protest actions on various issues, and espouse a “nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented culture” in the Maoist mold. But then as a student of Literature in the Humanities Department, I study The Illiad, Oedipus Rex and other artifacts of Western “high culture” in the classroom. But then I also keep myself updated on the latest Korean pop songs from my classmates and friends and listen to these songs while reading on Said or the latest by Žižek in the dormitory. And in facebook, I got hit for watching the latest Harry Potter without reading the book version first.

Seriously though, I don’t think it would be fruitful to dismiss Derrida, Lacan, Žižek, and much of Post-Saussurean theory on the premise that the language these theorists use in expounding their texts lack clarity. The aim of their theoretical projects is precisely to demonstrate that what we perceive as “natural,” “obvious,” and “commonsensical” are ideologically constructed. Common sense, as Catherine Belsey notes in her book Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), is “rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation”[1] and is thus “produced in a specific society by ways in which that society talks and thinks about itself and its experience.”[2] And since “Common sense appears obvious because it is inscribed in the language we speak,”[3] a critique of ideology necessitates a reappraisal of the concept of language as “merely the medium in which autonomous individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things… transparency of language is an illusion.”[4] Belsey explains:

Partly as a consequence of this theory, the language used by its practitioners is usually far from transparent. The effect of this is to alert the reader to the opacity of language, and to avoid the “tyranny of lucidity,” the impression that what is being said must be true because it is obvious, clear and familiar… New concepts, new theories, necessitate new, unfamiliar and therefore intially difficult discourses. [5]

As Adorno and Horkheimer already pointed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): “False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization.” [6] Of course, there is a proper place for everything. I don’t use Lacanese when writing for the student paper or speak in Derridean aporias to my classmates. Anyhow, my position vis-a-vis Žižek is perhaps better captured by Filipino literary critic and poet Edel E. Garcellano:

It is not surprising that Žižek would find resonance in the heart of young scholars: The Elvis Presley of philo is a veritable compendium of film, music, philo & lit giants that are intertwined in a new light: this bestiary that would dazzle the Socratic flaneurs in MTV mix. At this point of historical flux when Marxism is a god that failed & the future isn’t even privy to Benjamin’s angel, anyone who emerges from the ruins of despair would find Žižek a comforting figure that survived the first wave of socialism but wouldn’t denounce it, assaying also as unacceptable the triumphalistic chest beating of capitalism. Which exactly fills the bill for a generation of Filipino activists who devours Žižek as a feast of texts: he represents a positive despair in view of the promise yet unfulfilled by the revolutionists of the ’70s, its deflection in the ’80s, & the subsequent rectification in the past decades to keep their hopes alive.[7]

As I’ve pointed out before, I do have reservations about Žižek. But it has nothing to do with his lack of clarity or his compulsion to be original, which as Mr. Alex Reynolds points out, leads him to cling to the most unoriginal and orthodox Leninist positions (which for me is one of the good things about Žižek!). My primary reservation would be, apart from those I already pointed out in my previous blog entry, Filipino Marxist scholar E. San Juan Jr.’s observation that Žižek does not go beyond questioning the coordinates of the present order:

Armed with Žižek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Žižek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?[8] ■

1. As cited in Isagani R. Cruz, “Ang Wika bilang Ideolohiya o ang Wika ng Teorya bilang Teorya ng Wika” in Bukod na Bukod: Mga Piling Sanaysay, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2003), 133.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 134.

5. Ibid.

6. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), xiv.

7. Edel E. Garcellano, “Theory, Theory, Theory,” Edel Garcellano: Poems Old and New, 9 May 2008, http://theworksofedelgarcellano.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/theory-theory-theory

8. E. San Juan Jr., “On Zizek’s Popularity in Diliman, Philippines, and the Problem of Freudian and Lacanian Speculations for Social Change in the Philippines and Elsewhere: A Brief Comment,” The E. San Juan Jr. Archive, 5 April 2009, http://rizalarchive.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-is-afraid-of-zizek.html

Over the last few days I have been trying to think about what I am going to write for the next term paper.  Oh yes, it has come round again.  The intolerable agony over whether or not I can write the blasted thing, the endless whinging and obvious mental imbalance induced by the mental stress I place myself under when I realise that I need to get going with writing another piece.  And all those joys only materialise once I have completed the task of settling on what I want to write about.  This is possibly more agonising that what comes after, but at least occurs over a more protracted period.

Strangely enough, despite feeling increasingly anxious about trying to fix on the topic for the next paper I find myself more motivated to read and study tonight than usual.  I have had trouble motivating myself to sit and study for long periods this term.  Last year I was quite happily sitting from 5:30pm to 10:00pm (after work) trying to work through the weekly texts and readings.  This year I have, instead, opted more for a tactic of attrition, sitting down for shorter periods more frequently to tackle the reading.  I don’t know which is better, but I was starting to wonder where the motivation to just sit and plough through had gone.  I think it is partly that I haven’t been able to allow myself to get that caught up in the studying. I was suffering too much anxiety relating to my day job and simply couldn’t cope with any more anxiety/nervous engagement in my studying.  However my working life has now calmed down and I find myself with the compelling task of writing another paper.  It is compelling, I really want to do it.  The prospect of choosing a subject that I find interesting, that I want to write about and making it my own in the process of writing about it is so exciting.

Going back to feeling anxious about the paper, I don’t think it is just a feeling of wanting mental peace by getting it out of the way that motivates me.  That would be the obvious answer and it certainly would make some kind of sense.  I have suffered so much anxiety and mental unrest during the process of writing the last two, not least as a result of truely not knowing if I was capable of writing the damned things.  It is, however, more than a need to get back to mental equilibrium that motivates me. If that were all it was then I would have given up the MA by now.  That would be a much better way of relieving the tension.  The tension, however, seems to be caused by a feeling of challenge.  It is the challenge of it that spurs me on. Not just the challenge to fulfil what is asked of me as part of my programme of study though, again that is too simple an explanation for the torture I end up putting myself through.  Again, I am quite capable of deciding enough is enough and leaving it be.  No, the challenge is far more personal than that.  Once I have some inkling of a potential subject for the paper I have to pursue it. I have to know if my intuition that I might just have something intelligible to put down on paper and in some way illuminate the random connections that occur in my mind is in any way reasonably founded.  So far that has been how it starts, I have some vague notion or some connection that I make idly during a seminar or while reading.  It appeals to me for one reason or another, fits in to my existing framework of experience while still posing enough questions and confusions to prevent me from knowing exactly what I am doing immediately.  As I explore the idea further I find out which assumptions were ill founded, compare it to other things I have been reading and discover more connections, gain a deeper insight and realise how naive many of my first thoughts on the topic were and finally (almost as if by magic) end up with a coherent thesis that  seems to sum up something that I didn’t quite know I was thinking, but there it is in front of me.

Undoubtedly my motivations for studying are informed by a not insigificant degree of self absorption.  I concede this without being particularly proud of it, but not ashamed of it either.  I don’t claim to be doing any thing great for humanity, I am just doing something I enjoy because I want to.   I find something extremely satisfying in this process of trying to grasp an idea that seems to spend an awfully long time at the edges of my consciousness.  The process of grasping or groping towards an interesting or useful idea has some kind of hold over me.  It holds me in its grasp long before I get to make any tangible progress myself.  I find it fascinating to be so motivated and compelled towards an aim that I can’t even quite make out.  I also find myself fascinated by contemplation and reflection on the process by which I am learning and manage to somehow put it together to make a coherent argument about something. It still feels surprising that I have come as far as I have through this MA.  I trust more that I can do it now, but I still don’t understand how or why.  I suppose that is why I often describe it in terms of forces or processes that act upon me, (e.g. the idea grasping me, or being subject to ‘the tyranny’ of trying to do something) because I really have difficulty conceiving of it as something that I do.  It feels much more like something that happens to me or that I happen upon.

Anyway, the subject I am trying to organise my thoughts around at the moment is some kind of comparison of Adorno and Lacan.  I am sure there are some similarities there.  The Lacanian notion of the Real that can never be directly accessed and the Adornian notion of the constellation that is organised around some invisible centre that can only be illuminted by the correct configuration of the constellation.  Admittedly it might be a little tenuous, but I am determined to find out why I think they are similar.  Even if I am wrong and I have to conclude they are completely different.  I am trusting my instincts here though and I think there is something interesting or productive in this intuition and I want to find out what it is.

Uma das coisas de que o marxismo mais interessante e atual não poderia prescindir é do humor. Converso muito sobre isso com um amigo que, se não admitiria sem ressalvas a alcunha de marxista, sabe justamente quais os limites de uma nomeação como esta, e tem motivos mais que aceitáveis para rejeitá-la – e isto sem sair do marco de uma crítica marxista da cultura, se assim o quisermos.

O quanto vale um nome que nos determina como pertencentes a um grupo? Até que ponto o marxismo pode ser, ele próprio, um conjunto fechado de concepções políticas-morais-científicas sem cabular a si mesmo como uma postura filosófica aberta, diante de um real que se torna mais e mais complexo? (Falo aqui não de anos ou décadas, mas de um século inteiro e um pouco mais – o tempo no qual o capitalismo se tornou imensamente mais capcioso e ofensivo; tempo também no qual o cinema apareceu e se converteu, por vezes, em um campo especialíssimo de exposição dos conflitos que fizeram este século tão violento e extremo.)

A dificuldade das perguntas acima tem a ver, penso eu, com a dificuldade de o intelectual se posicionar diante do próprio objeto da crítica. Quanto mais intrincado é este objeto, mais intrincada é a tarefa de quem, por algum motivo talvez transcendente, não consegue suportá-lo sem que a mente refugue, até o ponto em que uma visão de mundo se transforma definitivamente em uma intriga existencial. Pensar não é um exercício de pura liberdade, como querem os idealistas, mas antes um adoecimento do espírito de quem, por mero azar ou, quem há de saber?, por penitência divina, insurgiu no mundo quando ele mais repercutia insidiosamente a contradição entre a emergência de uma luta e a sensibilidade que a detecta, ou – o que é a mesma coisa – entre a beleza da imagem que vicia, a paixão pelas musas da juventude, o espelhamento no herói dos westerns, todas essas patologias divertidas, tipicamente cinéfilas, de um lado, e de outro a consciência hostil a uma forma de vida que nos oprime, retirando-nos o que haveria de ser mais nosso, precisamente com a adequação das identidades ao desafogamento a que presta serviço a fruição estética, ou o que sobrou dela, hoje em dia. Velho e tortuoso problema. Godard bem o sabia, muito antes de mim.

Mas e o humor? Melhor seria a pergunta sobre qual humor se pode atrevidamente ressoar, com os lábios em figura de sorriso, as sobrancelhas se levantando, o olhar se tornando arguto, e o estereótipo ambíguo: ou este é demasiadamente certo e nos aprisiona, ou precisa ser repudiado para que seja, ele também, a nossa fonte infindável de novos humores. Ao contrário do que querem alguns, o supremo humor do intelectual ainda é a ironia, e ninguém soube disso melhor que Adorno. De uma das suas páginas mais belas, reproduzida abaixo, extraio as explicações possíveis para os meus mais particulares devaneios. Mas, antes, um aviso: a ironia só se revela quando o texto é relido, sem pressa, com uma paciência proporcional ao desespero que ele suscita.

O tipo presunçoso que só se considera alguma coisa ao ser confirmado pelo papel que desempenha em coletivos que não o são, e que existem meramente em nome da coletividade; o representante com uma braçadeira; o orador arrebatado, que tempera seu discurso com espirituosidade salutar e antecede sua observação final com um espirituoso “Oxalá assim fosse”; o abutre caridoso e o catedrático que correm de um congresso a outro – todos eles, um dia, provocaram o riso próprio dos ingênuos, dos provincianos e dos pequeno-burgueses. Agora, a semelhança com a sátira oitocentista foi descartada; o princípio difundiu-se, de forma obstinada, das caricaturas para a totalidade da classe burguesa. Não apenas seus membros foram submetidos a um persistente controle social, pela competição e pela cooptação em sua vida profissional, como também sua vida particular foi absorvida pelas formações reificadas em que se cristalizaram as relações interpessoais. As razões, para começar, são cruamente materiais: somente proclamando o consentimento através de serviços louváveis prestados à comunidade como tal, pela aceitação num grupo reconhecido, nem que seja uma simples loja maçônica degenerada em clube de boliche, é que se consegue a confiança, compensada pela conquista de fregueses e clientes e pela concessão de sinecuras. O cidadão substancial não se qualifica meramente pelo crédito bancário, nem tampouco pelos deveres para com suas organizações; ele deve dar seu sangue, e também o tempo livre que lhe sobra da roubalheira, ao posto de presidente ou tesoureiro de comissões para as quais tanto é arrastado quanto sucumbe. Não lhe resta nenhuma esperança, a não ser a homenagem obrigatória na circular do clube quando o ataque cardíaco o alcança. Não ser membro de coisa alguma é despertar suspeitas: quando se pleiteia a naturalização, é-se expressamente solicitado a arrolar os grupos a que se pertence. Isso, porém, racionalizado como sendo a disposição do indivíduo de abandonar seu egoísmo e de se dedicar a um todo – que, a rigor, nada mais é do que a objetivização universal do egoísmo –, reflete-se no comportamento das pessoas. Impotente numa sociedade esmagadora, o indivíduo só vivencia a si mesmo enquanto socialmente mediado. Assim, as instituições criadas pelas pessoas são ainda mais fetichizadas: desde o momento em que os sujeitos passaram a se conhecer somente como intérpretes das instituições, estas adquiriram o aspecto de algo divinamente ordenado. O sujeito sente-se até a medula – certa vez, ouvi um patife usar publicamente essa expressão sem despertar risos – mulher de médico, membro de um corpo docente ou presidente da comissão de especialistas religiosos, do mesmo modo que, em outras épocas, alguém podia sentir-se parte de uma família ou de uma tribo. Ele volta a se tornar, na consciência, aquilo que era em seu ser, de qualquer maneira. Comparada com a ilusão da personalidade autônoma, que teria uma existência independente na sociedade da mercadoria, essa consciência é a verdade. O sujeito realmente não é nada além de mulher de médico, membro do corpo docente ou especialista em religião. Mas a verdade negativa transforma-se numa mentira como positividade. Quanto menos sentido funcional tem a divisão social do trabalho, mais obstinadamente os sujeitos se agarram àquilo que a fatalidade social lhes infligiu. A alienação transforma-se em intimidade, a desumanização, em humanidade, e a extinção do sujeito, em sua confirmação. A socialização dos seres humanos, hoje em dia, perpetua sua associalidade, ao mesmo tempo que não permite ao desajustado social nem sequer orgulhar-se de ser humano.

O texto inteiro, intitulado Mensagens em uma Garrafa, está publicado nessa preciosa coletânea organizada por Slavoj Zizek, livro que tenho como indispensável para a racionalização de uma série de angústias, como a que deu origem a este post.

clique na imagem do livro para baixá-lo.

Hoje teremos dois livros:

Espistemología y Ciencias Sociales

Índice:

-Sociedad

-Sociología e investigación empírica

-Sobre la objetividad en ciencias sociales

-Sobre la situación actual de la investigación social empírica en Alemania

-Trabajo en equipo e investigación social

-Sobre el estadio actual de la sociología alemana

-Teoría de la sociedad e investigación empírica

-Investigación social empírica

Introdução a Sociologia, último curso ministrado por Theodor Adorno.

The last of my posts on Adorno’s dreams (for now):

I had an indescribably beautiful and elegant mistress; she reminded me of A., but had something of the grade of a dame about her. I was extremely proud of her. She told me that I absolutely had to acquire a prick-washing machine. I pointed out that I took a bath every day and that I kept myself scrupulously clean. She replied that only such a machine could guarantee that one would be free of every objectionable odour in the relevant place. Only if I were to buy one would she make love to me with her mouth. I was uncertain whether she might not be a saleswoman for the firm that manufactured the machine.

Another dream from Adorno’s Dream Notes:

St Charles Borromeo is said to have tried to enter the man on the cross through his anus. Through a miracle, this had opened to receive him and Borromeo had vanished inside completely. This is why he had been canonised. It was not quite clear whether he had performed this act on the living Jesus or a statue. Nevertheless, I saw clearly how he clambered around on a cross and busied himself between Jesus’ legs. By profession Borromeo is said to have been a colonel … That is why the church is known as St Borromäus im Gedärme (St Borromeo in the Guts) or, as the Bavarians say, St Borromäus im Oarsch (St Borromeo in the Arse).

WORK, PLAY & BOREDOM

Call for Papers on ‘Work, Play & Boredom’ for an ephemera Conference at University of St. Andrews, 5-7 May 2010. Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2010.

In recent years, play has become an abiding concern in the popular business literature and a crucial aspect of organizational culture. While managerial interest in play has certainly been with us for some time, there is a sense that organizations are becoming ever-more receptive to incorporating fun and frivolity into everyday working life. Team-building exercises, simulation games, puzzle-solving activities, office parties, themed dress-down days, and colourful, aesthetically-stimulating workplaces are notable examples of this trend. Through play, employees are encouraged to express themselves and their capabilities, thus enhancing job satisfaction, motivation, and commitment. Play also serves to unleash an untapped creative potential in management thinking that will supposedly result in innovative product design, imaginative marketing strategies and, ultimately, superior organizational performance. Play, it seems, is a very serious business indeed.

But this has not always been the case. Until very recently, play was seen as the antithesis of work. Classical industrial theory, for examples, hinges on a fundamental distinction between waged labour and recreation. Play at work is thought to pose a threat not only to labour discipline, but also to the very basis of the wage bargain: in exchange for a day’s pay, workers are expected to leave their pleasures at home. Given this context, we can well understand Adorno’s (1978: 228) comment that the purposeless play of children – completely detached from selling one’s labour to earn a living – unconsciously rehearses the ‘right life’. But play no longer holds the promise of life after capitalism, as it once did for Adorno; today, the ‘unreality of games’ is fully incorporated within the reality of  
organizations. When employees are urged to reach out to their ‘inner child’ (Miller, 1997: 255), it becomes clear that the traditional boundary between work and play is in the process of being demolished.

A certain utopianism underpins contemporary debates about play at work, evoking the pre-Lapsarian ideal of a happy life without hard work. In this respect, organizations seem to have taken notice of Burke’s (1971: 47) compelling vision of paradise: ‘My formula for utopia is simple: it is a community in which everyone plays at work and works at play. Anything less would fail to satisfy me for long’. But such idealism is not necessarily desirable. For while play promises to relieve the monotony and boredom of work, it is intimately connected to new forms of management control: it is part of the panoply of techniques that seek to align the personal desires of workers with bottom-line corporate objectives. We should not be surprised, then, when an overbearing emphasis on fun in the workplace leads to cynicism, alienation, and resentment from employees (Fleming, 2005).

While play at work has been extensively discussed in the popular and academic literature, the role of boredom in organisations has been somewhat neglected. It seems that boredom is destined to share the fate of other ‘negative emotions’, such as anger and contempt, which have generally been silenced in organization studies (Pelzer 2005). But boredom remains an important part of organisational life. As Walter Benjamin (1999: 105) observes, ‘we are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for’. Boredom thus contains a sense of anticipation, even promise: ‘Boredom is the threshold to great deeds’ (ibid.). Since capitalism is preoccupied with fun and games, perhaps it is boredom rather than play that now serves unconsciously to rehearse the ‘right life’ in contemporary times.

This ephemera conference and special issue ask its participants to explore the interrelated themes of work, play, and boredom alongside an exploration of the cultural and political context out of which they have emerged.

Possible topics include:
-    The politics of play
-    Play and reality
-    Anthropology of play
-    Play and utopia
-    The boredom of play
-    Boredom as resistance
-    Identity and authenticity when played
-    The blurring of work and play
-    Playfulness at work
-    Creativity and play
-    Experience economy
-    Management games
-    Cultures of fun
-    Play and pedagogy
-    Seriousness and indifference
-    Foolishness and fooling around
-    Tedium and repetition
-    Humour, jokes, and cynicism
-    Childishness and management
-    Invention and innovation through play
-    Organizing spontaneity

The best papers of the conference will be published in a special issue of ephemera.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Author of many books, including his recent Power at Play: The Relationship between Play, Work and Governance (2009, Palgrave Macmillan).

Professor René ten Bos, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His many books include Fashion and Utopia in Management Thinking (John Benjamins, 2000).

Dates and Location:

5-7 May 2010 at School of Management, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.

Deadline, Conference Website, and Further Information:

The deadline for abstracts is 31 January 2010. The abstracts should be submitted as a Word document to Martyna Sliwa at martyna.sliwa@newcastle.ac.uk  The conference fee has not been set yet, as it is dependent on the number of participants, but will be kept to a minimum. PhD candidates pay a reduced fee.

Further information about the conference can be found on the conference website: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/conference With queries, you can also contact one of the conference organizers: Bent Meier Sørensen (bem.lpf@cbs.dk), Lena Olaison (lo.lpf@cbs.dk), Martyna Sliwa (martyna.sliwa@ncl.ac.uk), Nick Butler (nick.butler@st-andrews.ac.uk), Stephen Dunne (s.dunne@le.ac.uk), Sverre Spoelstra (sverre.spoelstra@fek.lu.se).

References:

Adorno, T. (1978) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
Burke, R. (1971) ‘“Work” and “play”’, Ethics, 82(1): 33-47.
Fleming, P. (2005) ‘Workers’ playtime? Boundaries and cynicism in a “culture of fun” programme’, Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 41(3): 285-303.
Miller, J. (1997) ‘All work and no play may be harming your business’, Management Development Review, 10(6/7): 254-255.
Pelzer, P. (2005) ‘Contempt and organization: Present in practice – Ignored by research?’ Organization Studies, 26(8): 1217-1227.

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Some of the best Adorno I have read – from his Dream Notes:

A ceremony in which I had been solemnly installed as head of music in a high school. The repulsive old music teacher, Herr Weber, together with a new music teacher danced in attendance on me. After that, there was a great celebratory ball. I danced with a giant yellowish-brown Great Dane – as a child such a dog had been of great importance in my life. He walked on his hind legs and wore evening dress. I submitted entirely to the dog and, as a man with no gift for dancing, I had the feeling that I was able to dance for the first time in my life, secure and without inhibition. Occasionally, we kissed, the dog and I.

En los últimos dos días he venido intentando delinear el argumento que quiero presentar mañana en la mesa del V Simposio de Estudiantes de Filosofía que girará en torno al comic Watchmen. Primero, una corrección – según me informaron hoy día, la mesa se ha movido al Auditorio de Humanidades de la PUCP, mañana jueves a las 4pm (originalmente sería en la Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya). Así que si alguien está por ahí, y está interesado, es bienvenido a darse una vuelta.

La primera parte del argumento, en el nivel del texto, partió de Watchmen para elaborar el significado cultural del superhéroe y, sobre todo, lo que significa desmontar ese ideal en su concepción clásica tal como lo hicieron Alan Moore y Dave Gibbons a partir de Watchmen. La segunda parte, desde una suerte de metatexto, busca extrapolar la lógica de lo que nos ofrece Watchmen para intentar mapearlo a una concepción diferente de cómo se produce, se consume y se intercambia la cultura. Aquí el argumento se puso decisivamente más pastrulo.

Lo que quiero hacer en la tercera parte es dar otro paso hacia atrás, a algo así como un meta-meta-texto, para hacer una lectura de la lectura que he intentado hacer. Es decir, ¿por qué Watchmen nos permite realizar esta extrapolación? ¿Qué tiene de especial, y cómo debe verse modificada nuestra aproximación al “texto” en este sentido, para responder a la lógica cultural que he querido presentar en la segunda parte?

Es importante responder a estas preguntas porque, en verdad, nos enfrentamos a dos ideas un poco escandalosas. La primera, es que todo esto se pueda desprender de un “texto” como puede ser Watchmen. Obviamente hemos extrapolado esto y lo hemos llevado a niveles que, quizás, no pretendía llegar, pero hemos tomado Watchmen como el punto de partida de una narrativa cultural que hemos ido desplegando siempre a partir de lo que, me parece, es quizás su mensaje más interesante. Por otro lado, he postulado que este mensaje es, justamente, no sólo el desmontaje de la idea infantil e ingenua de los superhéroes, sino el desmontaje de un nodo articulador cultural. Es decir: el desmontaje de la idea de que algunas personas están, por alguna razón esencial, legitimadas para producir la cultura, o de que algunas ideas están legitimadas para ser más importantes, mientras que las demás personas o ideas simplemente no lo están.

Ésta es la idea que comúnmente ha significado la distinción entre una “cultura ilustrada”, de ideas legitimadas formuladas por las personas legitimadas para formularlas, que agrupa todo lo que es verdadera cultura; y una “cultura popular”, donde todos los demás, “los que no saben” pueden dedicarse a hacer sus cosas, a tener sus expresiones y manifestaciones de todo tipo, y todo está muy bien, siempre y cuando quede claro que la cultura ilustrada tiene más valor y es más verdadera, auténtica, profunda, significativa, que la cultura popular. La cultura popular no sabe apreciar la cultura ilustrada; la cultura ilustrada no aprecia la cultura popular porque no encuentra en ella nada que apreciar. Por el contrario, a partir de la idea de las industrias culturales que introducen Adorno y Horkheimer con su Dialéctica de la Ilustración, las industrias culturales y la cultura popular que producen, serialmente y en masa, son vistos simplemente como mecanismos de engaños de masas: recursos que utilizan gobiernos totalitarios, o clases dominantes, para mantener a las clases dominadas bajo control y, de cierto modo, sonámbulas ante lo que efectivamente está pasando. Son, en cambio, los intelectuales que saben apreciar la cultura ilustrada (aquella que no es industrial, que no es comercial, que se produce con un propósito artístico o ilustrado – aquella que tiene, como diría Benjamin, “aura”) los que pueden ver más allá del engaño de la cultura popular y no verse sometidos por sus mecanismos de dominación.

La mayor parte de expresiones culturales de nuestro siglo quedan excluidas de la cultura ilustrada – la radio, la televisión, el cine (al menos en su gran mayoría), por supuesto que todo lo que vino con Internet, y sí, también los comics. Todas estas expresiones vistas como un derivado más de la lógica del mercado, no tienen, por ello, nada más que ofrecer pues no son formuladas con el propósito de ser analizadas, sino consumidas lineal, ciegamente. El individuo que consume este universo simbólico, se dice, no se detiene a considerar lo que hace, sino que es cómplice sin saberlo de su propio sonambulismo.

Analogicemos esto de nuevo con la lógica Watchmeniana: esto es el equivalente a decir que los superhéroes están legitimados por sus propios superpoderes, y que responden a un mandato superior, de algún tipo, de protegernos. Están del lado del bien, y somos afortunados de tenerlos con nosotros porque nos protegen de las fuerzas del mal – Lex Luthor, la Unión Soviética, psicópatas como el Joker, etc. De la misma manera, tenemos guardianes de la cultura que se encargan de proteger por nosotros lo ilustrado, aquello que vale la pena, haciendo uso de sus superpoderes culturales.

Pero un momento… cuando descubrimos que, en verdad, no hay nada especial que haga de los superhéroes propiamente superhéroes, y que sus superpoderes son producto de una contingencia histórica, y que, además, son caracteres que exhiben tantas fallas, complejidades e imperfecciones como nosotros mismos… Descubrimos también que ellos no están, entonces, tan legitimados como creíamos que lo estaban para proteger lo ilustrado, al mismo tiempo que nosotros, si se nos viene en gana, estamos tan legitimados como queramos estarlo para expresarnos, para formular ideas, para proponer modelos, para experimentar con ellos. En ese momento deja de ser tan obvia la separación entre cultura popular y cultura ilustrada.

En ese momento empieza a tener sentido el desprender toda una narrativa cultural a partir de un comic.

Y hay, además, algo singular respecto al comic. El comic no es cualquier formato, y sería erróneo negarle una especificidad. Porque el comic ofrece una relación muy especial con el lector, que Watchmen sabe explotar de manera muy especial. Son dos características saltantes que lo hacen especialmente interesante: la relación que establece con el espacio, y la relación que establece con el tiempo – ambas las cuales están, por supuesto, íntimamente ligadas.

Por su disposición visual, el comic nos obliga a relacionarnos con la manera espacial como está distribuida una narrativa. Aunque no hay necesariamente indicadores claros respecto a cómo debe seguirse la lectura de los paneles en una página, aprendemos rápidamente a discernir los diferentes caminos que existen para reconstruir mentalmente la historia que se nos intenta contar. Aquí el elemento clave es, en realidad, el espacio que existe entre los paneles. Cada panel nos da un segmento parcial de información, que es continuada por el siguiente. Sin embargo, en ese espacio blanco que existe entre panel y panel, no hay nada, o mejor dicho, hay un espacio vacío que es rellenado por la imaginación del lector. Es, a pesar de su alto contenido visual, lo que Marshall McLuhan llamaría un “medio frío”: un medio que tiene los suficientes vacíos como para involucrar al usuario a llenarlos con su propia información. Medios que invitan, inevitablemente, a una mayor participación e involucramiento. La narrativa que se teje entre los paneles de un comic se presta singularmente a la co-creación por parte del lector, precisamente porque está repleta de estos espacios vacíos que rellenamos automáticamente conforme avanza nuestra lectura.

Lo que rellenamos no son solamente esas transiciones, esos espacios entre los paneles, sino que estamos permanentemente introduciendo, también, la variable temporal de lo que ocurre entre los paneles, y dentro de los paneles mismos. Entre un panel y otro puede pasar un segundo, un minuto, una hora, o diez mil años, y en el transcurso de un mismo panel podemos presenciar el desenvolvimiento de una acción que se despliega sobre la línea del tiempo, pero que es representada a través de un único cuadro estático. Eso es suficiente para que nosotros completemos lo demás. El comic es un medio de indicios, de pistas, de sugerencias, que nos aporta una serie de piezas de un rompecabezas que, sin embargo, corresponde a nosotros reconstruir de una manera que tenga sentido: la goma que utilizamos para pegar las piezas no es otra que la de nuestra propia imaginación.

Por todo esto es el comic un medio híbrido por excelencia. Es heredero de la tradición visual del cine, la fotografía y la pintura, encontrado con la tradición literaria de la imprenta, pero no es ni la una ni la otra. Es al mismo tiempo la hibridación entre una tradición conceptual occidental que se ha visto fuertemente influencia por una tradición conceptual oriental que se fusiona a través del manga y del anime. Y es, al mismo tiempo, un producto cultural de la era industrial, un objeto realizado para su consumo masivo, para su intercambio comercial. Scott McCloud quizás explora mejor que nadie la singularidad del medio del comic, en uno de los intentos más conocidos por formularla como medio artístico, en su libro Understanding Comics.

El comic es, además, una forma expresiva/artística que ha estado principalmente asociada con el universo de la cultura popular, la mayor parte de su historia. Es ampliamente considerado, sin embargo, que Watchmen fue, si no la principal, una de las más importantes obras que ayudaron a establecer la idea de que el medio del comic se prestaba para mucho más. Watchmen introdujo, si quieren, la idea de que un comic podía explorar, sin salir del ámbito y el formato del medio, temas más complejos y demandantes hacia los lectores. Eliminó la noción de que el comic era un medio destinado únicamente al entretenimiento, sino que mostró como a partir del entretenimiento mismo se podía llevar a los lectores en un recorrido de exploración de temáticas que escapaban a lo que la historia misma contaba. El camino que he intentado que recorramos juntos aquí busca ser un ejemplo de eso: de que Watchmen puede ser tomado como el punto de partida de la construcción de una historia más amplia en la cual nos involucramos como lectores, haciendo un tipo de lectura distinta, donde somos cómplices en la reconstrucción. Es ampliamente considerado que Watchmen marcó el paso a la madurez del comic, no porque empezara a tocar temas serios, sino porque mostró que podían abordarse temas serios y complejos desde la realidad misma del comic, sin pretender escapar a lo “popular” para volverse algún tipo de medio ilustrado. El paso a la madurez está, además, simbólicamente demarcado por la superación de la noción ingenua, lineal del superhéroe para introducirnos de lleno en un universo de personajes psicológica y moralmente complejos. Lejos de ser historias donde el bien y el mal están claramente delimitados, las historias que se empezaron a contar en esa época (y no es coincidencia que haya sido precisamente esa época) empezaron a reflejar una serie de tonalidades de gris y matices de color que, en gran medida, el público consumidor también reclamaba.

La cultura popular ha crecido enormemente en complejidad conceptual, así como en complejidad moral. La complejidad conceptual es algo que explora Steven Johnson en su libro Everything Bad Is Good For You: los videojuegos desarrollan finos mecanismos de ensayo y error y elaboración de estrategias sobre la marcha, mientras que la televisión actual, liberada de la programación lineal (primero por los VHSs, luego por los DVDs y ahora por YouTube) permitió a los televidentes manejar grados más altos de complejidad donde antes las historias eran sumamente unidimensionales. La carga mental que significa hoy, por ejemplo hacerle seguimiento a todos los cabos sueltos, personajes, e historias entrecruzadas de una serie televisiva como Lost sólo es posible porque podemos hoy día ver los episodios todas las veces que queramos, y luego discutir teorías y posibilidades con otros usuarios en línea.

Al mismo tiempo, la complejidad moral se incrementa porque la simplicidad moral que la cultura popular de antaño ofrecía terminó por desgastarse y chocarse con una realidad que se volvió ella misma más compleja. La reivindicación de la cultura popular por parte de diversos campos de estudio hizo también posible que empezaran a desentrañarse complejidades que no habían sido previamente encontradas. En todo este proceso, la distinción tradicional, adorno-horkheimeriana, entre cultura de masas y cultura ilustrada dejó de resultar tan explicativa como alguna vez lo había sido. Lo ilustrado se vulgarizó a medida que sus temas empezaron a incorporarse de una u otra manera en productos construidos para su consumo masivo; y lo popular se “ilustró” a medida que sus productos empezaron a volverse objeto de estudio y de reflexión por parte de la cultura ilustrada. El resultado de todo esto es que deja de tener tanto sentido insistir en que ambos campos están claramente delimitados, o que deberían estarlo. Empiezan a aparecer espacios híbridos de intercambio, donde, de nuevo, ya no son unos cuantos superhéroes los legitimados para tomar la batuta y establecer las distinciones entre lo que es y lo que no es, sino que empezamos a regalar las licencias para tener superpoderes culturales, y luego empezamos a filtrar sobre la marcha los resultados que resultan más interesantes de los que no.

Todo esto, sin embargo, partió de Watchmen. Creo que Watchmen nos permite contar una historia sumamente interesante de la manera como hemos venido a interpretar nuestra propia cultura en los últimos 30 años. No es que la historia de fondo sea fundamentalmente nuevo; pero sí que está magistralmente ejecutado, y que su ejecución magistral llegó en el momento justo para llenar una demanda cultural latente: la de complejizar aquello que podía decirse desde los medios identificados como de la “cultura popular”, y difuminar un poco las distinciones entre culturas cuyas relaciones han sido mayormente asimétricas. No es que esto sea sencillo, sino que es sumamente traumático. Para aquello que mantenemos vínculos con el mundo académico, tanto más aún: ¿esto quiere decir que no especialistas se pronunciarán sobre temas especializados? Sí, quiere decir eso, y quiere decir también que no te pedirán permiso, y que no se detendrán aunque te moleste. Es inverosímil pensar que podemos retornar a una idea de superhéroe del pensamiento, o superhéroe conceptual, que sea analóga a la idea de un superhéroe como el Superman de los años cincuentas. Pero más aún, hay una enorme oportunidad perdida si es que pensamos, además, que eso sería deseable.

La filosofía misma se ve amenazada por esto. No con que vaya a desaparecer, que finalmente no creo que suceda. Tampoco con que se vuelva irrelevante. Pero sí con el hecho de estar sistemáticamente excluyendo de su discurso y de su reflexión todo un universo de objetos, personas e ideas interesantes que pueden aportar mucho a sus conversaciones. La filosofía es muy buena para exportar conceptos que luego otras disciplinas, otros estudios, llevan por caminos sumamente sugerentes y creativos; pero es, en cambio, muy mala para realizar luego la importación, el circuito de feedback que le permita retroalimentarse y explorar ella misma nuevas posibilidades.

Cuando dejamos de pensar en los filósofos como superhéroes del pensamiento, dotados de algún tipo particular de superpoder, entonces empezamos a reconocer en la vida cotidiana, en las expresiones de los demás, en el mundo en general, todo un nuevo conjunto de problemas sobre los cuales podemos pensar “filosóficamente”. Pero si no lo hacemos, la dirección que toma la cultura simplemente será una diferente a la que los superhéroes del pensamiento tengan, y el rol que puedan jugar en ese camino no podrá ser sino uno menor. Tales de Mileto decía que “todo está lleno de dioses”, y el argumento que he querido formular aquí, a partir de Watchmen, es más o menos el mismo, pero cambiando lo que tiene que ser cambiado: todo es susceptible de ser pensado filosóficamente. Lo interesante radicará, justamente, en lo interesantes que sean los resultados que encontramos en el camino, como formas de expresión artística, como redefiniciones de problemas, o incluso como modelos para reorganizar la sociedad de una manera más “justa” – digamos, mejor, de una manera más feliz .

Self Portrait by Bruce McGaw. Oil on canvas, 1963. Photo from Bluepinecone.

MINIMA MORALIA: Reflections from Damaged Life. By THEODOR ADORNO

PART TWO: 1945. Aphorism #51: Memento.

Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott

51

Memento. – A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants to say.

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists, has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigour will benefit others at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty.

The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of the nineteenth century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or for worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic intention of his thought.

The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a compact style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, and the temptation to recondite and pretentious slovenliness, there is no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style. Locke’s platitudes are no justification for Hamann’s obscurities.

Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.

The Echternach dancing procession is not the march of the World Spirit;¹ limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction.

Scepticism is called for in the face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are ‘too beautiful’. Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity. The dream of an existence without shame, which the passion for language clings to even though forbidden to depict it as content, is to be maliciously strangled. The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter at hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well.

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

–Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott

Footnote: 1. Echternach is a town in Luxemburg, whose dance procession at Whitsun advances in a movement of three steps forward, and two steps backward.

Of all those interviewed in Prill & Schneider’s biographical film Adorno: Der Bürger als Revolutionär, I think Alexander Kluge comes across as the one who really gets inside Adorno’s thought and comprehends it. He seems to understand him in ways even Adorno’s research assistant didn’t. Aside from these insights the film is worth watching for clips of Bertolt Brecht coming up against Senator McCarthy, and great cameos from Rüdiger Safranski and a pipe-smoking Richard Sennett. In a different interview, upon receiving this year’s Adorno Prize, Kluge gives his thoughts on why, at the height of the ‘68 protests, Adorno might have given a lecture on Goethe’s Iphigenie.

1. Indie Rock

Indie rock is a genre of rock music that originated in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The term is often used to describe the means of production and distribution of independent underground music, as well as the style of music that was first associated with this means of production.^[1] Indie rock artists are known for placing a premium on maintaining complete control of their music and careers, releasing albums on independent record labels (sometimes self-owned and operated) and relying on touring, word-of-mouth, airplay on independent or college radio stations, and in recent years, the Internet for promotion. Musicians classified as indie rock are typically signed to independent record labels, rather than major record labels, although there are many examples of indie musicians switching to major labels mid-career. This practice blurs the lines between indie and mainstream music and is often the subject of debate amongst fans. Indeed, some bands that have spent most of their careers on major labels are still occasionally referred to by the press as indie rock because of their sound or aesthetic.

2. 7th-day Adventism

The Seventh-day Adventist Church (commonly abbreviated “Adventist“^[3]) is a Christian denomination which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday,^[4] the original seventh day of the Judeo-Christian week, as the Sabbath, and by its emphasis on the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ. It is the eighth largest international body of Christians^[5]. The denomination grew out of the Millerite movement in the United States during the middle part of the 19th century and was formally established in 1863.^[6][7] Among its founders was Ellen G. White, whose extensive writings are still held in high regard by Seventh-day Adventists today.

3. The Culture Industry

Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who argued in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods – through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. This was reference to an earlier demarcation in needs by Herbert Marcuse (see Eros and Civilization (1955))

MINIMA MORALIA: Reflections from the damaged life. By THEODOR ADORNO

PART ONE: 1944. Aphorisms #10 & 11: Separated-united. & Table and bed.

Translated by Dennis Redmond

10

Separated-united. – Marriage, whose despicable parody lives on in a time when the basis of the human right of marriage has been withdrawn, serves today mostly as a trick of self-preservation: each of the two conspirators deflects the responsibility for any villainy which they might commit onto the other, while in truth they exist together opaquely and swampily. The only proper marriage would be one, in which both have an independent life for themselves, without the fusion which rests on an economically compulsory community of interest, but which instead would involve taking mutual responsibility for each other out of freedom. Marriage as a community of interest inexorably signifies the degradation of the interested parties, and what is perfidious about the existing state of affairs, is that noone, even if one knew of this, can avoid such degradation. Sometimes one might entertain the thought that it is only those who are emancipated from the pursuit of interests, that is to say the rich, who retain the possibility of a marriage without shame. But this possibility is entirely formal, because those who are privileged are precisely the ones to whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature – otherwise they would not maintain their privileges.

11

Table and bed. – As soon as human beings divorce, even the most kind-hearted, friendly and educated ones, a cloud of dust enshrouds and daubs everything it touches. It is as if the sphere of intimacy, the inattentive trust of the common life is transformed into a poisonous substance, once the relationships are broken, in which they rested. What is intimate between human beings is compassion, patience, refuge for personal characteristics. If it is distorted, then the moment of weakness therein hoves into view, and during divorces such a turn towards the outside is unavoidable. Things which were once signs of loving care, pictures of reconciliation, make themselves suddenly self-standing as values and show their evil, cold and pernicious side. After separations, professors break into the dwellings of their wives, in order to carry off objects from the desk, and well-appointed ladies denounce their men for tax-evasion. If marriage afforded one of the last possibilities of constructing humane cells in the inhuman generality, then the generality revenges itself in its disassembly [Zerfall], by taking control of that which was apparently an exception, the alienated social orders of justice and property which underlies it and which pours scorn on those who thought themselves secure from it. Precisely that which is safeguarded turns into the cruel requisite of being sacrificed. The more “generously” the lovebirds originally behaved with each other, the less thay thought of ownership and obligation, the more horrid the humiliation. For it is even in the realm of the juridically undefined, in quarrel, defamation, in the endless conflict of interests flourishes. Everything shadowy, on whose ground the institution of marriage is raised, the barbaric access of the man to the property and labor of the woman, the not less barbaric sexual oppression, which tendentially compels the man to take lifelong responsibility for someone with whom he once took pleasure in sleeping with – this this crawls out of the cellars and fundaments into the open, when the house is demolished. Those who once experienced the good generality in the restricted belonging to each other, are now compelled by the society to consider themselves scoundrels and to learn, that they are the same as the gneerality of unrestricted nastiness outside. The generality proves itself in divorce as the mark of shame of the particular, because the particular, marriage, is not capable of realizing the true generality in this society.

–Translated by Dennis Redmond

Further Reading:

Antithesis by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond, 9/22/09

Always more slowly ahead by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond,9/14/09

No exchanges allowed by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond, 9/10/09

Jennifer Moxley’s new book of poems, Clampdown, confronts the domestic with a disclosing eye.

By Ange Mlinko
Poetry Media Service

Clampdown, by Jennifer Moxley. Flood Editions, $14.95.

In 1996, when Jennifer Moxley’s first book, Imagination Verses, was published to underground acclaim, the prevailing story was that, like the return of the repressed, the personal lyric had been reborn from the chance encounter of a girl genius and a violently anti-lyrical avant-garde. Imagination Verses was almost old-fashioned—full of love poems and soliloquies. But Moxley’s ear was decidedly trained by writers outside the mainstream anthologies: not Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath but experimental small-press poets like Bernadette Mayer and Rae Armantrout.

Now some may see Moxley as a harbinger of the big poetic trend of the 2000s, sometimes known as “lyric postmodernism” or “hybrid poetics.” This is a genre that has embraced the subjective “I” while rejecting the confessional voice; at the same time, it has appropriated the house style of the avant-garde, acute fracture and abstraction, while shedding its political baggage. What serves as content, finally, is language that speaks itself, an oracle mediating between poet and world, individual and history. It’s the very definition of poetry set out by Theodor Adorno in his 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” We are concerned, he said, “not with the poet as a private person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.”

Moxley knows her Adorno. The follow-up to Imagination Verses was a chapbook called Wrong Life, a title cribbed from Adorno’s famous aperçu: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” Much of Moxley’s work can be read in the light of this damning little sentence and the chapter it punctuates in Minima Moralia, “Refuge for the Homeless.” Moxley’s ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth, and cosmos. But unlike the legions of poets who now adopt (and inevitably flatten) an Adornian mode of lyric, Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.

Clampdown, her new collection of poems, is startlingly particular, privacy-shattering, and abject. It isn’t postmodern or experimental or hybrid, and parts of it aren’t even very lyrical—often she tones down her flights of gorgeous language to speak precisely and discursively, as if face to face with an interlocutor. Never uncontrolled, never artless, and never not in command of rhetoric, Moxley has written a book that could be available to a wide readership. Her expressive clarity, however, lures us into a universe of such self-doubt and self-cancellations that we find ourselves again, dialectically, in the company of Adorno: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” From “The Price of Silence”:

It is suffocating beneath this vinyl window,
in whose fake glued-on mullions we see a cross.
But it doesn’t mean anything. No word
can be uttered or kept in store to chant us
out of losing. The whir of the washing machine
as it pours detergent down the sewer pipes,
chlorine rising up from the drains, The compact
fluorescent bulb in the gooseneck lamp
with a broken spring neither mutters
nor sputters playfully. Things don’t speak
our distance. The phone, though loud, tinny,
and insistent, cannot, it seems, be found.
We oppress in a way we cannot pay for
in any direct or meaningful way. All is fake.

Why should we awake?

Clampdown takes its title from a song on the Clash’s London Calling (“When we’re working for the clampdown/We will teach our twisted speech/To the young believers”). Its doubt-ridden angst, though, is more neoliberal-era Radiohead than post-punk Clash. This is not party music for the Revolution; it’s part “Karma Police,” part “The Bends,” Thom Yorke elegiacally singing “I wish it were the sixties/I wish we could be happy.” “The Price of Silence,” like other poems in the book—”Mother Night,” “These Yearly Returns,” “Friday Night, Candles Out”—puts Moxley’s comfortable home and habits on display in a ritual of self-mockery and pathos.

For the past fifty years, confessional poetry has permitted us the luxury of oversharing—mostly about our sex lives and our parents—in a sentimental gesture ultimately meant to reconcile and heal. Free verse has been confessional poetry’s de facto medium. A supple artifice in the hands of William Carlos Williams or Gregory Corso or Sylvia Plath, free verse has degenerated over the years into a style of no style, a sort of broken vernacular prose, as if language could be as transparent as a glass pane, the better to signal one’s sincerity and truthfulness. The resulting poem substitutes personality for art, supposedly sounding “natural” or “speechlike.”

The arc of Moxley’s work—from Often Capital, written while she was in her early 20s, through Imagination Verses, The Sense Record, The Line, and finally Clampdown—works heroically against the obstacle of “natural” voice. On a first reading, Moxley sounds utterly disconcerting, as if she were writing to you on the heels of a marathon session of retyping the poems of William Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy. From “The Yield”:

A thumb of silvery fur ensnared
my visual stupor: it was a mouse
scooting across the perilous ground
that lay between the rustic lean-tos
of brittle nut-brown maple leaves.
Image-gripped, but how to name it,
this will to live in little things?
Upon such monumental nerve
we build and break our wage.

The net effect of Moxley’s strange style has often been to foreground the sexiness of language and the poet, but their awkwardness too; it’s a style that cultivates and explores the notion of wrong life. For to write in one’s “natural” speaking voice already presupposes eloquence and fluency, and fluency presupposes ease. Moxley is definitely not at ease, either in her body or this country or century. She is in the wrong life, which cannot be written rightly. Thus she reconstructs another language—both yearning and alienated. In Clampdown it is a language in which she can confess her doubt and despair about the “chlorine rising up from the drains,” the fluorescent bulbs, the nylon bedspreads of the middle-class bedroom, the fake plastic trees. Moxley’s unmasking of American bounty as actual impoverishment thus has a lyric equivalent: the unmasking of the usual seductions and blandishments of the poem as an upmarket ad for metaphysical comforts. That she sets her personal theater against the backdrop of the world stage may seem like a grandiose gesture, but it is a necessary one. The figure she cuts is as erect and austere as a gnomon; the shadow she casts will be long.

Ange Mlinko is the recipient of the 2009 Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Her latest book of poems is Starred Wire. This article first appeared in the Nation. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.

The only way to survive in the culture industry is by fitting in.
Consumers are the lower classes, confined by capitalism, victims to what is offered to them…”as naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves”…these are the deceived masses.
The conformism of the buyers and the “effrontery” of the producers leads to the reproduction of the same thing. Also leading to reproduction of the same thing: risk aversion. There is talk of things surprising and new, but it is all talk.
Also, those who already control the system are making their claim stronger and more permanent…the rates of advertising agencies are too high a barrier to entry for anyone but the already established to enter the market. Advertising’s great triumph is its ability to make the consumers buy and use products they see right through.

Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be thinking along similar lines to Greenberg. Capitalism is creating and satisfying needs, keeping the masses at bay. The culture industry produces the soma for the people.

Some works that rocked my taxonomies this twelvemonth:

Hélène Cixous | Ex-Cities | Slought Books | 2006

On cities & revenance, the struggle of the year. “I have known for a long time that one does not go anywhere. It is the cities or the countries that come or do not come to you. Cities are fateful letters. They only arrive lost.”

Manfredo Tafuri | The Sphere and the Labyrinth, read for the second time | MIT | 1987

His books keep blowing me away. Once one has clarified the assumptions, nearly every sentence delivers a mordant perception. “The change wrought by Canaletto upon the urban context of Venice attests to the profound reality of this city for the eighteenth century; to the fact…that the most devastating manipulations are legitimate on an urban organism that has become merely an object at the disposal of the fantasy of a tourist elite.”

Roberto Saviano | Gomorrah | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2007

Anyone who wears clothes or deposits trash should read it. Matteo Garrone’s adaptation onto film is equally recommended for the dialect and the architecture. Creepier than neorealism (appropriately, as we’re headed the other way politically).

AES+F (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes) | The Feast of Trimalchio | Biennale di Venezia | Video | 2009

Tableaux surrounding the Roman plutocrat from the standpoint of Moscow could have been easy high jinks, like Fellini’s. But assumption of the day’s affect of sacral conversation (of videogames that is) makes them mesmerizing. Best viewed against backdrop of live cruise ships hastening the demise of a sinking cosmopolis: this was perhaps unconsciously the festival’s most site-specific work.

Jia Zhangke | The World | Office Kitano | 2004

Makes fateful cinematic diptych with the above, from Beijing.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | University of California | 2007

If only Pound could get the message in heaven: “You should have talked / To women”—& much more. Can’t wait to teach Oppen again.

Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009

Keeps making lyric gutsy. Timely, down to the afterword which wishes the work’s own ephemerality.

David Larsen, ed. and trans. | Names of the Lion by al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh | Atticus/Finch | 2009
David Larsen | neo-benshi performance of the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy at Flarf Video Festival | May 2009

500 odd epithets for the creature, including “‘Who Destroys Capital’ (?)”⁶⁴ Want all my history like this, as serial translation.

Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009

When two wits like these team up for “thinkership” a primer’s bound to be implosive. A pocketbook that begs for more such pocketbooks.

Tan Lin | Reading from | Segue Series |  http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html | April 2009

Tons more feed for thought, after filing a piece for boundary 2.

Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno | The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 | Harvard | 2001

Resisted for a long time, out of loathing for fetishization of biographical being—then torn through in a day, destroyed. The intimate content of research drives its criticality tumultuously home.

Plus several conversation circuits:

Al Filreis, ed. | PoemTalk | Poetry Foundation, PennSound & Kelly Writers House podcast | http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/ (subscribable through iTunes) | 2008-, monthly

You get the writer uttering and writers that read disagreeing live. Amazing for modeling close reading, & makes even the dreariest commutes curious.

Herman Melville | “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” & other poems | annotations brought on by Wild Orchids, a new review, Ed. Sean Reynolds

Incredible that only specialists (i.e. “Americanists”) seem to read Melville’s body of verse. The journal, out of Buffalo, will be reintroducing glorious pages to consciousness.

Belladonna | Elders Series | Belladonna | 2008-09

#1: E. Tracy Grinnell/Leslie Scalapino; #2: Rachel Levitsky/Erica Kaufman/Sarah Schulman/Bob Gluck; #3: Tisa Bryant/Chris Kraus; #4: Emma Bee Bernstein/Susan Bee/Marjorie Perloff; #6: Kate Eichorn/M. NourbeSe Philip/Gail Scott; #7: Cara Benson/Jayne Cortez/Anne Waldman; #8: Jane Sprague/Diane Ward/Tina Darragh. I edited the number left out here.

Despite my discomfort with the name (about which see Eichorn’s analysis in the preface to #6); my year’s most delirious cycle of discoveries, revisitations, reflections on the nature of dialogue, calls for more.

More Jennifer Scappettone here.

Theodor Adorno & Heinrich Boll, Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, 1964.

MINIMA MORALIA: Reflections from the damaged life. By THEODOR ADORNO

PART ONE: 1944. Aphorism #6:

Antithesis.

Translated by Dennis Redmond

6

Antithesis. – For those who do not play along, there exists the danger of considering themselves better than others and misusing their critique of society as an ideology for their own private interest. While feeling their way towards making their own existence into the flickering picture of the right one, they should remain aware of its insubstantiality and know how little the picture can replace the right life. Such considerations however contradict the gravitational force of what is bourgeois within them. Those who are at a distance are as entangled as those who are actively engaged; the former have nothing over the latter, except the insight into their entanglement and the happiness of the tiny freedom, which lies in the recognition as such. Their own distance from business as usual is a luxury, solely spun off by that business as usual. That is why every impulse towards self-withdrawal bears the marks of what is negated. The coldness which it must develop is not to be separated from the bourgeois one. In the monadological principle, even where it protests, lurks the ruling generality. Proust’s observation, that the photographs of the grandfathers of a duke and a Jew from the entrepreneurial class look so similar, that no one thinks of the social ranking order, strikes at a far more comprehensive state of affairs [Sachverhalt]: all of those differences which comprised the happiness, indeed the moral substance, of individual existence, objectively disappear behind the unity of the epoch. We detect the decay of education, and yet our prose, measured against Jacob Grimm or Bachofen, has phraseologies in common with the culture-industry which we did not suspect. Moreover we no longer know Greek or Latin like Wolf or Kirchhoff. We point out the transition of civilization into analphabetism and ourselves forget to write letters or to read a text of Jean Paul, as it must have been read in his time. We abhor the coarsening of life, but the absence of any objectively binding common decency [Sitte: morals] compels us at every step into modes of conduct, speech and calculation which are barbaric, measured by humane standards, and tactless, even by the dubious standards of the good society. With the dissolution of liberalism, the authentic bourgeois principle, that of competition, was not overcome, but passed over from the objectivity of social processes into the composition [Beschaffenheit: character, constitution] of pushing and shoving atoms – into anthropology, as it were. The subjugation of life to the production-process degradingly inflicts something of that isolation and loneliness on every single person, which we are tempted to consider the matter of our superior choice. The notion that every single person considers themselves better in their particular interest than all others, is as long-standing a piece of bourgeois ideology as the overestimation of others as higher than oneself, just because they are the community of all customers. Since the old bourgeois class has abdicated, both lead their afterlife in the Spirit [Geist] of intellectuals, who are at the same time the last enemies of the bourgeois, and the last bourgeois. By allowing themselves to still think at all vis-a-vis the naked reproduction of existence, they behave as the privileged; by leaving things in thought, they declare the nullity of their privilege. The private existence, which yearns to look like one worthy of human beings, simultaneously betrays the latter, because the similarity of the general implementation is withdrawn, which more than ever before requires an independent sensibility [Besinnung]. There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame that when one is in hell, there is still air to breathe.

–Translated by Dennis Redmond

Further Reading:

Always more slowly ahead by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond,9/14/09

No exchanges allowed by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond, 9/10/09

A grandeza de uma obra de arte está fundamentalmente no seu caráter ambíguo, que deixa ao espectador decidir sobre o seu significado”.

- Theodor Adorno

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno (11 de setembro de 1903, Frankfurt, Alemanha – 6 de agosto de 1969). Filósofo, sociólogo, musicologista e compositor.

A worn copy of the New Left Books English language edition of Minima Moralia, 1974, translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott. The German edition was first published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1951.

MINIMA MORALIA: Reflections from the damaged life. By THEODOR ADORNO

PART THREE: 1946/47. Aphorism #102:

Always more slowly ahead.

Translated by Dennis Redmond

102

Always more slowly ahead. – Running on the street has the expression of terror. The fall of the victim is imitated in the very attempt to escape the fall. The posture of the head, which would like to remained raised, is that of someone who is drowning, the tense face resembles the grimace of torture. They must look straight ahead, cannot even glance back, without stumbling, as if the pursuer [Verfolger: follower, persecutor] whose sight would cause them to freeze were breathing down their necks. Once one ran from dangers which were too desperate to stand and face, and those who are running after a bus speeding away still testify to this, without knowing it. The flow of traffic no longer has to reckon with wild animals, but at the same time it has not pacified running. This last estranges the bourgeois walk. The truth becomes apparent, that something is not right about security, that one must constantly evade the unrestrained powers of life, even if these are only vehicles. The body’s habit of walking as something normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois manner of getting somewhere: physical demythologization, free from the bane of the hieratic step, the homeless fellowship of the road, the breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to the gait, a rhythm not drilled into the body by command or terror. Going on promenades, being a flaneur were private ways of spending time, the legacy of the feudal pleasure-jaunts of the 19^th century. Walking is dying out along with the liberal epoch, even where autos are not being driven. The youth movement, which groped for such tendencies with unmistakable masochism, challenged the parental Sunday excursion and replaced it with the voluntary march of power, which they christened with the medieval name of trip [Fahrt: journey, travel], while the Ford model quickly became available to the latter. Perhaps the cult of technical speediness, just as in sports, conceals the impulse of mastering the terror of running, by turning it away from one’s own body and at the same time high-handedly outbidding it: the triumph of the increasing mile-marker ritually attests to the fear of being pursued. Whenever however human beings are told: “run”, ranging from the children, who are supposed to fetch the mother a forgotten handbag from upstairs, all the way to the prisoners, who are commanded by their escorts to flee, in order to have a pretext for murdering them, then the archaic violence becomes audible, which otherwise inaudibly directs every step.

–Translated by Dennis Redmond

Further Reading:

No exchanges allowed by Theodor Adorno, translated by Dennis Redmond, 9/10/09

Is dwelling on loss not necessarily depressing?  Jonathan Flatley argues that embracing melancholy can be a road back to connecting with others and enable you to productively remap your relationship to the world. Aesthetic activity can give one the means to comprehend and change one’s relation to loss.

Flatley’s argument shares with Freud an interest in understanding the depressing effects of difficult loss and with Walter Benjamin the hope that loss itself can become a means of connection and the basis for social transformation. The affective maps artists like Henry James produce can make possible the conversion of a depressive melancholia into a way to be interested in the world (cribbed from Flatley’s publisher).

Affective Mapping

The decisively new ferment that enters the taedium vitae and turns it into spleen is self-estrangement.

—Walter Benjamin, “Central Park”

In his influential 1960 book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch explored the ways residents internalize maps of their cities. These cogninitive maps give one a sense of location and direction, and enable one to make decisions about where one wants to go and how to get there.¹ A later scholar helpfully defined cognitive mapping as “a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of the phenomena in his everyday spatial environment.”² Lynch studied three different cities—Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City—and found that some cities are more “legible” to their residents than others. That is, “the ease with which [the city’s] parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern” varies from city to city.³ In a nongrid city like Boston, with notable points of reference like the Charles River, Boston Common, and Boston Harbor, residents were quite able to assemble usable cognitive maps of the city through repetitive experience of it. Jersey City, on the other hand, organized by an incomplete grid, was found to be more undifferentiated and thus less legible. Many of its residents, Lynch found, had only fragmented or partial images of the city. Since an image of the total system in which one is located is of course a crucial element in establishing one’s confidence in one’s ability to live in the world—see friends, get to the hospital, buy groceries, go out to dinner, arrive at the train station on time—the lack of such an ability can produce a sense of anxiety and alienation.

In his essay “Cognitive Mapping,” Fredric Jameson expanded the use of the term to suggest that just as one needs a cognitive map of city space in order to have a sense of agency there, one requires a cognitive map of social space for a sense of agency in the world more generally.⁴ Such a map’s function is “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”⁵ In other words, in its negotiation of the gap between local subjective experience and a vision of an overall environment, the cognitive map is an apt figure for one of the functions of ideology, which is, in Althusser’s now classic formulation, “the representation of the subject’s imaginary relationship to his or her real conditions of existence.”⁶ We all need such representations, no matter how imaginary, in order to make sense and move through our everyday lives. By the same token, “the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience.”⁷

The difference with the social map is that where the totality of Boston is quite representable, the “totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole,” conversely, is not. And the socioeconomic systems we all must negotiate on a daily basis are becoming ever less representable.⁸  Increasingly, Jameson argues, the distance between the structures that order everyday life and the phenomenology and datum of that life itself have become unbridgeable.⁹ Cognitive mapping in this context would be an essential part of “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.”¹⁰ Without such a picture insights remain partial and fragmented; we remain mired in the logic of the system as it exists.

*

So then what is this thing I have been calling affective mapping? In the context of geography and environmental psychology, the term affective mapping has been used to indicate the affective aspects of the maps that guide us, in conjunction with our cognitive maps, through our spatial environment.¹¹ That is, we develop our sense of our environments through purposive activity in the world, and we always bring with us a range of intentions, beliefs, desires, moods, and affective attachments to this activity. Hence our spatial environments are inevitably imbued with the feelings we have about the places we are going, the things that happen to us along the way, and the people we meet, and these emotional valences, of course, affect how we create itineraries. For instance, I live in downtown Detroit, and when I am in the suburbs around Detroit, I often get the sense that some people in the suburbs who have not crossed over the city limits for years carry around with them a map on which Detroit is a large, hazily defined space, but a space clearly marked by some mixture of fear, anxiety, sorrow, and nostalgia. They avoid Detroit not because of poor urban planning or a lack of landmarks but because of the emotions they have associated with the city space of Detroit.

Thus, by way of analogy, I would suggest that social maps are also marked with various affective values. To return to the example regarding the suburban resident who avoids Detroit, this is an affective map of social space as well, in a way that parallels ideology. For in all likelihood the person from the suburbs of whom I write is white, and Detroit is largely African American, and this split is of course overwritten by a class divide, so emotions about Detroit as a space are, for these suburban residents, inevitably also emotions about class and “race” and racism. In short, it is not just ideologies or cognitive maps that shape our behavior and practices in the world but also the affects we have about the relevant social structures of our world. The term affective map in this sense is meant to indicate the pictures we all carry around with us on which are recorded the affective values of the various sites and situations that constitute our social worlds.

I should perhaps reemphasize here that “map” is meant in a particular, metaphorical sense, a metaphorics that I hope does not too seriously limit the concept. The affective map, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic map, is neither fixed nor stable: “The rhizome refers to a map that must be produced or constructed, is always detachable, connectable, reversable, and modifiable, with multiple entrances and exits, with its lines of flight. The tracings are what must be transferred onto the maps and not the reverse.”¹² Such maps must be able to incorporate new information as one has new experiences in new environments; but this does not mean they are entirely self-invented. Rather the maps are cobbled together in processes of accretion and palimpsestic rewriting from other persons’ maps, first of all those defined in infancy by one’s parents, and later the maps that come to one by way of one’s historical context and the social formations one lives in. 

Just as the lack of a cognitive map of one’s social space is crippling for effective political activity, so too is the lack of an affective map, for several reasons. Our most enduring and basic social formations—patriarchy, say, or capitalism itself—can only be enduring to the extent that they are woven into our emotional lives in the most fundamental way. Gender differences or class distinctions are not just tools we use to make sense of our worlds, they are things about which and in relation to which we all have a whole range of emotions, from the teenager’s shame among his wealthier classmates at the shabbiness of his family’s car or his parent’s working-class accent to the particular anxiety of a woman alone on a city street at night. Whole sets of affects—about family, profession, sexual practices, physical appearance, eating habits, and so forth—come into being only through categories of class and gender. Social hierarchies surely could not work without the depression, cynicism, or despair produced among poor persons by unemployment, discrimination, or not being able to pay one’s bills or, alternatively, without the joy that accompanies the purchase of a big new house or a fancy car or the pleasurable sense of achievement and entitlement the high school student feels on admission to an Ivy League university. Because our social formations work through affect, resistance to them must as well. Substitute objects of positive affective attachment must be provided where necessary, counter-moods evoked, and the emotional valence of various objects and ideas changed through processes of rearticulation and recontextualization.

And if we want to form politically agential collectives, this is most directly a question of moods, structures of feeling, and affects; anxieties must be overcome, alliances must seem not just logical but emotionally compelling. Insights about one’s political oppression are unlikely to motivate resistance unless they can be made interesting and affectively rewarding. This is why Aristotle directed himself toward the affects in his Rhetoric, so he could figure out whatsituations produced which affects in whom; the politician above all must know how to make and use the moods of his audiences. In short, without an affective map, the most basic political acts—the distinction of friend from foe, danger from safety, despair-inducing from interest-enhancing experiences—become impossible; we are reduced to operating as if dumb or blind.

Our affective maps are likely to be especially in need of revision, repair, or invention at moments of rapid social change or upheaval. Just as modernity made the production of cognitive maps more difficult, it also made the assessment of one’s affective surroundings more difficult, not least because of the new scale and scope of the experience of loss. Emigrating to a new country, learning a different kind of work, or losing one’s parents in war are likely to render one’s environment emotionally confusing. Unexpected fears, surprising disappointments, and new enjoyments must all be processed in one way or another. And then one must figure out how to negotiate the new affective terrain, to exert some agency in it.

*

Here, however, I am concerned not with the creation of affective maps in general but with the ways an aesthetic practice might help with this process of affective mapping. My argument is that it does this not primarily through a realist representation of a social space in the world, but through a representation of the affective life of the reader herself or himself. Such a representation is accomplished by way of a self-estrangement that allows one to see oneself in relation to one’s affective environment in its historicity, in relation to the relevant social-political anchors or landmarks in that environment, and to see the others who inhabit this landscape with one. The texts of James, Du Bois, and Platonov function as affective maps to the extent that they work as machines of self-estrangement. By this term, as I mentioned in the Introduction, I mean a self-distancing that allows one to see oneself as if from outside. But I also mean estrangement in the sense of defamiliarization, making one’s emotional life—one’s range of moods, set of structures of feeling, and collection of affective attachments—appear weird, surprising, unusual, and thus capable of a new kind of recognition, interest, and analysis.

In what follows I have tried to schematize the operation of this self-estranging machine, mostly by way of an extrapolation of certain elements of the aesthetic theories of Adorno and Benjamin, particularly regarding the logic of the moment of aesthetic experience and the role of the shudder therein, which Adorno valued so highly.¹³

The affective mapping function is achieved by means of the non-coincidence of two moments in the experience of what, following Adorno, we might call “the work of art,” so long as we mean that phrase in a fairly broad sense. On the one hand, one has a perceptual and cognitive apprehension of the artwork in its otherness, which has certain effects: “As a musical composition compresses time, and as a painting folds spaces into one another, so the possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is. Space, time, and causality are maintained, their power is not denied, but they are divested of their compulsiveness” (AT, 138). For a moment at least, listening to a recording of Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” or to Beethoven’s late string quartets in a concert hall, reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, walking at Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial, or beholding one of Donald Judd’s reflective aluminum boxes, one finds oneself in a world that does not exist, or that exists only in this space at this moment. This otherness is not liberatory in itself, but inasmuch as the relationships between space and time, for example, that we are used to in our everyday lives are altered in some way or another, we may see that the logic of the world we live in is not compulsory. Things might work differently.

On the other hand, but simultaneously, one has an affective response in this other world defined by the work. The artwork provides both the context and the objects affects need in order to come into existence. The logic is a transferential one: like psychoanalysis, the work provides a scene in which past affects can reappear as (what Freud called) new editions or as facsimiles of old ones. However, the work can only do this to the extent that the objects or moments within it recall earlier affectively charged experiences. Similarity is the key principle here; and as we know, even (or especially) in therapy, the slightest similarity will suffice if there are affects itching to find objects. One may be surprised by the affects that come out in the space of therapy, and so too with the work of art: by creating a kind of mood atmosphere with its own objects, artworks bring affects into existence in forms and in relation to objects that otherwise might not exist.

In an important sense, we never experience an affect for the first time; every affect contains within it an archive of its previous objects. Or, more exactly, there is a secret archive of objects out in the world in which our affects are residing. Like Proust with his madeleine, we do not necessarily know when or how we will encounter such objects. Benjamin recounts one such discovery in relation to a painting by Cezanne he saw during his 1927 visit to Moscow. He writes that “various very specific spots” immediately “thrust themselves” out at him. The space of the painting “opens up in corners and angles in which we believe we can localize crucial experiences of the past; there is something inexplicably familiar about these spots.”¹⁴ The painting provides a site for affects from Benjamin’s past to reenter existence, and consequently for his archive of affective objects to open up, and perhaps, to become visible as such as if for the first time. By way of these affects, the world, and indeed history itself, makes its way into aesthetic experience. Affect is the shuttle on which history makes its way into the aesthetic, and it is also what brings one back from the work into the world. The affect that one has in the space of the artwork (which hovers alongside the cognitive experience as what Adorno calls a “trans-aesthetic subject”) links one back to the world like a rubber band or the bungee on a bungee jumper, pulling one back from the artwork into the world, but pulling one back through a strange parabola which has altered one’s view of the world and unsettled one’s relation to it. To use the Heideggerian metaphor, it is as if we have been rethrown.

So, for example, here I am at a concert of the Emerson String Quartet; they are playing one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. At a certain moment, some fragment of a motif being played on the viola, in the relationship it strikes with the development of the piece as a whole, surprises me, and I have that feeling of inexplicable familiarity. But it is vague; it is not as if I am somehow reminded of a specific

According to Adorno, such a shudder is generated not by the emotion evoked itself but by the transition from this emotion—experienced in this world of the quartet, that is to say, a world that bears no apparent referential relation to the world of everyday life—back to my subjectivity as I experience it in everyday life. At the moment of this return from the work, one has the sensation that one has just been temporarily dislocated from one’s subjectivity. This is because one has, for a moment, had an affect in a space not defined by one’s subjectivity, and then one is returned to that subjectivity, reminding one precisely of that subjectivity, and its limitedness. The return to the “self,” the subjectivity as we find it in our everyday lives, and its disjuncture with the affects and the mood we have experienced without a self, in a nonself, is what produces, for Adorno, the shudder.¹⁵ “Shudder, radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis], provides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude” (AT, 245). Put differently, we might say that one has a shudder about the limitedness and situatedness—which is also to say the historicity—of one’s affective life in toto.

Adorno suggests that the shudder is also the moment of contact with an other, with otherness as such. “The shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it” (AT, 331). The moment when one has an affective experience without being a subject, as if one exists for a moment in the Beethoven quartet, is one in which one loses oneself in this vague nonsubject space of the work. I am not quite sure what Adorno means by “the other” here, but I take him to be referencing a moment of apprehending the basically plural nature of one’s emotional life. The work is something like a meeting place for an affective collectivity. In this sense, Adorno’s “aesthetic shudder” is akin to the shudder one experiences in a large crowd experiencing a common emotion at, for example, a political protest, sporting event, or concert. “Aesthetic comportment,” as Adorno puts it, is one place where one learns how to participate in a collectivity, to make contact with an other, based on a shared affective experience. While I do not think that the self-estrangement aspect of the affective mapping function necessarily or literally needs to produce a “shudder,” I do think that the mechanism described here is at work in the affective maps I analyze in this book.

That said, however, in the texts I write about here, this self-estrangement is only part of the project. Each of these texts—James’s Turn of The Screw, Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, and Platonov’s Chevengur— also have something to say about the very subjective experience from which a reader has been estranged. This allegorization of the experience that the aesthetic practice is itself promoting, the narration of the production of their own readers—this is the moment in which the text functions as an affective map for its readers. The effect is not unlike the moment in a therapy when the analyst says: “Hmm, well, perhaps this is about those early conflicts with your father.” You have had an experience, transferring some fears or anger about your father onto the therapist, and to be sure it is strange, and you have noticed perhaps already that your emotions really are unlikely to be about the analyst as such—but then, when it is pointed out to you, it can no longer be ignored, and the analysis of the emotions in question can begin. Similarly, in The Turn of the Screw, for example, the first text I look at here, James narrates a kind of epistemological desire on the part of the governess, and the pleasures as well as the disastrous results of this desire; at the same time the text solicits just such a will to knowledge from the reader. Or, in a more complex process, Platonov solicits a relationship from his reader that resembles nothing so much as a melancholic friendship, at the same time that he shows how socialism might be built on just such a friendship. In other words, what I am calling an affective map here is a carefully prepared aesthetic experience, an experience that is narrated—and connected up to collective, historical processes and events—even as it is produced.

Of course, for a textual practice to work in this way, it must be able to be attuned to the moods of various readers. It is not designed to produce a uniform experience, but rather to be able to estrange one from wherever one is in relation to one’s emotional world. It needs to be flexible enough to allow for readers to input different experience. In this, when it works, it is a portable map, a kind of global positioning device that tells you where you are at this particular moment, giving you a satellite view of your own life.

In sum, if an affective map is a representation of one’s affective life in its historicity, then this representation works in the following way. The moment of shudder is a reaction to the simultaneous rupture and connection between the affective experience one has within the world created by the work on the one hand and the affective attachments one has within the world of everyday life on the other. In this way the shudder opens up the space of self-estrangement that is necessary to get a distance on one’s affects. It also puts one into contact with others, a contact that is imaginary in one sense. But inasmuch as it is based on the shared historicity of that affective life, it is quite real.

—from Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism

Notes

1. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).

2. “Cognitive Map and Spatial Behavior: Process and Products,” in Image and Environment, ed. R. M. Downs and D. Stea (Chicago: Aldine, 1973), 2–26, cited by Robert M. Kitchin, “Cognitive Maps: What Are they and Why Study Them?” Journal of Environmental Psychology 14 (1994): 1. Kitchin’s article, in addition to being an excellent survey and summary, also contains a full bibliography of work on cognitive mapping.

3. Lynch, Image of the City, 2.

4. “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), reprinted in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi

Weeks (New York: Blackwell, 2000), 277–287.

5. Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 51.

6. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

7. “Cognitive Mapping,” 283.

8. The key transition in this history for Jameson is the moment of colonialism, for it is then that “the truth of [daily] experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited experience of London lies, rather, in India or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet the structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people” (Postmodernism, 411). If colonialism meant that the truth of life in the metropolis was in some way determined in and by the colonies themselves (that is, quite far from a local context), then the intensification of globalization has meant that the systems that structure our lives and on which we rely in innumerable ways are even more diffuse, multiple, and distant. Accordingly, Jameson argues, the gap between the phenomenology of daily life and the totality of economic relations that shape that life has become even more unbridgeable. One of the worrisome things about postmodernism, in Jameson’s view, is the abandonment of cognitive mapping as a project.

9. The aesthetic experimentation we see in modernism was, Jameson argues, in large part generated out of the desire to “square the circle,” to produce formal devices for representing the structural system that was now no longer apprehensible from within the realm of everyday life. Like ancient Greek or medieval allegories of the divine, these experiments were attempts to articulate something across a gap, to represent something that was, strictly speaking, unrepresentable. These modernisms emerge in “forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global system on the very syntax of poetic language itself, a new play of absence and present that at its most simplified will be haunted by the exotic and be tattooed with foreign place names, and at its most intense will involve the invention of remarkable new

languages and forms” (Postmodernism, 41).

In fact, sometimes defeat or the failure to produce a cognitive map, Jameson writes, can, “even more effectively, [cause] the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit” (415).

See Jameson’s reading of E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End and (more briefly) of Joyce’s Ulysses along these lines: “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Jameson and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66.

10. Postmodernism, 54.

11. See, for example, Christopher Spencer, Mark Blades and Kim Morsley, The Child in the Physical Environment (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1989), 108, cited in Kitchin, “Cognitive Maps.” Also see Christopher Spencer and Jill Dixon, “Mapping the Development of Feelings about the City: A Longitudinal Study of New Residents’ Affective Maps,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 8 (1983): 373–383. The term affective mapping has also been used occasionally in political science; for example: Marc Swyngedouw, “The Subjective Cognitive and Affective Map of Extreme Right Voters: Using Open-Ended Questions in Exit Polls,” Electoral Studies 20 (2001): 217–241, and Angus Campbell, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).

12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 48–49.

13. To some degree, I am here glossing Adorno’s ideas about the “aesthetic shudder”—some of Adorno’s more Benjaminian moments, which are scattered throughout his Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) (hereafter AT). See esp. 244–245, 269, and 331.

14. Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 42. He was at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; it has been deduced, on the basis of the museum’s holdings and what was likely to have been on display at that time, that the painting was Road to Pontoise, although Benjamin says nothing specific about the painting in question, as it is the quality of the experience and not the object as such he is concerned with here.

15. And, Adorno argues, the temporary negation of subjectivity at this moment rescues subjectivity. “The subject, convulsed by art, has real experiences; by the strength of insight into the artwork as artwork, these experiences are those in which the subject’s petrification in his own subjectivity dissolves and the narrowness of his self-positedness is revealed” (AT, 269).

The Philippines is a country obsessed with beauty contests. This mania goes not only for pageants for young women, but also for men, queers, children, teenagers, grandmothers, and even pregnant women, among others. But irregardless of the kind, the pageant candidates and their bodies ultimately serve the purpose of packaged commodities that satiate the gaze and pleasure of the spectators.

This fixation with pageants has been conditioned into the collective mind not only through the mass media, the stronghold of a seemingly all-encompassing showbiz culture patterned after Hollywood, but even in small community affairs like the barangay fiesta where fundraising usually takes the form of the beauty contest.[1]

Historically, this predominance can be traced back to the era of American colonization wherein the Filipinos, by means of the educational system and other state apparatuses, were molded to become little brown Americans. It is one expression of a patriarchal and consumerist culture that works to reproduce the prevailing social order. We do not anymore ask why women are regarded as sex objects, we become enthralled by it.

With every new bit of showbiz gossip presented on TV, we begin to forget the greater scandals that entangle the Arroyo regime. Its unresolved crisis of legitimacy, its seemingly endless series of political and corruption scandals, its shameless puppetry to U.S. political and economic interests, its neglect of education and other basic social services, its brazen violation of human rights and civil liberties, and its aggravation of the people’s hardships in general, are all put on the backseat.

“When I grow up, I wanna be famous, I wanna be a star, I wanna be a movie. When I grow up, I wanna see the world, and drive nice cars, and wanna have movies,” the Pussycat Dolls song blares on the radio to the tune of the American Dream. “Fame, fame, baby, we live for the fame,” we watch Lady Gaga sing and dance on television.

The pageant and the invasion of show business into all aspects of life in general are part of what Adorno and Horkheimer described as a “social mechanism” that sought “to level down everyone who stands out in any way. The stars are simply a pattern round which the world-embracing garment is cut…”[2]

The beauty contest, just like the mania over “Search for a Star” spectacles, “Pinoy Big Brother” and other reality TV shows, the trivialization of news reporting into TV gossip, actors becoming politicians and politicians acting like soap opera stars, and so on, all these serve to further this dynamic. And indeed, from one’s watching of television, strolling in the mall, gaping at billboards, and finally participating in those children’s competitions in school, the beauty contest has become part of daily discourse.

I was not surprised therefore when I attended a pageant featuring men dressed up as girls in the university auditorium the other week. However, what struck me about the show was its subversion of the ideal of “brains and beauty” endorsed by beauty contests.

The pageant, better known in our university by the name Hasa, presented the spectacle of guys wearing exaggerated evening dresses and skimpy swimming suits and comically parodying girls in the way they conduct themselves.

The talent portion saw the pageant candidates and their backup male escorts trying to outdo each other in pleasing the crowd with the most hilarious allusions and depictions of various sexual taboos on stage.

The interview proper – far from exemplifying the traditional pageant’s ideal of “brains” as the combination of grace and intellect (or perhaps simply grace) – put a premium on wit and black humor (much like the case in gay pageants).

There were both subtle and undisguised references to the sexual act: a figurative performance of gang rape and bondage, pumping, the missionary position, fellatio with the microphone, moaning, parody of a conservative morality which requires abstinence before marriage, lampooning of famous celebrities, and so on.

It was, in brief, a night of flouting the rules of social decency for the organizers, the pageant candidate themselves, and the audience who enjoyed the show.

So would this obvious perversion of the typical beauty pageant count as a deeper subversion of the country’s predominantly conservative morality? Notwithstanding its apparently explosive outburst against official conservative morality, Hasa seems more of a state of exception. It is a temporary suspension – wherein one is encouraged to break the rules – allowed by the law, akin to the Bakhtinian notion of the Carnivalesque.

Far from subverting the law, the transgressive elements in the pageant only renders clear the obscene underside of the “official” moral norms. If anything, the bodies of those on the stage are portrayed as sex objects in this upturned pageant, further normalizing the commodification of sexuality already internalized by the audience.

The audience’s viewing of supposed illicit acts on stage can thus be given a color of voyeurism, a form of perversion which is itself mirrored in the exhibitionism of the candidates and their escorts on the stage. And in a way, the perversions presented in the pageant are already the underlying elements in the concrete practice of the “official” conservative morality.

Hayden Kho and Katrina Halili.

While commanding us to follow propriety, it also bombards us with various hints that encourage us to break these rules. But the more we transgress, the more we feel guilty, the more it gains power over us. Perversion, Slavoj Žižek explains, “is no longer subversive: such shocking excesses are part of the system itself; the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.” [3]

Hasa thus reinforces a patriarchal order that makes women subservient to men while remaining within the orbit of a showbiz culture that marks the usual beauty contest. The theme itself, Hidden Queue: for Love or for Play, was an obvious allusion to the Hayden Kho sex video scandal, the now notorious saga of a cosmetologist’s sexual liaisons with other celebrities, the spread of their sex videos, and the ensuing fracas. This is the same scandal that has been charged by accepted political wisdom of objectively concealing the political scandals of the crisis-ridden Arroyo regime. ■

[1] For a good look on the beauty pageant’s significance in the Philippine social milieu, see Rolando Tolentino’s “Interview Portion sa Beauty Pageant at Katawang Kapital” available online at http://rolandotolentino.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/interview-portion-sa-beauty-contest-at-katawang-kapital-kpk-column-mar-16-22-2008/

[2] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, 1968 [1944], p. 236.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?, London: Verso, 2000, p. 24-25.

Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno. Photograph taken by Jeremy Shapiro in Heidelberg, 1965.

MINIMA MORALIA: Reflections from the damaged life. By THEODOR ADORNO

PART ONE: 1944. Aphorism #21:

No exchanges allowed.

Translated by Dennis Redmond

21

No exchanges allowed. — Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts. Violations of the exchange-principle have something mad and unbelievable about them; here and there even children size up the gift-giver mistrustfully, as if the gift were only a trick, to sell them a brush or soap. For that, one doles out charity [in English in original], administered well-being, which papers over the visible wounds of society in coordinated fashion. In its organized bustle, the human impulse no longer has any room, indeed even donations to the needy are necessarily connected with the humiliation of delivery, the correct measure, in short through the treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private gift-giving has degenerated into a social function, which one carries out with a reluctant will, with tight control over the pocketbook, a skeptical evaluation of the other and with the most minimal effort. Real gift-giving had its happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this. In the best of cases, they give what they themselves would have wished for, only a few shades of nuance worse. The decline of gift-giving is mirrored in the embarrassing invention of gift articles, which are based on the fact that one no longer knows what one should give, because one no longer really wants to. These goods are as relationless as their purchasers. They were shelf warmers [Ladenhueter] from the first day. Likewise with the right to exchange the gift, which signifies to the receiver: here’s your stuff, do what you want with it, if you don’t like it, I don’t care, get something else if you want. In contrast to the embarrassment of the usual gifts, their pure fungibility still represents something which is more humane, because they at least permit the receiver to give themselves something, which is to be sure simultaneously in absolute contradiction to the gift.

In relation of the greater abundance of goods, which are available even to the poor, the decline of gift-giving may appear unimportant, and considerations on such as sentimental. However, even if it became superfluous in a condition of superfluity – and this is a lie, privately as well as socially, for there is none today whose imagination could not find exactly what would make them thoroughly happy – those who no longer gave would still be in need of gift-giving. In them wither away those irreplaceable capacities which cannot bloom in the isolated cell of pure interiority, but only in contact with the warmth of things. Coldness envelops everything which they do, the friendly word which remains unspoken, the consideration which remains unpracticed. Such iciness recoils back on those from which it spread. All relations which are not distorted, indeed perhaps what is reconciliatory in organic life itself, is a gift. Those who become incapable of this through the logic of stringency [Konsequenz: consequence, corollary], make themselves into things and freeze.

–Translated by Dennis Redmond

This translation is copyright 2005 Dennis Redmond. The original German text is available from Suhrkamp Verlag as: Theodor W. Adorno. Collected Works. Suhrkamp Verlag, Volume 4.

Albrecht Wellmer, der ehemalige Assistent von Jürgen Habermas und bis 2001 Philosophieprofessor diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks, hat seine Analyse des Verhältnisses von Musik und Sprache nicht klein angelegt – und sich Zeit mit der Publikation gelassen. Nun legt Wellmer unter dem bescheidenen Titel „Versuch über Musik und Sprache“ nichts weniger als ein Standardwerk vor, eine wegweisende Übersicht zum Thema – seinem zuweilen etwas professoral wirkenden Duktus zum Trotz. Ein Übersichtswerk ist das Buch nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil der Theodor-W.-Adorno-Preisträger von 2006 explizit darauf verzichtet, „originelle Interpretationen von Musik selbst zu formulieren“. Vielmehr zeichnet er breitflächig historische Entwicklungslinien der Musikästhetik auf, wertet Erkenntnisse anderer Autoren aus – als einer der wichtigsten zieht sich ­Adorno, gleichsam als roter Faden, durch Wellmers Darstellung – und stellt Positionsvergleiche an, die jeweils den Weg freilegen für die nächstfolgenden Analyseschritte.
Ausgehend von der Leitfrage, ob es eine Sprache der Musik gebe bzw. ob die Musik „sprachähnlich“ sei, reflektiert Wellmer umsichtig Antworten und Erklärungsmodelle – und gibt schließlich gegenüber den komplizierten und, wie er nachzuweisen vermag, oftmals irreführenden Analogisierungsversuchen von Sprache und Musik eher bildhaften Erklärungen wie jener des englischen Komponisten Brian Ferneyhough den Vorzug, der die Musik als „Satellit der (Wort-)Sprache mit einer extrem exzentrischen Umlaufbahn“ zu verstehen versucht.
Albrecht Wellmer geht es stets um Sprachlichkeit in der Musik im weitesten Sinne. Davon zeugen insbesondere seine umfangreichen und virtuosen Fallstudien zu zwei der Schlüsselkomponisten der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, nämlich John Cage und Helmut Lachenmann. Darin geht der Autor weit über eine bloße Analyse des im Titel angegebenen Themenfeldes hinaus.
Was Wellmer tiefstapelnd „Versuch über Musik und Sprache“ nennt, entpuppt sich am Ende als eine komplexe und detaillierte Interpretation der komplexen neuzeitlichen Musikphilosophie.

Fritz Trümpi in Falter : Woche 37/2009 vom 9.9.2009 (Seite 18)