Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Roland Barthes
Remembering You Have Forgotten Something…
…given the way things are, it is not easy to return to writing here. It feels late in the day, but I did always promise to write something about Perfume and today, of all days (though whilst in the grand scheme of things needing not to be significant), seems as good as any to get this out.
The last time I was in London I did two things. I collected my copy of Classen et al. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell and I watched the film of Perfume. Both were in preparation to write something about Süskind’s novel. Amongst other things I think I was going to say something about the complication of trying to find words for the unsayable of scent. And I had thought the film would struggle even more than the book. I think in a sense it did, but I much preferred the ending, which visually – sculpturally even – was rather nicely done and importantly managed to undo the somewhat clumsy messiah routine of the book. I had always been primed for the film to be like a feature length Christian Dior advertisement. But, in fact, I was reminded of one of those Stella Artois advertisements. Something of the mise-en-scene, the milieu, the class of people perhaps, but also the film of the book is similarly over dramatic and funny for all of that. (Although the wit of the beer commercials – contained within 3 minutes – is inevitably much shaper).
But this all seems superfluous now (and perhaps it always was). If before I had wanted to ’say’ things here, now I am not so sure; hence my growing absence. My words have severely depreciated over the months, which is doubly sad: I don’t like to lose them, but equally I don’t like what I lose because of them (because here they just continue in all emptiness…)
Those who know me will understand when I say I had to ‘rescue’ Aroma from the smoke-dust climes of my family home. Ironically, then, my copy of the book carries its own potent aroma (though the time it has taken me write something has been sufficiently long for my eyes to stop watering as I turn its pages). To my surprise the book contains a direct reference to the novel:
Peter Süskind’s enormously popular book Perfume is a case in point. The keen-scented protagonist of the book, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is both ’idiot’ and ‘pervert’ – as well as an offspring of the ‘degenerate’ lower class. Grenouille exercises his abnormal passion for scent by murdering maidens in order to sniff up their sweet fragrance. In the end, through his de-scenting of maidens, Grenouille is able to invest himself with an odour so attractive that he is torn to pieces and eaten by a frenzied crowd.
If Perfume makes for a ‘good read’, it is not only because of its unusual topic and engrossing story line, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) because of its confirmation of the validity of many of our most cherished olfactory stereotypes – the maniac sniffing out his prey; the fragrant hapless maiden; the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell. (p.4)
I can’t say I recognise any of these ‘olfactory stereotypes’ – at best they seem obscure and a little harsh; at worst they conveniently establish something the authors wish us to believe need debunking. The novel is indeed a ‘good read’ because of its story and story-telling (barring a few didactic sections, particularly a middle section in which Grenouille retreats to the mountains and returns like some pesudo-Nietzschean Zarathustra), but for me the real (and only) impetus to read the book (and read it quickly) came from the hands that gave it to me. The book was an offering, with the potential to know something about myself and another. Sadly, I don’t think we ever really discussed it. Never the right occasion.
…the words of Aroma leave me cold, but the words that fell out of the book (on a scrap paper I inserted back when I had my initial idea for an entry here) seem – where at least I can read my own writing – a little more poignant:
There was a day when you mentioned in email that you were having trouble getting hold of your usual perfume (and you might try another). I never said anything at the time (perhaps because one ought not say these things), but I was struck in terror at your words. …I was doubly affected. Perhaps I wouldn’t get to experience that brush of your perfume again, which was sad enough, but added to which I was struck with the thought I had no idea what it was I was missing. I don’t have a memory of your scent, I just know/knew it because of you… and these unaromatic words simply take me further away…
The strangest of things: to remember something you have forgotten - ‘it is on the tip of my tongue’ we tend to say (what a lovely phrase). The hint of a perfume of someone you long for is a delicate thing. You stand there next to them and that is everything (so you think); but then, just occasionally, playing on the tips of the invisible boundaries between one another, the faint curls of a scent you can only know as being them, when with them. And no sooner does it reach you, it dissolves too.
Perhaps the moment of such scents and of words need not be so different. In A.S. Byatt’s Possession there is a line about people’s handwriting: ‘Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years’. Here the sentiment is negative, but equally it can be the other way. The mere hint of another’s writing – like a scent you recongise in them – can have an immediate, overflowing sensation.
In writing about the ‘presence’ of her own writing, Cixous notes:
I need writing; I need to surprise myself living: I need to feel myself quiver with living: I need to call myself into living and to answer myself by living: I need to be living in the present of the present: I need double-living: I need to come into life: I am afraid that writing will take the place of living: I need writing thinking of living: I write celebrating living: I need to accompany living with music: I need writing to celebrate living: this morning, I perfumed myself with essence of orange flower water: on the phial of essential oil there is the original label covered with Arabic signs that spirit me away on their sweeping curls to an unknown but imaginable neighbourhood in Baghdad: I adore scripts: and the two most beautiful scripts in the world are Hebrew and Arabic, languages I neither read nor speak… (Cixous, ‘(With) Or the Art of Innocence’)
The infusion here of writing and perfume seems particularly sweet. The to and fro of those delicate languages we barely even read or speak need not be unfathomable scripts – they can the senses of scents or all those messages we pass between one another over the days, months, years… Again, I think of lines from Possession: ‘Letters … are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure … Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. [...] Letters … exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader, they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader’. But… but, I know… I sense it… I’m afraid I don’t adequately ‘answer myself by living’, even if that is not how it feels right now.
Imaging a painful outcome (renouncing, leaving, etc.), I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.), and I immediately forget what I would then have to sacrifice: my madness itself – which by its very status cannot be constituted as the object of my sacrifice: who ever saw a madman “sacrificing” his madness to someone? (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
…and it is surely the little indefinable and beautiful moments - like the near remembrance of another’s scent – that keeps awake the madness that would be a true madness to sacrifice.
Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance (the natural dimension of real fatigues). I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity: always bewildered, never discouraged; I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem…
Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight(Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
In the vernacular I know it to be a ‘Weeble-Wobble‘ which never falls down. How mad they must have felt all those times so nearly hitting the ground, yet recovering due to an irrepressible balancing pin. I am due to go to London again next week, though I really wonder what I will do, how I will remain on a level. This time I carry with me another book. I’ve kept it wrapped in the manila envelope in which it arrived. It bore no note, nothing. I only know it was obtained by its owner (with the fabulous handwriting) in 1999. And I know also, because it was one of the last things we said (and in such a matter of a fact kind of way, which was odd given it was the last time we allowed ourselves to be together), that it had been remembered it had been forgotten, having previously been placed next to a copy of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-between (which of course seemed so apt at the time). But what is this time in which I have to read it?
…keeping in mind that Perfume is a murder story of sorts, I sense myself being on the run. I am a criminal, a thief in the night of my own thoughts and feelings: ‘The sentiment of an accumulation of amorous sufferings explodes in this cry: “It can’t go on…” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse). Indeed these words must stop…
…the remembering of something forgotten is a perpetual loss; only ever remedied by the ‘thing’ itself, that which goes beyond any words to describe it…
circumstance
Tinsley Cooling Towers Demolition
Driving back up the M1 (R. – remember those majestic cooling towers as you pass Sheffield? They were blown up a while back. The place seems so lost without them. Good job we imortalised them when we did!), a song I distinctly remember from my childhood came on the radio. I could hardly have told you I remembered it so well until I heard it serendipidously like this – but suddenly I was in that space, or rather echoes of that time/space merged with my current emotional space. I think I must have always thought the song was by Paul McCartney – the tones and the melody lines (particularly the break to the middle eight) are so close (- although wikipedia suggests: ‘The melody echoes the ending of Elton John’s 1975 single Someone Saved My Life Tonight). Anyway, it was Billy Joel’s My Life (1978). [Listen via YouTube]
From the moment the strolling bass, neat drums and skating piano kicked in it all just spoke to me in so many ways – all in its three and a half minutes (the perfect length of a pop song). The opening lines, ’Got a call from an old friend / We used to be real close / Said he couldn’t go on the American way’, immediately got me thinking about my planned trip to Bogota – to get away from the American way and to see R. (we did indeed use to be – and still are – real close). Of course I’m hardly going to pitch a ’stand-up routine in L.A.’ when I get there, but hey ‘it’s okay’.
It was the second verse that really began to interweave various strands of thought.
They will tell you, you can’t sleep alone in a strange place
Then they’ll tell you, you can’t sleep with somebody else
Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space
Either way it’s okay, you wake up with yourself
I have been reading Barthes’ The Neutral recently, and in particular the entry on ‘Retreat’, which works around the difference between place and space. We can organise our space (and feel it), whereas place is somewhere we are situated, whether we like it or not. He writes: ‘…it wearies me to have to look for (and not to find) my place … but this weariness is converted … if I’m asked not to take up a place … but only to float in a space’. And he further explains: …the Neutral would be a sutble art of keeping the good distance between landmarks (including human landmarks of emotional space. Cf. last year’s course on the critical distance in shoals of fish: Neutral = spacing (production of space) and not distanciation, distancing’. In one brief verse – as I sped along in the fast lane of the motorway – these ideas were all there. You cannot necessarily ’sleep alone in a strange place’ (nor sadly with someone else), this is a ‘place’ that – in this case – is closed off to you (certainly as one’s life unfolds). But, still, you’ll always have your ‘own space’, which always includes waking up ‘with yourself’ – and which you’ll always be left to fathom for yourself (and/or as a space in which to fathom those around you). So, how you choose to wake up, how you produce the space of your own (which is all you have) is all part of the subtle art of keeping good distance.
It is easy to listen to My Life as the pronoucement of reformed and now assertive individual (as we find for example in the relentless I Will Survive): ‘I don’t need you to worry for me cause I’m alright /I don’t want you to tell me it’s time to come home / I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life / Go ahead with your own life, and leave me alone’. But, if the opening lines about giving up the American way were not enough, the middle eight makes evident (in words and melody) the melancholy which underlines the song. There is the unforeseen line ’I never said you had to offer me a second chance’, followed by the wonderfully ambiguious rider ‘I never said I was a victim of circumstance’. And the most powerful line, which the whole song revolves around, is just three words : ‘I still belong’ – the melody, which goes up, bounces you back into an ’space’ quite other to that of ‘my life … leave me alone’. The sense of belonging we feel never actually goes away.
Of course the emphatic ‘my life’ that drives through the song cannot be ignored, but my reading of it is that it is about affirming an appropriate kind of spacing… (following Bathes’ dalliance with zen literatures) I have found myself thinking about that vaguely zen-inspired problem of whether or not it is possible to clap with one hand. It sounds impossible, but I got to thinking (due to circumstance being like a circumference) that maybe you can be true to something, hold a clear and real feeling, and that need not necessarily require the other hand to meet in the resounding clap we expect, we wish…
I don’t (yet?) know how to practice any sutble art of keeping good distance between human landmarks of emotional space, but I’d like to think it might be equally precious, and for now I suppose it might start with saying ‘I don’t need you to worry for me cause I’m alright’… but…
…but I’d always be lying if I said ‘I don’t want you to tell me it’s time to come home’.
Slow Time(s)
‘Slower,’ said Jalal. ‘In-two-three-four, out-two-three-four. Very good. Slow the stream of your thoughts. Once you are in Slow-Time, everything will seem to slow down around you. But you will be fast. You will be faster than anything. (from S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, p.129)
We are accustomed to measuring time in a uniform manner. In this sense, time is made up of fixed, repeatable units. Phenomenologically, however, the way we experience time can alter quite markedly – it can seem to stretch, or constrict as if it were hardly adhering to the usual units of time measured upon the clock face. That final hour, when you are desperate to leave work to go and meet someone, time can feel so long. Yet, upon meeting the person you longed to meet, an hour seems to fly past all too quickly. Are these in fact different kinds of time? Or is it simply how we make use of time, how we shape the time we are in?
In S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, we are told the tale of a small Mesopotamian Blue kitten who, breaking out of the confines of his owner’s home, must learn to fend for himself in the big wide city. In doing so he re-discovers the Seven Skills of a secret cat martial arts called The Way of Jalal. Of these seven skills, the fourth is Slow-Time: ‘everything will seem to slow down around you. But you will be fast. You will be faster than anything‘. There is something quite plausible about a cat with the ability of slow-time, one only has to sit and watch the stealth with which a cat slowly advances upon its prey (or just a shadow even) to recognise a certain potential for an altered sense of time.
In a rather more elaborate fashion, Slow-Time is an effect used in countless films since its celebrated use (and development) in The Matrix. The following clip offers an account of how the effect is created. Given the nature of the movie industry, it is perhaps without surprise that instead of the gentle sounding Slow-Time, the effect is generally referred to as Bullet-Time. Nonetheless, what is apparent in the creation of the effect is – as a theoretical model – the ability to spatialise time, or rather to ‘move’ in time just in the same way we can willfully move in the three dimensions of space. It is a fantasy of time travel used on a micro-level to move about the perspective of a single event.
Concurrent with reading Varjak Paw, I have also been reading Sara Maitland’s intriguing new book, A Book of Silence. It has got me thinking that perhaps Slow-Time need not be thought of as just a mystical Way, the musings of a theoretical physicist, or the technology intensive illusion of the film industry. Perhaps Slow-Time is equally something quite simple and ready to hand. In her book, Maitland gives an account of an ‘adventure’ she goes on – over a period of 10 years – to experience and chart what we mean by silence (the book reads as of mixture of both personal journey and cultural history). Crucially she seeks to find a positive, affirmative reading of silence, contrary to popular notions, which suggest silence to be boring, asocial and potentially bad for us. She spends six weeks all alone a cottage on Skye. During this self-imposed period of silence (which for her is closely linked to solitude), she notes eight particular experiences: ‘…an intensification of both physiological and psychological sensation; disinhibition; a sense of ‘givenness’ or connection; auditory confusions; an exhilarating consciousness of being at risk, in peril; ineffability and bliss’ (p.78). Not all of these experiences are necessarily relevant to Slow-Time, but they all suggest of a certain mallebility of our own sense of self and our sense or place in time and space. She writes, for example, of a heightened sensation and awareness of the taste of food (even bland food such as porridge), an ability to distinguish various sonics within the rush of wind and rain. And she describes a whole different sense of being in the world, particularly a sensation of blurring with the surrounds, to shed the usual sense of one’s own boundary (of one’s skin etc). Is this how Slow-Time begins, with a re-negoiation with what is going on around you? (…it is worth remembing, the First Skill of the Way of Jalal is Open Mind, ‘only when you admit that you know nothing, can you truly know anything‘!).
Roland Barthes, in his lecture course ‘The Neutral’, devotes a section to ‘Silence’. He begins by differentiating between tacere, which in Latin refers to verbal silence, and silere, meaning stillness, absence of movement and of noise. Sara Maitland’s quest to embrace and understand silence begins more along the lines of verbal silence, but soon (especially following her experiences on Skye) unearths much more of the sense of silere, which, as Barthes explains, generally refers to:
…objects, night, sea, winds … Hence a series of very beautiful ordinary metaphors: the moon turned invisible at its wanning, the bud or the tendril that hasn’t yet opened up, the egg that is not yet hatched: silet, sileunt.
In short, silere would refer to a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared…
I’d like to think the shift of attention to a silence of things (and not just words, speech), brings us upon a sense of Slow-Time, in that it is about our ability to take up and appreciate shapes within our all too often confined experience of the space-time continnum. Like Maitland, Barthes looks to silence (and more broadly the neutral) in the affirmative. It is precisely its removal from the very structures of meaning we are accustomed to that attracts him and within which he suggests a radical space or time of meaning – or, the opening of meaning. And, there is a underlying interest in Zen for Barthes too, both its ’suspicion with regard to theoretical verbalisation’ and its undoing of hierarchies: ‘Why did the sixth patriarch succed the fifth: “It’s becase,” he says, “I don’t understand Buddhism.” (p.28). At the close of the section on Silence, Barthes writes the following: ‘This integral silence is no longer simply the tacere but joins the silere: silence of all nature, scattering of the fact-of-man throughout nature: as if man were some kind of noise of nature (in the cybernetic sense), a caco-phony’ (p.29). Perhaps, here, Barthes, is raising Slow-Time to the level of humanity, beyond the singular adventures of a very particular cat!
It might be said bridging between Slow-Time and silence, or to put another way, to suggest a certain silence within Slow-Time (which admittedly is often a feature of the sequences one sees in film, at least in that the soundtrack is ’slowed’ through the use of different acoustics), is not entirely appropriate. But, if it is a way to relate Slow-Time to our own lives, it might be worth pursuing. At the time of my writing I am caught up in a certain silence. Not of the solitary kind, as Maitland experiences on Skye. Instead, I am surrounded by a host of sounds, but all of which in a culture the language of which I do not speak. I hear everything, but I do not comprehend and crucially I have little means to make the ‘voices’ in my head become understandable to those around me. It is the latter, I feel, that creates the silence I am in. The days are long (but then I have come from a timezone in which the nights grow dark much earlier) and I find myself noticing all sorts of little details (the shape of clouds, the bleeps of domestic appliances, the structural creaks of the house, the patterns on cushions and carpets), which perhaps I would not normally attend to (although some who know me would might say otherwise!). Is this Slow-Time I am experiencing? Or is my current sense of time simply out of joint? Going on an unusual clumsiness with chopsticks I suspect the latter, but I will keep practicing – one never knows when the art of Slow-Time might come in handy!
[NB. For the regular reader, disappointed not to find an entry here on Perfume, I extend my apologies. However, I have not forgotten and it will one day appear - and soon I hope]
Why do I/we note everything down?
I don’t know why I note down everything. Everything? It cannot be otherwise. Everything that I am apt to note down: everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation. Sometimes I am tired. For example for dreams. A voice whispers: don’t note it. I am tempted. I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail. (Cixous)
Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop (Barthes)
When writing, Derrida suggests, there is ‘a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself … Nothing intimidates me when I write’. Yet when he is just falling asleep – in the midst of a dreamscape - a panic of the subconscious sets in, “You’re Crazy to write this!”. Characteristically, Derrida then attempts to deconstruct this moment: ‘…in a certain way,’ he remarks, ‘I am more unconscious [when awake] than in my half sleep. When I am in that half sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth … when I’m awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep’. Yet, in noting everything down, when (in) writing, Cixous refers to a tiredness, ‘[f]or example for dreams’. What does she mean and how does this relate to the ‘truth’ of one’s half-sleep? Cixous would seem to be looking the other way. In obeying the whispering voices she seems to be responding directly to that same certain vigilance: just as Derrida’s subsconsious panic is like being scolded, Cixous is weighed down by all the dreams she writes…
I had been saying to you how I just couldn’t write here at the moment. I have lost my ‘voice’ I said. And we had been saying whether I was going to do anything ‘interesting’ with this afternoon of my own. I think I got it right when I said I can’t plan to do anything interesting, it will simply take me by surprise. I was going to tidy my desk and complete the correspondences sitting in my inbox, but in doing so… I happened to look at my copy of Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’, the one that was going to appear at the very end (beginning) of that article about blogging (about being a virtual scholar) and I just found myself opening up the various books I think link together (across the gulf of time, like that grand arc of time in Woolf’s Orlando). Although, underneath it all, it was your prompt that set it all off. So…
You can go to Technorati.com to see ‘what’s percolating in blogs now’ – all and sundry are at it and writing writing about everything and nothing (at the time of writing this blog is apparently ranked 4,696,975 – whatever that means!). According to eMarketer (May 2008), there were 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) and 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%). Worldwide, Universal McCann (March 2008) report that 184 million peope have started a blog and 346 million people read blogs, estimating 77% of active Internet users read blogs. Fitting with Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the potential is for ‘the public’ to be the ‘examiner’ – for all of us to become the resident critics and experts. But of course, as we know from the ‘Artwork’ essay, that comes with the admonition that this ‘examiner’ is generally ‘an absent-minded one’. Nevertheless, as Zoe Corbyn reports for the Times Higher Education, in her article ‘By the blog: academics tread carefully‘ 9 October 2008, UK scholars too are slowly but surely contributing to these statistics – adding no doubt to the state of absent-mindness. Are we all now potential writers? And what does that mean anyway?
…which leads me to think back to Roland Barthes’ piece ‘The Writer on Holiday’ in Mythologies, which opens with the line: ‘Gide was reading Bossuet while going down the Congo. This posture sums up rather well the ideal of our writers ‘on holiday”. Perhaps there is a similar sort of posture we might idenitfy with all those that write blogs – whilst ‘going down the Congo’ or at least some form of being on the move, all these millions of ’writers’ are ‘on holiday’ – everyday is a potential holiday from the mundane. For Barthes, the point was to uncover a certain myth residing in the activity of the writer on holiday – the idea of being on holiday means that writing is then just another form of work (from which you need or deserve to take a break): ‘To assert that this phenomenon can henceforth concern writers, that the specialists of the human soul are also subjected to the common status of contemporary labour, is a way of convincing our bourgeois readers that they are indeed in step with the times’. So, if we turn this around, if we suggest the holiday is no longer a reified thing, but actually a constant possibility – we’re all on holiday, or certainly on leisure time, we’re all ‘in step with the times’ - we come to the point in which all of us as holiday-makers are writers (…with a few clicks of the mouse: welcome to your blog). So, instead of the writer being on holiday, it is the holidays (offered through hypertext) which make us all writers (should we choose to be).
But, for Barthes there always was a delicate twist:
What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he [must it be he?] unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, a false holiday-maker as well. One is writing his memoirs, another is correcting proofs, yet another is preparing his next book. And he who does nothing confesses it as truly paradoxical behaviour, an avant-garde exploit (Barthes)
…but, as we trace through our day by partly being at work, yet equally finding ourself on the phone to a loved one, or at home, but catching up on the work mail, we all seem to be false workers, false holiday-makers and perhaps also false-writers (after all anyone can write a blog)… yet we keep writing (to one another) and reading, maybe because we don’t want to be on holiday, because being on holiday is only ever a temporary location.
So what do we write about, now that there is all this time upon our hands? As Cixous might suggest, ‘everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us…’. But it is this need to translate that can lead us astray, or can be make for a thread, weaving between us, so that the translation becomes the original. We are writing our own trail. Equally the translation can simply get in the way – where do I start? No longer a blank sheet, but a blank screen. …yet if the words breathe life into ‘everything that happens every day to one of us’, then I suppose it makes sense we try to find ways around the white void of words.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.
[...]
If this myh is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of duing his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus)
In locating my copy of Camus’ book to write out this quote, I am thrown back some 13 years by a hand written message. To anyone else it is simply a birthday greeting, but to me it evokes all those (dark) whispering voices that were present even then – encircling me like thieves. I never knew how to note them down (and I suppose I still don’t). The temptations remain (some now much lighter, though no less engulfing): ’I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail’. I probably do need to make that trip by plane to see the person who wrote the note back then.
I always wondered why the rules were added in with pencil. I never did ask at the time (and the reason by now is surely forgotten). It always read like a inserted quotation and that is how it remains. Like everything ‘that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation’…
Apparently, whilst I could never have discovered this with such ‘wikipedia ease’ back when I was given my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, Pascal Pia (1903 - 1979), a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar (and close friend of Camus) is said to have expressed absurdist and nihilistic sentiments. At the end of his life, he claimed the ‘right to nothingness’, prohibiting others from writing about him after his death. Which would have worked had we all not had this compulsion, however crudely, to note everything down.
Just Do It!
The dream has never died … it lives on in those Americans, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American, gay and straight, who are tired of a politics that divides us and want to recapture the sense of common purpose that we had when John Kennedy was president of the United States of America – Barack Obama (CNN)
When I look at Barack Obama (through the lens of the British broadcast media and various Internet snippets) I really only see a man in a race with the spectre of his own good looks and charm; epitomised, perhaps, by the I Got a Crush… on Obama viral video, which apparently Obama himself responded to by saying: ’It’s just one more example of the fertile imagination of the Internet. More stuff like this will be popping up all the time’ (more). Of course it is far more complex, and murky too. A recent article in The Guardian, ‘It’s the most vicious election campaign ever: and here’s why’, amply demonstrates the problem for Democrats trying to stage a political campaign against the ‘force of the mighty Republican propaganda machine’. In the UK it is easy to see only the photo-opportunities (the main speeches and press conferences). What is not witnessed are the endless parade of advertisements and internet videos, some authorised, plenty others not. Still with the polls in Obama’s favour and numerous negative headlines for McCain and Palin appearing on the widely-read syndicated news blog service The Huffington Post (see also plaid lemur), there is quiet optimism for a politics that no longer divides…
But aren’t we forgetting something? Polls show that race remains a negative factor. A poll conducted by Stanford University, for example, suggests that ‘the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points’ (Associated Press). The irony, of course, is that with prospects of America’s first ever Black president, race is strictly off the agenda: ‘The black candidate can’t really talk about race without being accused of race baiting, and the Republican candidate can’t indulge in the typical GOP-style coded race baiting because everyone knows what he’s doing’ (Deggans). The question, then, is whether race is being seen, but not voiced, or whether it is finally becoming a non-issue. Sadly, the latter is unlikely, but equally the former is surely more complex.
In Roland Barthes’ oft cited volume Mythologies (1957), the example of a young black solider is used to help unravel the complexities of semiological ’myth’. Whilst at the barber’s, Barthes casually notices the cover of Paris-Match, which shows an image of a young black solider who is saluting, ‘his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour [the French flag]‘. As a photograph it cannot ‘lie’ – ‘All this is the meaning of the picture’, Barthes notes.
But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this [solider] in serving his so-called oppressors (Barthes, Mythologies)
The key lesson of Barthes semiological system is that ‘myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear’. What happens in this case is that the history of the solider (his own personal history and that of colonialism more broadly) is changed into mere gesture. Nothing is removed, or hidden, but everything takes on a different manner.
This is a king of arrest, in both the physical and the legal sense of the term: French imperiality condemns the saluting [solider] to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the [solider] suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment [his] salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality. [...] myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place.(Barthes, Mythologies)
Have we finally exorcized this myth? For Barthes, there is one ‘language’ that is not mythical. It is language of the producer, of one who ’speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image … revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical. Revolution is defined as a cathartic act meant to reveal the political load of the world: it makes the world’ (See also: Michael Johnson’s Barthes and the Politics of Electoral Photography which prompts consideration of imagery from the US Election). In 1983 the UK’s Conservative Party issued the following election poster:
As Paul Gilroy explains: ‘The poster was presumably intended to exploit ambiguities between ‘race’ and nation and to salve the sense of exclusion experienced by the blacks who were its target’. The main caption ‘Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British’ set against the image of a young black man in smart dress ’set out to reassure readers that “with Conservatives there are no ‘blacks’, no ‘whites’, just people’. Rhetorically, the attempt was to make nationality colourless, or colour-blind. And of course the suit worn by the man is quite pertient. Obama is well known for his stylish suits (which contrast dramatically with McCain) – is this the manifestation of a revolutionary language? In the 1983 poster, Gilroy sees the suit as a weapon:
…the slightly too large suit worn by the young man, with its unfashionable cut and connotations of a job interview, becomes a key signifier. It conveys what is being asked of the black readers as the price of admission to the colour-blind form of citizenship promised by the text. Blacks are being invited to forsake all that marks them out as culturally distinct before real Britishness can be guaranteed. Isolated and shorn of the mugger’s icons – a tea-cosy hat and the dreadlocks of Rastafari – he is redeemed by his suit, the signifier of British civilization. The image of the black youth as a problem is thus contained and rendered assimilable. The wolf is transformed by his sheep’s clothing (Gilroy, in Images: A Reader, pp.76-78)
Obama carries no such signifier. The language of his suits (to quote Barthes again) ’speaks in order to transform reality and no longer to preserve it as an image’. The Media Critic of the St. Petersburg Times, Eric Deggans, offers a neat phrase: ‘It’s something people of color face every day: you’re a symbol to the world until you get famous enough that you’re not.’
Obama’s style and affect might better be understood in terms of Celia Lury’s analysis of the advertising of Benetton clothing, which has a purposefully ‘global’ definition of race. The company’s slogan subtly, but significantly changed from ‘All the Colours of the World’ to ‘United Colours of Benetton’. The ir advertising imagery frequently accentuates racial characteristics and national codes. On the one hand:
The overpowering reference point in their imagery is that race is real: racial archetypes provide the vehicle for their message, and racial common sense is overbearingly present in the ‘United Colors’ myth, such that the reality of race is legitimated in Benetton’s discourse (Back and Quaade, in Images: A Reader, p.262)
Yet, there is a more complex and contemporary reading, which Lury explains:
…the novel productivity of these images is missed if it is argued that racial difference is naturalised here, if by that is meant that race is presented as an unchanging and eternal biological essence. ‘Race’, in this imagery, is not a matter of skin colour, of physical characteristics as the expression of a biological or natural essence, but rather of style, of the colour of skin, of colour itself as the medium of what might be called a second nature or, more provocatively, a cultural essentialism (Lury, in Images: A Reader, p.262)
Keeping in mind something of Lury’s logic of race as a style and medium, Eric Deggan’s article, One Reason Race May Not Derail Obama: The ‘Do the Right Thing’ Effect, provides a set of three scenarios that foreground the manner in which Obama’s ‘race’ is not easily understood a simple biological category, but as something far more complex, tactical and arguably with very little to do with Obama himself – but instead the complex history of signification that we are all placed within.
The Do the Right Thing effect – I named this for the moment in Spike Lee’s legendary film where he confronts a racist pizzeria operator with the observation that the guy makes awful comments about black people but loves Prince, Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson.
“It’s different,” John Turturro’s Pino Frangione insists. “Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers…They’re not really black. They’re black but they’re not really black. They’re more than black. To me, it’s different.”
And that’s a dynamic no one can measure. It’s been my experience as the occasional object of racism that there are some folks who feel badly about the idea of black people, but those attitudes can change for specific black people they feel they know.
So there are probably some Democratic voters who don’t see Obama as a typical black person, and don’t transfer those negative, generic feelings onto him – particularly because he doesn’t fit the easy stereotypes, even of black politicians. And as long as Obama has been running for president, there are many voters who didn’t really get to know him until he clinched the Democratic nomination in July.
[...]
The Reverse Bradley Effect – Okay, this one is a little less likely, I admit. But the Bradley effect is a dynamic named for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a black politician who went into a tough election for governor doing well in the polls but lost when the votes were counted.
The lesson some learned: people told pollsters they were voting Bradley just so they wouldn’t look racist.
But as today’s presidential race has taken on a new dynamic, I wonder if a different impulse won’t emerge. We are, after all, in an election season where Republicans and even Democrats like Geraldine Ferraro insist Obama is getting widespread support mostly because of his race.
So maybe there are some folks planning to vote for Obama who don’t want to admit it.
[...]
The George Wallace Effect – Like Hillary Clinton before him, Republican John McCain has tried to reference Obama’s difference without mentioning race, emphasizing his loose connections to “domestic terrorist” William Ayers and repeatedly asking “Who is the real Barack Obama?” as if two years on the campaign trail hadn’t provided the public a few answers.
But McCain is discovering what Clinton also learned the hard way – the real point of those kinds of attacks is obvious in the post-Willie Horton-era, and it hurts in two ways. It makes people who are not racist but uneasy about Obama feel as if they are falling in league with racists, and it brings enough racists out of the woodwork that those making the attacks start looking like the famously pro-segregation governor (doubt my words, check the footage of McCain correcting a supporter who worried he was an Arab – the kind of thinking his campaign seemed to be encouraging just days before).
[...]
These are odd positions for me to argue, I admit. Back when Obama first announced his candidacy, I along with many other black folks, had a hard time believing a black candidate for president could be much more than a trivia question.
But white friends who were much less cynical about racism argued me down, and seem to be proven right.
Now that the worsening economy is hobbling Republican electoral hopes everywhere, I’m ready to believe that America might be ready to elect its first black president.
The only real question left, is whether enough white folks feel the same.
…in keeping with the ‘Do The Right Thing’ effect, and reminding ourselves of the presence of sports wear and its associated, global slogans which appear as parody in Spike Lee’s film, we might now most usefully take Nike’s mantra – JUST DO IT! – and get on with that dream which never died…
Virtual Feed
