Bryan Cooke

"Six Lessons from a series of sleepy yet delirious moments at the University of new South Wales"

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Gah.

As I said to a friend yesterday afternoon: I am a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. And, on a wholly unrelated note, I have a cold…

Anyway.

Some of you are aware that I recently went to a conference with the primary intention of seducing as many attractive people as possible with my wit and formidable dialectical prowess, and with the secondary intention of presenting a paper on Plato and Badiou.

Suffice it to say, that I BASICALLY achieved 'b', as long as your definition of the word 'paper' is sufficiently loose and you take the word 'delivered' in its original, that is, strictly postal sense. I also, of course, triumphantly achieved my first goal, as long as my imagination still counts as the main criteria for reality. Which it does...

By way of a cruel and unusual “warm-up” to said paper, I had given a sprawling and shambolic ex tempore beta-version of the same paper a week before to a group of mainly analytically inclined post-graduate students who were – as this group tends to be --extremely generous and patient with both my inchoate ramblings and with the completely alien material. In addition, said crowd asked a goodly [sic] number of intelligent, sensitive questions in the discussion period while mercifully resisting the temptation to cry ‘where’s Alan Sokal when we need him’ in response to me saying preposterous things like 'mathematics is ontology'.

I gave the preliminary paper, because I’d long thought that I should attend the conference that I attended last week, because rather than despite the fact that said conference is infamous in ‘continental’ circles for being a suzerainty of analytic philosophy to the point that ‘people of opposite inclinations' simply do not attend.

But, I wanted to go, both because a kindly acquaintance (not knowing how egregious I can be when behind a desk or a podium) invited me, and because I've long thought that I should attend this particular (annual) conference given that:

1) Even if I do sometimes agree with Deleuze/Badiou on the limits of dialogue in philosophy, I am not and have never really been a partisan when it comes to Anglophone philosophy's tedious, and parochial-seeming “Great Divide”. Thus, as much as there are people (frankly, in all sorts of areas in the humanities and sciences) who I am unable to talk to on the grounds of their being frighteningly intellectually narrow, I have also been fortunate enough to meet people from all kinds of philosophical tendencies whose company I've enjoyed and from whom I’ve learned much. Given this, the ‘divide’, like all such things, is, I think, ultimately deleterious if not disastrous to philosophy. In particular, the stereotypes each group has of each other are -- while sufficiently true to exist as stereotypes -- sufficiently false, to deserve to be overcome as stereotypes. So, just as not all “continental” philosophers are artist-manque poseurs desperately trying to hide their vacuity by occasionally vomiting out bits of ill-digested jargon amidst gnomic pronouncements that ultimately amount to: “if our concepts were just a little more vague, everyone would be nicer to everyone else”; similarly, not all analytic philosophers are humourless, Aspergic train-spotters of the kind who might have been useful in Bletchley Park’s cryptography unit, but who otherwise deserve the name of ‘philosopher’ only if the word's principle connotation is a person who would respond to In Search of Lost Time by suggesting that Swann would be a lot less worried about Odette if he’d thought through the consequences of first order predicate logic. Tee. Fucking. Hee.

Related to the above: I have a friend who argues (publically) that the term ‘continental philosophy’ is entirely a construction of ‘analytic philosophers’. Not sure if she says that the opposite is also true, but I still like the idea...

2) I do think that in writing and teaching, clarity is a virtue, despite the fact that this basically salutary belief is (I’m an Augustinian about evil) easily perverted into the stupid, philistine principle: ‘if I can’t instantly understand something, that’s surely because it’s (obfuscatory) nonsense.”

3) Again with the notable exception of the kind of people who treat an encounter with unfamiliar thought as proof that they are in the presence of obscurantist barbarians hell-bent on denying modus ponens, leveling the distinction between penicillin and a rain-dance and thus, er....y'know, apologizing for the Nazis : I do frequently appreciate the habit common to many of the more good-natured analytic philosophers of asking questions to just about anything. While certainly this can lead to the speaker being faced with obviously naïve questions: it’s surely a truth universally known that naïve, or ill-informed questions are often a) eminently philosophical and b) even where a) is false, they often provide the occasion for a a speaker to reshape her previous statements into a more cogent form. In contrast to this, some "continental-types" (fewer in philosophy per se actually, and more in the 'theory-phobic/theory-philiac OTHER humanities) are too easily intimidated by the sense of a speaker’s expertise or erudition to do anything but nod and say ‘mmhmmm’ vigorously, particularly if the speaker has the reputation of being an eminence or is in anyway charismatic, in which case people will (as I've seen them do) watch their deepest-held beliefs be dismissed as total nonsense and still come out of the talk acting as if exceptionally cool Professor X had spent the whole lecture holding both of their hands, staring into their eyes, and saying 'I believe you', like the electronic monk in Douglas Adams's first "Dirk Gently" novel.

In particular, I know one celebrity professor, in an adjoining department to mine, who since his arrival at my university, seems to have been constantly followed by an embarrassing, puppy-dog like coterie of academics and graduate students whose contributions to his seminars tend to be of the order of ‘that was wooooonderful…it’s soooo much like what I already think in My Own Work....” and other such surefire stomach-purgers. I've even seen the same coterie greet the most respectful and well-formed questions to the Master with rolled eyes, as if none but the most intellectually disabled would dare to say anything that could imply more criticism than: "I love you". Ce n’est pas magnifique et ce n’est pas la guerre. And it certainly isn’t philosophy.

4) I am an inveterate believer in the notion that if you occupy the position of a despised or excluded minority , it is better to try to take Manhattan (followed, as Leonard Cohen rightly, tells us by Berlin) rather than trying to accept the ghetto that will inevitably be proffered to you as being ‘perfectly nice in its own way’. Thus, when confronted with awful, pseudo-concessions of the: “sure, you ladies can’t write proper novels, but y’know you could write some damn fine ‘women’s fiction’”) the correct answer is not only the obvious “Sure, I will and how about you insert [name of blunt/spiky/uncomfortable sounding object] into your [name of orifice]…”, but also to immediately try and write a novel to (paraphrase a line of Orwell) that will knock Proust into a cocked hat.”

In context, Orwell was saying that he knew thousands of people in Paris with this intention – mainly upper-middle class expatriates -- and I’ve always found the phrase particularly endearing, again, because rather than despite the fact that my crappy visual imagination fails entirely to add the adjective ‘cocked’ to the hat that the sentence conjures up. Sure I could Google it, but we all know this would be ruining the magic.

5) Now, obviously, my own presence at aforementioned conference meant exactly doodly-squat to the noble sounding principle I just mentioned, especially as I was confined, by reasons of time, vague social guilt, and stupid "stream-loyalty" to a very narrow choice of papers. Nonetheless, I do of course agree with myself [sic!] that my '"storm the citadel -- even if it makes you look like a lone looney" principle - is a good one. Also, there were many more ostensibly ‘continental’ types at said conference than I initially expected: watch, O ye mortals, for our trickle will one day be a deluge.

Anyway, apart from not doing much frolicking (I spent the first of only two nights in which I stayed at what should have been a 5 night conference pathetically, in my small, cold, room, in the company of a bottle of carbonated water and the 100g bag of crisps that was my dinner): attempting to write my paper, which was nearly 4,000 words longer than it should have been by 3.30am while still being good only in comparison to my previous shambolic talk.

But apart from this I did see:

a) An excellent paper by a young English academic on Marx, who put forward a trenchant, elegant and I thought knock-down case against various well-intentioned attempts to uncover the implicit ‘normative’ (i.e. moral) basis of Marxist thought. He also made a very instructive comparison between Marx and Foucault which is still making me resolve to find the guy’s book and read it before any sensible person can tell me off from finding another tangent to distract myself from my thesis.

b)Several fine, thought-provoking, elegant papers on Plato, although many of these excellent papers (by lovely people) did, in a very indirect way, give rise to the speculations which I’ve scribbled below. As background, the older I get, the more unequivocally I love Plato. I’ve even recently gone and made shambolic and quixotic attempts to teach myself (with the help of an equally masochistic friend) Attic Greek. Consequently, I still have nightmares about the passive aorist, the mysteries of endless participles, third declension nouns that resemble other third declension nouns IN NAME ONLY and those God-cursed enclitic particles that appear for no reason and seemingly do nothing to the sentence. (Ah, dit donc? Doch!)

c) Two keynotes: one utterly, utterly awful one on ‘responsibilities to oneself’, which unfortunately managed to be an amalgam of every bad stereotype that I have of analytic moral philosophy: from humourless jokes to feeble attempts to reflect on the content of something purely from the point of its logical structure with the result of presenting constant tortuous banalities and false paradoxes as if they were the inevitable solution to an equation and cii) a later, elegant keynote speech, which, although it was still not exactly "my kind of philosophy" left me, and I believe everyone else in the audience, in a mood of hat-doffing salutation: it’s quite something to watch someone who seems like a kindly old lady in her late 60s take on analytic eminences as if they were so many flies buzzing around her afternoon tea...

Okay. Enough of the background.

I’d now like to leave you with some of my immediate, post-conference thoughts, in the hope that you will relate similar experiences, comment, or at least somehow build an enormous gilt statue of me in the plazas of your minds.

N.B. Some of the following remarks have a direct relation to certain papers/discussions/drunken arguments whereas others have only a very oblique relationship to these same: so, if you were present at said events, please don’t leap to the conclusion that any of my things, are a coded way of saying ‘god I hate that guy….”

LESSON NUMBER ONE:
</strong>Glib, shibboleth-swapping hacks and Pious Philologists are Equally Capable of PROJECTION when it comes to reading text. Which is disturbing.

My Plato stream was introduced with a discussion about how the scholarly consensus was (finally) moving towards a greater acknowledgement of the importance of attention to dialogic context in the reading of Plato, i.e. that we cannot approach Plato’s thoughts, by simply turning to what we have already delimited as the ‘philosophical parts of his work’ (say Book VI of the Republic) while blithely ignoring everything else in a given dialogue (or in other dialogues) as so much literary window-dressing. (And of course, the idea that the word 'literary' is equivalent to 'decorative' is the mark of an idiot or a philistine, or more commonly, both at once.)

Now, I, of course, approve of the various more ‘hermeneutic’ approaches to Plato that do this kind of close-reading, cross-referencing between dialogues, attempts to think about a given argument in regards to its place in the dialogue and so on. Also, I saw some gratifying, even exemplary implementations of this kind of strategy at said conference.

Having said that, I’ve long thought that one of the unfortunate things about extremely close reading is that the 'closer' it gets, the more it seems to warrant the accusation of arbitrariness as much as extremely glib readings.

To explain (and this was something discussed during my panel), I find the close-reading vs. glib reading thing, relates to projection, in a manner that is vaguely reminiscent to the way that (I think) the definite article operates in French.

Explaining, in French, at least as I understand it with my feeble grasp of the language, definite articles are used for either extreme specificity (“le livre = the book, over there…” i.e. almost as a demonstrative pronoun) and for extreme generality (l’amour= love in general). It's the kind of middling terms that make one use the indefinite article.

Similarly, I think that we find the extent to which the author’s prejudices (what might lead them to ‘project’ things on to the text) tends to be obvious in case of extremely glib readings (i.e. sweeping general statements), but also, more surprisingly, in very close readings.

At the lower end , you get to see the author’s prejudices in how they read Plato, because the ability to IGNORE THAT MUCH TEXT always shows what the person doing the ignoring was thinking about in order to ignore so much. However, I'm surprised to note, how often I've found a really close or detailed reading similarly revelatory as to the prejudices of its author (that the close-reading is usually supposed to overcome). It’s as if the more labyrinthine the twists and turns of the reading, the more it is made obvious that the ‘entrances’ and ‘exits’ were designated before we entered the maze and not after.

Specifically, I was thinking about this in the context of what one of the contributors to my session, referred to as the dangers of ‘cherry-picking’ (focusing on one set of details while ignoring another). This speaker (who, incidentally gave a fine paper) made the important point that Plato scholarship really needs, as it moves towards greater attention to the dialogue form, a kind of literary theory or reflection on method.

This, unsurprisingly, made me think of not only the problem of, but also the (seeming) inevitability of cherry-picking – or what also goes by the name of “the hermeneutic circle” and (in Gadamer’s use of the word) ‘prejudice’ conceived positively.

Thus, for instance, I know that there are certain things that can be said about a given dialogue, that I will invariably reject out of hand, if the accumulated evidence flies in the face of my dearly held conviction that Plato is most definitely not a peddler of platitudes. Conversely, I'm prepared to accept a very glib reading of a dialogue, if it yields a philosophically interesting point.

Of interest here, I think is the fact, that something like what I’m talking about is also continually staged in the dialogues as a philosophical and pedagogical problem.

Thus, any reader of Plato knows (in the light of the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition and its readings of the dialogues) that Plato and Aristotle already make use of one of the pillars of phenomenology: namely the idea that instead of perception being synthetic (putting together a chaotic manifold into an intelligible whole through mechanisms of the mind), we always start, and indeed, need to start with a kind of pre-apprehension of the whole, such that our disparate experience is then related to this whole (as changes in an object relate to the object as already perceived). Thus, an anthropologist, as Husserl and Heidegger would both point out, always has a pre-conception of what human beings are, in order to be able to consider humanity as something whose many facets and many ways can be revealed through the study of different cultural forms. The point is not that the anthropologist is bound to a certain doctrine, but rather that 'man' must have emerged as a REGION of phenomena: a locus of appearances.

In Plato and Aristotle the many complex issues around this problem of the 'part' and 'whole' revolve around the question of the nature of 'noesis', i.e. the faculty through which we have an immediate apprehension of the ‘whole’, which precedes any investigation or discourse, but which, nonetheless may be suffer a sea-change through a certain imponderable magic of dialectics. Noesis is about immediate perception (hence intuition), but not of the 'manifold', or the 'flux' of experience, but of a pre-delimitaiton of that field, such that appearances occur in the REGION already laid out (Heidegger would say 'opened') by noesis.

>2. I want a monstrous Socrates

Upon seeing the first version of my Badiou-Plato paper, a friend of mine said something so nice, and so immensely pleasing to me, that I really wonder whether my memory hasn’t just conveniently omitted the point where I bribed him into making this pronouncement. In essence, said ‘friend’ (who is er...really real and not at all a figment of my imagination...ahem...) said that my first ‘warm-up’ presentation reminded him (amidst all my drivel about axioms) that Socrates was a monster in a way that caused him to revise some of his own remarks in his thesis upon finding more and more evidence as to this monstrosity in the dialogues.

I was pleased by this, not only because I am an egomaniac's egomaniac (c.f. my cover photo on "Egomaniacs! Monthly") but because I realised that this notion of ‘monstrosity’ is definitely something I think about Plato. Consequently, one of the things that I like about reading Plato with Badiou (preposterous as it might be) is that you get a ‘Plato’ utterly irreducible to Alain de Botton-like nostrums. Who after all wants a Plato who exists simply to affirm what are already our platitudes?

In essence, I realise that I treat “Socrates” much as some of my more favoured theological thinkers (I’m thinking particularly of Kierkegaard) will treat Christ: i.e. as someone utterly, monstrously, irreducible to ordinary ethical categories, or to the canons of polite sociability:

A figure who says things like: “Sure, you follow the commandments…but you want the Kingdom: how about you give up everything you own and follow me…”, a person who ignores his family, who points to love beyond the law, and who breaks with the respectable morality by hanging out with prostitutes and ‘tax collectors’, a figure whose claim to be ‘God suffering and dying and incarnate’ is, and indeed must be, as St. Paul says a ‘scandal to the Greeks and Jews’ (meaning, as Badiou points out) that it is something utterly nonsensical both to ‘our traditions', to 'the old ways', to ‘what has always been done and seems natural’ as well as to the ‘respectable or modish intellectual or elite opinion.’. Thus, when I hear soi-disant Christians talk, I am constantly bemused by those who claim that their Christianity lies in either general bourgeois respectability (hard work, looking after your family &c.), or, worse, if you’re a member of the Christian right, a certain judicious, daily amount of not-being-gay (?!?). Instead, isn't the whole point, far more...enticingly, appallingly mad: the demand that you love your fellow human beings not only as friends who share the same interests, nor as suffering victims who are conveniently acceptable when they are distant and pitiable but instead that you love all humanity at its most frail, annoying and unbearable, that you are committed to the idea (and will work for the realisation of the ideal) that the poor, the meek and the despised will inherit the earth (and deserve to inherit it), that you believe we are required to act with a capacity for forgiveness, kindness et cetera that is, frankly (and here Christopher Hitchens is right) inhuman.

Now, his own (doubtless gratifying) lack of pretensions to divinity aside: a human-all-too-human Socrates is not something that I think would render him worthy of puzzling over, except to the extent (and this also is true, of say Kierkegaard’s reading of Christ) the traces of his ordinary humanity participates in an admixture with the monstrous (where the monstrous is perhaps a good way of translating Badiou’s idiosyncratic sense of the ‘Subjective’). Lacan, speaking of Socrates and Alcibiades speaks of Socrates' agalmar that which is in 'him more than himself", and both concepts, to me, grasp something of why I like Graham Harman's suggestion that we should replace Hegel's Owl of Minerva with (H.P. Lovecraft's) Chthulhu as the symbol of philosophy...philosophy as the monstrous gaze of a monster on a series of monsters: itself an attempt to be faithful to a monstrous injunction...

In admitting to this prejudice, I’ve just noticed that all of this actually seems to go with my intuitive feelings about ethical commitments in general. Specifically, I’ve never trusted any ethical ideals that people would seem to be able to easily fulfill by doing what they would in any case have done (hence one of the many obviously embarrassing things about New Ageism), whereas conversely, anyone who subscribes to a set of ideals to which their own lives seem perpetually inadequate tends to gain my instant approval, even when the ideal is a little bit batty. Thus, I like people to be, in their own eyes, perpetually falling short of their ideals, rather than easily living up to them: which is probably why it's a good thing that I'm not Emperor of the Universe.

3. Combining 1 and 2 above: if we’re going to walk through a philological, or hermeneutic, Inferno, I want to come out, at the end on a cliff above a beach, with my senses restored, feeling the wind on my face (like the beginning of Dante’s Purgatorio)


I was walking back from Monday night drinks with two friends, both good, talented, energetic young academics – I’d be tempted to say “good philosophers” in the way that characters on the Wire might say good ‘po-lice’, and somehow discussion got ‘round to the thousand year-old conspiracy theory books -that-have-a-lot-to-answer-for-in-inspiring-Dan-Brown

As we were talking about this, my friend, who sheepishly admitted to having read many such a treatise, said that what's so disappointing about these novels is that you spend all this time being told of exciting connections between the CIA,the Illuminati, the "real story" of the Last Supper, the Templars, Gnostics, Cathars, the Grail, and all the other sorts of things mentioned in Foucault’s Pendulum, only to be told that the Great Secret is something like "the body isn't as bad as people make out."

It's as if the whole thing was set in motion by a misread laundry list, even and especially when the Great Secret is Revealed.

The moral (applying also to Platonic hermeneutics): people will follow you a long way, down tortuous, and mysterious paths, but you have to give them something that makes the journey not feel like a complete waste of time. (I say "a biscuit", for who doth not like biscuits? Suffer the little biscuits to come unto me...&c.")

4. Most academics are unfortunately almost never worth listening to on subjects other than those they do not devote their careers.

Okay, so there are exceptions, and said exceptions tend to be the people I most like.

But, unfortunately, here again the stereotype is too often based in reality. Academia, too often leads to (because it encourages) ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’ (Max Weber). And one of the obvious consequences of specialization is that people end up with a position on ‘things-that-they-in-fact-know-little-about-but-vaguely-feel-they-should-have-something-to-say-about’ with a few defensive, shallow catechisms that they repeat whenever the specter of all of the things that they rejected in choosing their particular ‘intellectual favourites’ comes up.

Thus: Listen to a “Deleuzean” who might have some very subtle things to say on Keith Ansell Pearson, on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Crack-up", Pataphysics or on how Deleuze’s concepts differ while resembling Bergson’s. Then listen to the same person talk about Hegel and you suddenly find yourself in the midst of statements that would be rejected by the philosophical equivalent of “Private Eye”.

Related to this, is the number of people whose take on the parts of the history of philosophy (or of literature) that they don’t actually study is a (sigh) complete mirror of the opinions of the figure(s) that they do study/like.

Now, naturally, there’s nothing wrong with agreeing with a figure whom you hold in some awe, nor do I think that everyone has to have an absolutely unprecedented ‘taste’ in intellectual matters to qualify as a grown up. (There would be a danger in such an imperative of applying consumer-capitalist imperatives towards perpetual self-differentiation to the life of the mind.) Nonetheless, I still find it disappointing, when I ask, say a devotee of Heidegger about, say, Hermann Cohen, and realise within 5 seconds of the answer that the person is about to trot out their own specialisations version of the 'line' on this figure:

the Husserlian line, the Straussian line, the Voeglinian line, the speculative realist line &c.”

The dedication and trotting out of such lines may be (and – let’s not mince words -- is) expedient for an academic career, but it is entirely unphilosophical to the point that most of the (mainly dead) philosophers who I respect made a name by not doing this, i.e. by continuing to read, write and think about figures who were terribly unfashionable before these same (often great figures) MADE THEM SO.

Maxim:

Wherever our eros for truth is dampened by our desire to suggest that what we’re doing is right, and what other people are doing is idiocy we collapse back into sophistry.

5. I would find it much easier to believe in the various conservative philosopher’s favoured magic rocks, if there were fewer claims to utterly heterogeneous things (as Graham Harman might say: stars, pot plants, railroads, unicorn tears, quasars) for which other, similar conservative philosophers claimed a similar status:

Explaining: everyone knows this old chestnut about magic rocks:
“I have a magic rock that prevents me from contracting lung cancer.”
“How do you know that said rock is magic/ prevents cancer &c.? “
“Because as long as I’ve had the rock I’ve never….”

You get the idea.

There is a particular conservative argument (I’ll call it Hobbesian in spirit, which is ironic, given that I’ve often heard it from ancient critics who would pose as critics of modern liberalism)* that says the world is chaos and madness, insofar as it lacks (or has abandoned) ‘x’, ‘the one thing needful’: a proper ontology, a correct attitude towards ‘being’, the true faith &c. Now, any such argument, might, of course, be true.

What worries me, however, is the tendency among some partisans of this thesis to use evidence of chaos, madness or just everyday stupidity in the world, as if this constituted proof, that their particular choice ‘for candle in the darkness of our time’ sheds either the requisite warmth or the requisite light to constitute a candle in any meaningful sense of the word.

For more on this:

C.f. “6” below

[*I know Hobbes politics is hardly liberal, but I agree with Macpherson/Strauss and others that Hobbes is one of the founders of liberal thought, and thus responsible for the ‘authoritarian’ dark-side of liberalism, the one that says: ‘but if security, on which, the enjoyment of all liberal rights is threatened…everything is permitted.”]

6. Against the imminent fall of civilization means….we should, y’know, look after ourselves more…

I’ve read a lot of what I’m tempted to call (in deference to a ubiquitous, worrying, Adorno-horrifying sporting-military idiom) ‘extreme cultural criticism’, by which I mean mainly the works of Adorno and Heidegger (as the more obvious examples) but also Nietzsche, Eric Voegelin, György Lukacs, Leo Strauss, Kierkegaard, John Milbank, and arguably even parts of Zizek and Badiou.

Most philosophical criticism is of this sort and, indeed, has been since Plato: philosophy rarely operates via the kind of Clive James/Martin Amis/Aristotelian model of social criticism (“people should uphold the rules of grammar and try to write “coruscating” rather than “leaden” or “tin-eared” prose if we sensitive humanitarians are to stave off the always-imminent death of civilization, or try to find the mean between excess and deficiency, or generally to act in consistent ways with our fundamental norms") but rather it tends (at least in the fields where I wander) to produce the kind of sociocultural criticisms that will describe everything about human civilization in our epoch (often defined as one lasting centuries if not millennia) as being predicated on some kind of wrong-turn (be it to capitalism, or to Scotist metaphysics, to the ‘oblivion of Being through the “enframing” effects of technicity’, the replacing of an ontology of peace with an ontology of violence and so on.)

But what surprises me, given that I know that such arguments are not only faux-Fall narratives, but often parts of rich, subtle conceptual systems, that I often meet fervent partisans of this or that theory who a) seem to have nothing but scorn for the rival versions of the same theory while b) at the same time sharing with these rivals the (to my mind surreal) tendency to act as if the essence of this critique was the imperative to consume less cultural junk-food than the uneducated parts of the population who have to do things like manual labour, watch reality television and so on….

I mean, this is all… fine. Laudable and lovely, even, but why go through the tortuous middle-man of Adorno, or Heidegger if the essence of your “civilisational critique” is just: people should try and eat good (fresh) food, drink good wine, get a decent amount of exercise, have a job that is distant from the business world (like academia might once have been), a passing acquaintance with ‘high art’; and generally attempt not to be unbelievably crass and bigoted?

Add to this, the notion that upon having children you will agonize appropriately about which expensive private school might best bring out our child’s special gifts...and you have...

Heidegger? Adorno?

Excuse me?

I know that I always go on about this ‘how does being a bit middle class save the world exactly' thing, but it seems particularly glaring to me, when the all-too-familiar everyday ‘let's be a bit bourgeois at things' is taken to be the essence of fidelity to a thinker like Adorno. (Also c.f. above on philosophical monsters).

7.(warning explanation contains jargon/also this point isn't really from reactions to my paper at the conference, but even so was something I was thinking of) Upon first hearing of him, no-one is capable of understanding that Badiou isn’t a Pythagorean no matter how many times you say:


Goddamn it, he isn’t a goddamn Pythagorean. Grrrr. No, no, no, no and, once more with feeling, nooooooooooo.

Repeat after me, O awestruck parishioners: Being and Event does not makes use of ZFC set theory because B. thinks that numbers are real, floating entities in the sky, to which all things…no…just…shut up.

That’s not what ‘mathematics is ontology’ means.

Instead, B. is taking a bet on the craziest proposal in the Parmenides, namely the idea that the ‘one is not’. But that, at the same time, there is, as Lacan says, something of the one (il y a de l’un) .

B turns to ZFC theory because he thinks it manages to describe ‘oneness’ as a mere effect of the way things are presented (‘counted’), i.e. as the way they manifest themselves: whereas being itself as ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ (a heterogeneous mass of stuff) does not present itself, because all presentation involves oneness…Thus, in saying that mathematics IS ontology, he means that mathematics is BETTER at thinking the 'inconsistent multiple' that would be a 'oneless' being, despite the fact that such a 'multiple' (and, let's face it, it isn't really 'a multiple' is strictly speaking unthinkable. ) Mathematics, like everything, needs to deal with one-manies (as Plato knew), but B. thinks set theory and ZFC in particular manages to do so in a way, that LEAST needs to suggest any 'intuitive' reality to the one-multiples...

The details of this are, of course, complex, but it should suffice to say for now, that just because Badiou is, in many strange ways a “Platonist”, he is not a Platonist as this term is used in philosophy of mathematics.

b) The other question, that always attends any paper of Badiou is a question about how you tell whether something is a 'false event', or (even sillier) what to do if there are multiple events. The very short answer to these questions are, respectively, 'you can't and [scoff, clear throat, points at other person and clicks tongue while shaking head slowly...]

Put otherwise, there is no way to tell whether or not an event has happened. (Again if you go to the details of Being and Event, you’ll see that this relates to the way that B.’s formula for the event actually violates one of the ZFC axioms (the one that denies that a set can be a member of itself), this is why it involves the person being seized by it, declaring 'I've fallen in love', 'the world must change now', 'science will never be the same &c.". Second, on multiple events: [more scoffing] since when did you expect philosophy to make decisions -for- you: if the question is motivated by saying: can't two things 'seize' me simultaneously: then, 'yes', and surely, it's not up to Badiou to resolve the dilemma that this would entail: this is an existential matter, not a matter of orthodoxy...

Badiou’s remark on Nazism, does not break with the above, by finding a criteria to deny that Nazism was an event: instead he denies that National Socialism had anything to do with truth. Thus, for Badiou, whereas an event reveals a void of a situation that gets a truth process into motion, Nazism, is all about responding to this ‘eruption of the void’, by attempting -- not to move beyond the situation – toward universality, but to purge the situation (of the German people) of an element that is blamed for threatening its particularistic fantasies with nothingness (namely Jews, gypsies, homosexuals et cetera).

For Badiou truth is that which, being irreducible to the situation, ‘punches a hole’ in meaning/knowledge, and points to the possibility of previously unauthorized or nameless collections of elements, that were not ‘represented’ by what Badiou calls the ‘state of the situation’ (the dominant ways by which elements are ordered and counted). Thus, the ‘falsehood’ (as opposed to the more obvious and obscene immorality of Nazism in terms of an ‘event’, is, for Badiou, manifest in the fact that it is a movement that responds to the “evental” revelation of a void a the heart of a situation (of Germany, of humanity as it has previously been organised) not with an attempt not to transcend the situation in the name of elusive truth, but instead to do the exact opposite of what happens in a truth process: an attempt to preserve the situation (and worse, some fantasy of the unspoiled, pure situation of Germany) by eliminating the void that haunts it in the form of possible universalism, communism, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals et cetera.. It is at this level, that Nazism, constitutes a “pseudo-event.”

Oh, and he's also not a decisionist. The idea that 'because of the decision everything is permitted' (and other Schmitteanisms) is precisely what Badiou calls the reaction of an OBSCURE subject. More on this another time.

8. I have a new ranking of Badiou secondary texts:


1) Peter Hallward’s book is still definitive, not only as an introduction to Badiou’s work, but for still being the best secondary text on Badiou available in English. However, I now rank Ed Pluth’s book as the second best book on Badiou after Hallward’s: giving Pluth extra points for being able to achieve as much as he does in very little time. Oliver Feltham’s book is, while undoubtedly good and obviously written from a position of mastery of the material, I still feel, less helpful than either of the other two, perhaps because of Feltham's familiarity with B.'s work: his (short) book does less of a good job, of doing things like anticipating reader questions. Last in the race, at the moment, I would place Jason Barker’s book, which I think is actually quite –bad-. First, it shares with Christopher Norris’s book the disappointing tendency of not only avoiding even the vaguest attempt at a guide to the mathematics (which let’s face it is the tricky bit), and also making Badiou seem a less interesting and attractive precisely in the moments in which he is being praised. Adrian Johnston’s book on Badiou and Zizek is also, I think decent academic work, but I have not finished it yet and don't quite know where to rank it...

Every Good Critic has.no.taste (Part I)
Sunday, January 16, 2011

[follows on from Part I]

...To explain: there are few things that I find less important (and thus, more absurdly over-valued) than people’s tastes. In anything. It doesn't matter whether it’s their taste in music, or in books, in décor or in lovers, in hairspray, or in spray-on spirituality.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with people talking about their likes and dislikes. It’s one of the things that human beings do after all. And the thing to remember about human beings (as the late, great Cornelius Castoriadis used to say) is that human beings aren’t (pace Aristotle) rational animals -- they’re mad animals.

This being the case, one of the more obvious benefits of being completely and utterly insane is that it gives us the ability to live in, alongside, and through universes of meaning in which the naked Real (as opposed to symbolized reality) tends only to be manifest to us in those uncanny gaps in our capacity to make sense of things: in the disparity we sense between what we can taste, and touch, and master and the overflowing, volcanic power of life, in the universe of sub-atomic particles in every microscopic entity.

This is not to say, in some faux-sceptical pseudo-philosophical way that maybe our reality is not really real, but rather that our ability to encounter the real (as well as the space in which those encounters take place -- the 'world') is both shaped and suffused by things that will never be discovered as determinate entities by even the most subtle of scientific instruments. Thus, we might discover the underlying causes of dreams and longings, by ‘evaluations’, or that love is CONCOMITANT with this particular chemical reaction in the brain. But insofar as the world is, for us, made up of phenomena like love, like war, we cannot but help be struck by the fact that our best glimpses of the reality beyond or underlying these phenomena do not seem in any way, to correlate with our sense of their importance, or even of their existence.

It is therefore our capacity for madness, our 'radical imagination' (in Castoriadis' phrase) that above all things is the distinctive, the defining. Note that I do not here mean our ability to be ‘creative’ (in the sense of that which allows us to to compose masterpieces, or hallucinate the landscapes of unknown worlds). Instead, I mean that which makes 'imagination' in the normal sense possible, but that which allows us to think and act at all. The imagination in this more fundamental sense (Coleridge's 'primary imagination') is what allows us to to break with the filibuster drone of instinct, to tune our brain to a stunning variety of different keys that are at once affected by and give rise to different cultural matrices -- it's what allows us to live not only in a world of rocks and of quarks, but of affects, percepts, by things that do not exist (fictional characters, imagined communities, realities beyond everything we know as reality.) And these are not just the fancies of poets and opium-eaters, but the condition of our ability to experience the most everyday thing, not as a series of discrete 'sense-events' that are 'synthesised' together by the mind, but (as Husserl loved to point out) that appear to us as unified: it is not this flash of colour, this burst of light: but this chair, this scene, this stunningly beautiful person who makes my heart stop and deprives me of consonants.

What I’m talking about here as ‘imagination’ is thus very similar to what Sartre called the ‘negating’ power of consciousness that allows us to see the world of dolphins, and quarks, and oceans not only as it is, but as redolent with possibility/significance/ and the various meanings of the French word "sens" (sense/direction/meaning.) It's a fact of being-human that allows us to encounter the world, always in the midst of our preoccupations, interests, habits, tendencies, the sediment of knowledge, of tradition, and of culture, as well as the surge of desire or of fear. The whole world is (despite the Enlightenment's attack on 'occult properties') still redolent with significance such that we do not only see (like an animal) edible things which we chow down whenever we can get them and inedible things from which we instinctively recoil or ignore, but instead a universe in which a distinction as nugatory as between the raw and the cooked can still evoke for us a distinction between civilization and barbarism, history and pre-history; a universe in which an egg is not only and not always simply an egg, but a potential omlette or a potential quiche, a mnemonic of a time when we used to stay with our grandmother before her death, a symbol of creation, of the universe, of the joys of an annual secular chocolate gorging festival, an ancient celebration of the coming of Spring (fertility and flourishing) or even -- by the strange assimilations of pagan things into Medieval Catholicism -- the resurrection of the Incarnate God.

It’s a world marked, then, by its constituents (who are also its inhabitants) perpetually shifting between the background and the foreground of billions of consicious minds who are themselves objects in the foreground and the background of other conscious minds, conscious processes. Our mental life is what seems to set the foreground or the background, but it also can itself recede into the background or come forward -- in radiance -- as an object which we hold up to the light and turn about in the hands of our psyches until it coruscates.

I stop what I’m doing for a moment, interrupt the flow of my writing (bashing my fingers from word to sentence) and reflect on a memory. The recollection then starts to accumulate other memories, flickers of fear for the future, and strange associations like meteors that have been captured and pulled into the atmosphere by the gravity of a heavier body. Suddenly pieces of memory, compete with my immediate perceptions (this desk, the glow of computer screen), my half-seen reflection in the mirror of on the other wall. Then, in an instant, all of these thoughts are overwhelmed by the traffic noises outside the window, which are in turn overwhelmed by a sudden pain that seems to explode from a single point to the rest of my body, like the chain reaction that destroys the Death Star. At this point, the consciousness of my body is principally the consciousness of pain, and the angsty adolescent would be right to say that here and now (words that are a scandal to philosophy) the world gives itself under the aspect of pain: a pain-coloured world, or a world contorted by pain like an origami bird that’s been crumpled one too many times.

Of all the myriad things in the world, I form the flux, the chaos into ‘objects’ (into little cosmions or microcosms of the larger world which is itself a microcosm) -- some objects are brought into the forefront of my consciousness by desire, or by longing, by reverence, gratitude and nostalgia while others fade into an infinite background made homogenous by its vast indifference and resistance to our concerns. (I am fond of mentioning Schopenhauer’s statement that our sense of the reality of something has much to do with the extent to which it resists manipulation by our will: this is why unrequited love is so vivid.)

But this power in human beings (the imagination) also gives us the ability to change the arrangement of background-to-foreground: to come up with new foregrounds and new backgrounds, new regions in which beings reveal themselves, even as they are concealed. (I’m using Heideggerian language here, because I think that one of Heidegger’s most profound ideas has to do with thinking through the different ways in which things conceal themselves, not despite the way in which they are revealed, but in and through their revelation.)

The mind, to use Castoriadis’s favourite quote from Freud, seems therefore less like an organ that gives us the ability to go and out and find food to further survival and reproduction as something that allows us to hallucinate a sandwich while we starve to death.

If imagination allows me to turn over in my mind the infamous incident with the tiger, as if it has evolved to give me a chance to come up with a strategy to avoid the same fate next time: the 'adaptive' aspect of this development is also seriously undermined by the fact that this turning over in my mind can give me a neurosis about tigers that will make me freeze every time I see one, or be overwhelmed by the pang of frustrated desire, or the unforgettable sound of the River-God’s laughter as the tiger leaps towards me: a prophecy fulfilled. Spending an idle afternoon in the gardens of the Forbidden City, I see the miniature waterfall in front of me, but I can also, while seeing it, have before my mind the Fall of Constantinople, a childhood dream of flying and yet have all of these things interrupted by the smell of jasmine or woodsmoke just as a Russian monastery whose members are at evening prayer might be aroused by an invading Mongol army.

Anyway. Talking about likes and dislikes is of course perfectly normal, and has doubtless been a mainstay of human interaction ever since the first cavemen stopped fighting his fellow over a mammoth carcass to grunt out: “nice stick, man – does yours dig as well as hit stuff!”, And, yet, I remain intransigently against taste.

The problem is not only that I find it irritating the way that people will announce their discovery of a new vegetable in the portentous tones that they might have reserved for announcing their cure for cancer. No, in the world of irritants, this is small pak-choi.

Taste is irrelevant, not because it’s inherently subjective (as the enemies of criticism would hold), but insofar as it is made into an expression of subjectivity.

What I mean by this is that taste is utterly banal and uninteresting if it is nothing more (as it often is) an expression about an object (music, art, film et cetera) the ultimate point of which is to rebound on the subject who pronounces the judgment thus displaying something about the judging person and her soul. It’s not, of course, that I don't think that we can tell anything about someone from what they love and hate (on the contrary!): it’s just that in the age of freewheelin’ consumer capitalism, one of the main things in which we are most trained by our society is the ability to learn to express ourselves through our tastes which is, of course, a major reason to buy things and to keep buying things (subjectivity easily taking on the aspect of infinity).

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that in the age of the internet: of blogs, of twitter and so forth, our principal way of thinking about subjectivity, i.e. of thinking about how we might answer questions about who we are is inextricably bound up with shopping insofar as it's bound up with the question ‘what do you like?’/’what do you do?” which also means how much time and how much effort were you prepared to spend on x – whether it was a book, a film, a project, a vision of oneself and one’s life and how it might be.

While much of this seems perfectly innocuous, there is still, I think, a kind of frightening aspect to it all.

First, I can’t help feeling that this is to do with what I’ve elsewhere referred to as the secular Calvinism of our time. What I mean by this is that while we tend to suggest that we believe in the ultimate equality of all human beings, we act constantly (and our whole society seems predicated on the importance of) as if life is a constant struggle to prove ourselves (to whom I often wonder) as members of the Elect as opposed to those who will be ‘passed over’ by the hands of the Gods.

After all, why would I bother spending all this time finding ways to express who I am through what I like, were it not for the fact that a) I had doubts as to my own reality far away from ‘consumer’ modes of self-expression and b) I felt that the distinctions that I made between things, also helped to distinguish me from the bland mass of humanity who will never rise to the heights of…whatever mountain best serves as a metaphor for the potential future achievement that I see adumbrated in my ability to define my likes and dislikes.

In addition, something that continually shocks me about the way that people assert their tastes is the way in which virtually every person I’ve ever met seems to think of their tastes as having reached the golden mean. In other words, people continually talk as if the world consists in two classes of people 1) stupidly pretentious snobby people, who insist on pretending to like esoteric nonsense for the sake of appearing posh/hip/or like members of a revolutionary avant-garde and 2) On the other hand, sad, brain-dead people who consume obscene amounts of Orwellian prolefeed (let’s say reality T.V. shows) with all the discrimination and insight of a dung beetle.

What I find most scary about this (apart from its obvious role in the maintenance of a class system that is not any less of a class-system for the classes having become nebulous and complicated) is that everyone I know from any walk of life, social class, or kind of taste, seems to assert the fact that their particular taste occupies the mean: not too snobby, not too plebeian. The irony is that while one person’s pretentious would-be elitist is another person’s uncultivated ignoramus, this fact won’t stop BOTH people from seeing themselves as the sane centre in the middle of the barbarian hordes of wankers (on the one hand) and yobs/bogans (and other nasty class-hatred-whipping-up insults) on the other.

So. How do I reconcile these criticisms of taste with my sense of the enormous importance of criticism?

First, let me say, that I have long agreed with Kant, who in the third critique quotes the maxim “there is no accounting for taste” approvingly but who also says that the remarkable thing, is that on the one hand, everyone knows the truth of this platitude, but at the same time, anyone who is moved by the beauty of anything will find themselves compelled to argue that (in contradiction to their knowledge) their experience is precisely not an unaccountable or idiosyncratic one, but instead something that anyone who had eyes to see (who shared the same faculties) would see as they do.

(This is why sometimes, we can feel that at an aesthetic matter is so indubitable that it renders us inarticulate: “Just LISTEN to the damn thing…it’s FUCKING A-maaazing. How do you not see/hear/ that?”)

And in fact, I’ve noticed that the people who tend to pull the shrugging ‘oh, well, taste is subjective’ line, are almost always the people who lack passion about whatever it is they insist on not discussing. Thus, most people who really care about or love art, or music, films (or even fashion or computer games) will consider such things worthy of argument.

But the reason I approve of such arguments (the kind of arguments that are, after all, cutlivated into the basis of criticism) is because I think that such judgments actually have nothing to do with taste, but instead constitute situations where the truth of an aesthetic judgment is not held up out of a boorish refusal to see that there are other points of view, as much as a belief that there is such a thing as a truth of (rather than a truth about) a work of art itself. After all, we only argue about something when we believe that there is, at least in some important respect, a right answer -- a truth that can and may not be entirely graspable, but that can be glanced at, at least such that our glimpse can be travestied or distorted, or even betrayed.

At this level, I think that good criticism (of art, of music or whatever) has something in common with good philosophical and theological debate, both of which have nothing to do with the 'I'll name your beliefs and you name yours' game which makes people rightly think that argument about things on which people have different proclivities is a kind of social disorder. After all, both philosophy and theology have their raison d'etre in uncertainty (which is why religious fundamentalists tend to hate theology as either dangerous sophistry or feeble equivocating). However, this doesn’t necessarily lead either philosophers or theologians to quietistic silence, mysticism or hand-waving. On the contrary, the fact that truth may be ultimately elusive, has never stopped anyone but the most bloodlessly indifferent people from thinking that it shouldn’t be sought, or reaching Socrates' conclusion that the unexamined life wasn't worth living.

And the reason I would insist on talking about criticism in relation to truth is not to say that people must share my idiosyncratic philosophical ideas about how art works, but because they cannot help feeling that there is some stake in what they do. In particular, I’d be tempted to say that criticism has something to do with what Badiou calls ‘fidelity to the event.’ For the good, let’s say, rock critic, something happened in relation to their chosen 'object domain', some pivotal experience of a great concert or a first beloved album, that they are, insofar as they are a critic, not simply prepared to dismiss as experiential flotsam that should be ultimately treated as experiential jetsam. Instead, the critic is often motivated by a sense that they have at some stage seen a glimpse of something in music (or whatever) that they have a lifelong duty to seek out elsewhere, to think through the consequences of this event and its true meaning (I know this sounds all very Badiou, but he is much in my thoughts of late) to to slay the suitors who (as Deleuze says on an old Plato-Homer parallel) are the simulacra of the truth that they witnessed.

In concluding here (rather hurriedly, I admit) I should say that when I’m talking about ‘criticism’ I’m not necessarily talking of high falutin’ interpretative criticism of the kind you might do if you were Paul Ricoeur.

No, I mean everyday ‘this is a great album’ criticism, i.e., the very kind that can be (and is often) mistaken as no different from the usual ways in which we express our subjectivity through aligning ourselves with products. And indeed, the distinction is slim, i.e. genuine criticism can reside and flourish within the broader consumer metaphysic of “I am what I buy – and then tell people about.”
Nonetheless, what I’m saying is that, at the heart of criticism, there is always something apart from our desire to express to others who we are. Instead, there is a fascination with the object, with the thing that made us start writing, with music or art or literature (as a region in which certain beings, certain strange and shining creatures can appear to us in certain ways). It involves an implicit belief (and most beliefs are implicit) that there is something revealed to us in music, intimated in art, given to us in the things that we most appreciate, but obscured in the things that we do not. In this sense, a good critic is someone who lacks the glibness of the way we normally rack up tastes: she’s someone who wants to try and give voice to the strange language of the things that she’s witnessed, to act in fidelity to the truths that she has endured.

Another Porn is Possible: Review of Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman'
Sunday, January 16, 2011

note: I've now walled off the Badiou section so that people who don't want to know can skip down to the bit about Power's book - Mal]

Nina Power’s incendiary One-Dimensional Woman is one of those books that leaves its reader with the exhilarating sense of having been an accomplice in bringing about the kind of carefully placed explosion that at once renders entire shelves of the library redundant while at the same time opening a door through which bold new ideas and dusty, long-neglected arcana can rush through and jostle with each other over which of them gets to become the emblem or portent of a future that – but for Power’s intervention – would have remained proscribed by the present epoch’s bland prescriptions of the possible.

Thus, while ODW is not exactly a “desert island” book (it’s probably insufficiently – to borrow one of Power’s more memorable constructions -- ‘chocolatey’ for this purpose) the book is an exemplary political intervention whose wit and wisdom makes you feel that everything you’ve read on its subject (feminism in a putatively ‘post-feminist’ age) in the last 20 years was one great desert in which Power’s book is the only oasis that can claim to be more than an hallucination brought on by overly close contact with one’s camel.

The book’s topic is, as the Marcuse-inspired title suggests, the laughably limited picture of freedom and fulfillment that is held out to women as the space for the realization of their possibilities under the conditions of “late” (“Post-Fordist”, or “flexible”) capitalism.

<a href="http://prettycoolforaniconodule.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/one_dimensional_woman1.jpg"><img src="http://prettycoolforaniconodule.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/one_dimensional_woman1.jpg?w=194" alt="" title="Cover artwork master (8.1mm)" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-60" height="300" width="194"></a>

Power, a young English academic, is known for her work on Marxism, cultural theory in the mode of Raymond Williams, film criticism, and is also distinguished for being one of a handful of academics who are responsible for bringing Alain Badiou to the attention of the Anglophone world. Her <a href="http://cinestatic.com/infinitethought/">long-running  blog “Infinite Thought”</a> (named -- I think -- after one of the first collections of Badiou’s essays in English, although perhaps it's the other way around?) is one of the obligatory passage points of the philosophical blogosphere – so much so that in my head, it’s less a blog and more an enormous ramshackle share-house in which it’s impossible to take more than two steps without stumbling over another Antipodean philosophy student lying in a puddle of their own drool while saying: "I coulda been a contender."

The book’s style is engaging, terse, unaffected, and, at times, so deceptively breezy that the number of brilliant, aphoristic sentences that end her paragraphs still emerge like rapier-thrusts so fast that you can’t help thinking that the wounds they inflict will go entirely unnoticed by the people on whom they’re inflicted right up into the moment at which they keel over like “Bill” from Kill Bill. confronted with the "Five Point Palm Exploding Hand Technique".

Knowing some of Power’s academic work, I was expecting that there would be far more in this book about Badiou, Zizek, and other heroes of the philosophical left. As it happens, Badiou makes a single (if memorable) cameo (an extract from an excoriating piece on the foulard affair in France) and Zizek’s famous thesis on the post-modern super-ego and its imperative to “Enjoy!’” is mentioned , but not discussed at length and that's about it for what people in English departments call 'theory'. Given this, it's fair to say that ODW is a book whose academic credentials are principally made apparent in the way that the sustained, systematic nature of its argument, which makes the book, compared to Ariel Levy’s otherwise admirable Female Chauvinist Pigs) a series of thought-provoking anecdotes punctuated with (understandably) bemused questions.

So, while ODW is entirely (perhaps mercifully) devoid of mathemes, I do think that Power’s book -- along with Peter Hallward’s equally remarkable Damning the Flood is proof of the extent, if not of Baidou’s generally salutary influence on contemporary philosophy (on the question of which it is probably too early to tell) then at least evidence that those who have been most influenced by the scourge of Sarkozy have shown themselves capable of turning directly to political discussions with a deftness that is, arguably, unusual for academics leaving behind the familiar warmth of the journal and conference circuit.

This is especially the case, because although much (too much?) has been written deploring academic esotericism, many of these jeremiads against obscurantist prose and faux-erudite shibboleth-swapping have the unfortunate tendency (especially in the allegedly higher brow conservative press) to disingenuously act as if Professorial ventures outside of what the dominant corporate-New Age idiom would call academic ‘comfort zones’ were not possessed of their marked tendency to ditch the Socratic vocation along with the jargon and the footnotes, thus giving us the less than edifying spectacle of someone fastidiously preserving their bath water in glass-bottles as another baby is hurled from the rooftop balcony. Put otherwise: although it is certainly possible to feign profundity through obscurity, this does not mean that evidence of relatively clear writing by someone with academic credentials should be taken as proof that said academic actually has something to say. But in contrast to either the ponderously fatuous or the breezily vacuous, both Power ‘s and Hallward’s books are rare examples of works which combine the obvious virtue of refreshingly clear, trenchant prose with the philosopher’s trademark the virtue of realizing and struggling against the strange obscurity of the obvious, and of the taken for granted.

Of course, in mentioning Hallward and Power’s relationship to Badiou, I’m not, of course, saying that credit for either One Dimensional Woman or Damning the Flood should go to the author of L’etre et l’evenment (he, to wax biblical, “has his reward”.) Nonetheless, I can’t help thinking that the excellence of two recent books written by young Badiou scholars owes something -- if not to the more esoteric details of Badiou’s philosophy -- then at least to some of his central theses and attitudes.

So, apart from the famously Cartesian clarity of Badiou’s own prose (a virtue that is also present in both Hallward and Power), Hallward and Power both make their political interventions in a manner that suggests the strength of Badiou’s notion of the ‘subtractive’ quality of politics.

For those of my Vast Army of Readers (henceforth my “VAR”) to whom the last phrase is gobbledygook unhelpfully interspersed with pre-Enlightenment invocations of proper names: a quick explanation.

*** Badiou section starts here, skip if you do not care or are easily bored by philosophy***

Among philosophy-types, Badiou is known for his studied irreverence towards what might be called “the mystifications of ‘difference’” which were once the bread and butter of every cultural studies department and ‘theory’ seminar in the Anglophone world. For anyone who’s never been the victim of a modern-day English department, I’m referring to the tendency (the basis of many people’s entire undergraduate education) to take a few out of context passages from influential French philosophers and to mutilate them into slogans that conveniently express a ubiquitous ideological sophistry: (“everything is relative!”, “it’s all a matter of perspective!”, “all values come down to ‘culture”) as if such things were a) the most original profound things ever to have been thought, b) profoundly daring acts of intellectual rebellion and c) what Derrida, Foucault et al were actually on about.

Basically the attitude of difference mystification starts from the obviously correct premise that the world is complicated (marked by a rich diversity of cultures, languages, interactions between heterogeneous elements at different of reality) and then all-too-quickly moves to the position that there is a virtue – and most mysteriously -- a political virtue in trying as much as possible to avoid the apparent ‘violence’ inherent in any concepts and categories that (allegedly) distort the underlying plurality of existence by making claims to universality or veracity. Unfortunately, although the motive for such thinking is often what seems like a salutary liberal respect for ‘pluralism’, the result of such thinking is far less often the kind of rigorous, patient hermeneutic analysis that we might imagine in an ideal-encounter between different civilizations, and far more often simply a way for students and academics to SPIN a capacity to dizzy themselves in a labyrinth of particularisms as the best hope for the oppressed peoples of the earth. It’s as if, given all the violence that has occurred between people of different creeds, the best thing to do would be to have as many academics as possible having the courage to write as if they were stupefied by the ineffability of experience and of 'difference': this is the kind of thing which, I’ve said elsewhere, means that a thousand ethnography doctoral theses are published every year that ultimately amount to nothing more than pseudo-lyrical dream-diaries in which the author records her experiences as if they constituted a mystical experience that required the constant use of new jargon to not betray the underlying ineffability of what was witnessed.

Against this forced convergence of academic fashion and public platitude (a convergence which elevates a strangely democratized New Age Nietzsche into the unlikely philosophical icon of a vaguely outraged liberalism) Badiou argues that while there is, of course, a plurality of languages, affects, sensations, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking, living, and desiring (across space and time) in short, a plurality of worlds; the ability to be a subject (and not simply a clever ape) is, for Badiou, contingent on a capacity for human beings to have a relationship with that which cuts through, indeed bores a hole in the matrices of language and culture, the idioms of an epoch, the vagaries of "taste" understood as a system of preferences, and all other systems, signs and bodies that make up the baroque real and virtual universes in, alongside and through which we exist.Like Sartre, Badiou believes this capacity for transcendence is actually grounded in an inconsistency of reality itself, i.e. that not only do all our ‘symbolic-imaginary’ constructions of meaning fail to grasp the Real (a Real which can be grasped only at the highest levels of abstraction, i.e. at the furthest distance from the realms of the 'meanings' that make up the worlds in, through and by which human beings live and speak) but also that there is in an incompleteness, a fold, a proximity to the void within the real itself which allows the possibility of the unexpected, the birth of the new, of the event.

While there’s no time to explain such portentous sounding things especially given my whole not- exactly-being-sure-that-I-understand- -all-of-the-arguments-of-Being-and-event-anyway-thing what’s important, for the moment, is to note the way in which the whole of Badiou’s philosophical enterprise revolves around saying that as well as there being (what is) there is also (because of a metaphysical proximity between being and nothingness) the possibility (that can be marked out formally, i.e. mathematically) that ‘something happens’: such that which has previously been taken for granted as 'reality', 'the way things are and has always been' can be made to tremble by rare, unassimiliable, whose occurrences as St. Paul, sort of says) have always been, by their very existence, a scandal to metaphysics.

The point, for Badiou, is that events, as things that cannot be predicted or accounted for from even the most exhaustive list of "everything that we grant has existence by our present understanding of what beings there are", ‘if and when they happen’, , not only possess the ability of showing the 'Real' that surpasses reality as we know it, but also have a markedly ambiguous ontological status (they might not have happened, and, in fact, have not happened except to those who allow themselves to be ‘seized by the event’) which consequently compels decisions, which themselves compel different ways of working through the consequence of these decisions. These decisions and this working through are the space, for Badiou, of 'subjectivity', understood here, not as the 'personal, the idiosyncratic, the kind of stuff you put on your Facebook profile', but rather the 'becoming-subject' of the human beings, where becoming a subject means (in Peter Hallward's apt formulation) 'being a subject to truth.'

Thus Badiou relates events to subjectivity, which for him is not the idiosyncratic psychological make-up of a human animal with a particular history, culture et cetera but a dance that is always going to look mad to those who hear not the music.

Thus, in speaking of ‘truth’, Badiou speaks not of correspondences between words and things, but of a process of ‘fidelity’ (his term), which is a process of working through the consequences of our belief that ‘x has happened’, that ‘some universal possibility’ has been announced which we now try to make sense of via statements and axioms that try to make sense of the event (‘all people are created equal/the Messiah comes for both the Greeks and the Jews/love conquers all et cetera’), such that this work of art, this scientific formula, this revolutionary uprising, this surge of love between two people requires devotion, thought, rigour and discipline that will carry its 'subjects' through all the potentially labyrinthine twists and turns of the 'truth process' over years, decades, millenia. This is precisely because -- being unaccounted for on the basis of all that we thought we previously thought we understood about life and the universe , about politics, art and love, -- the unknown legacy of this event that may or may not have happened requires those people whose devotion to the idea that ‘something has happened’ to build for that event a legacy that doesn’t stop at the borders of an individual human life: the truth process, the process of fidelity goes on as, long as there is still even one person trying to work through the consequences (what does it mean now, what's the next step, what now?) of the strange (and necessarily universalisable) propositions that – from the perspective of all our received wisdom, all our knowledge of conflicting bodies and languages make no sense, because they point to something that is defined, at least initially, by its unintelligibility to, i.e. its irreducibility to a mere ‘continuity’ with what has gone before.

Thus, for Badiou a musician seized by a certain musical event might say: “Music changes after Schönberg [or Charlie Parker or Brahms or the Sex Pistols.] What can I, as a composer, a rock god, a critic do – to acknowledge that this artist happened, not just to me, but to music.?” Similarly, when I say, “I love you” to someone, I’m ambiguously tying a predicate between two subjects that is invisible to anyone outside the love relationship (which is why it’s so easy to be cynical about love when it doesn’t involve oneself).

Lovers are forced to ask themselves: what does this mean, this thing that has occurred between us: to confront the fact that ‘love’ names something obscure, something dubitable that can happen to anyone, but each time it happens, whose trajectory meaning (and thus even existence is obscure but for the commitment of two or more people to its existence.) We are in love, but what does that mean, what effect does that have on the situation of our lives prior to the declaration, or years after it was first made? Where will this take us – given that love (like politics or revolutionary art and thought) is, for Badiou, always going to be the sort of things that interrupts our plans and our sense of the world. Love, qua love is something that interrupts both our casual pragmatic hedonism (“I hope I can get some spicy romance and relaxing sex in between advancing towards my career goals”) as much as it interrupts our equally pragmatic “let’s settle down and share a mortgage” ways of thinking: love, as is testified to in works of art from the dawn of civilization, spoils plans, cuts across borders, punches a hole through the knots of sense (meaning, but also direction) by which we usually try to hold our lives together.

In the same vein, Badiou thinks that politics is not at all about the patient work of translation or compromise or communication but instead about the moment where people proclaim things (at a certain distance from contemporary knowledge and contemporary prejudices) like the Rights of Man and Citizen that are supposed to be as universalisable as the knowledge of geometry as shown in Plato’s Meno. (a knowledge that even a slave possesses). And the point about these declarations is that they are made at a distance to what is known, accepted, and understood: radically pointing to a world that could be organised under entirely different principles.

Thus, when the Jacobins talk of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, or when Badiou’s own political organization makes the pronouncement: ‘everyone who is here is from here’ (a claim for the rights of ‘stateless persons’ all over the world), such statements do not obviously attest to empirically verifiable truths – or to things that are part of any extant ‘language game’. You can't, after all, find something like equality or justice by performing the right kind of statistical analysis: equality is a matter of declaration, i.e. of an axiom.

So, like love, these axiomatic propositions refer to truths which are invisible outside of our commitment to them, our attempts to work through them, our patience to follow their consequences where they will take us, to make mistakes, repent them, and pick ourselves afterwards and continue.

Thus: I can search the entire universe and still not find anything resembling love because I can reduce it to the sexual urge + sentimentality + certain culturally variable representations of the above common pathos of breeding as attached to social institutions to do with courtship, marriage contracts and so on. But I will never prove the existence of love as something irreducible to all of these things, just as I will never prove that ‘all men are created equal’ if I treat it like a hypothesis rather than an axiom. (After all, remember that empirically equality, is as Badiou notes difficult to find: we find difference first: she’s smarter, he’s better looking, they have more money et cetera. Inequality is empirical; equality is rational.)

This is why, for Badiou, political “truths” like the equality of all human beings have to be posited and then worked through – not in the form of unchangeable injunctions which require that because something once happened nothing will ever change (e.g. staying in a relationship even though it’s killing us both, continuing to defend the USSR as a bastion of freedom even though it’s run by Stalin, hanging on to Euclidean geometry to the point that one denies Riemann because one is nostalgic for its clarity in one’s youth) but, on the contrary, acting, thinking, seeing what happens, changing the plan, reconsidering what is to be done, moving on, fighting, losing, trying again, starting over, like a religious believer who realizes that following the animating spirit of her faith might mean leaving the Church, becoming an atheist, but even so refusing to renounce the truth to which she once bore witness as mere illusion.

The point is that, for Badiou, this ‘malleability’ that is necessary for ‘fidelity’ is not the ‘malleability’ of pragmatic-utilitarian compromise. Badiou objects to nothing more than propositions like “oh, well, communism ended in a bloody tyranny, so best to just accept the present political order – mumble, mumble something about human nature et cetera.” Instead, the question is: how do I remain faithful to the political principle of equality, or to what was revealed to me about the nature of love on that night by the shores of the Mediterranean twenty years ago? How do I continue to trace the consequences of this glimpse of truth? How do we comport ourselves to what –we still maintain – has, against all odds, happened.

So, when Hallward takes on the task of telling the story of Haiti (before the earthquake) one of the poorest nations on the planet as a result of over a century of reparation payments to the French government for revenue lost by said government by the loss of its slaves, Hallward knows that he’s no expert in Haitian culture (despite his perfect French): nonetheless, he looks to the nation, and its fate since the revolt by Toussaint L’ouverture, devotes his considerable intellectual resources to studying it and to trying to bring to the world’s attention to an injustice so shocking and grotesque that it still reduces my rowdiest and least interested students into half-respectful silence. It’s as if Hallward operates under the principle that if Toussaint L’ouverture was motivated by the idea that liberty, equality and fraternity applied to Haitians and not only to white, bourgeois Frenchmen, then, why shouldn’t Hallward’s own approach to Haiti be to tell the story of how these principles were betrayed by our own epoch's masters rather than taking the blandly, safe, “post-colonial studies approach” that would instead talk endlessly of the impositions of a white academic presuming to speak of such things, thereby demonstrating that the primary concern was saving the beautiful soul of the academic rather than, demonstrating to anyone who has eyes show another instance in which the axioms of equality or of justice had been betrayed.

Anyway. To Power’s book itself.

****Badiou section ends ****

Power’s wonderful opening goes like this:

Where have all the interesting women gone? If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man – probably in that order. Of course, no one has to believe the TV shows, the magazines and the adverts, and many don't. But how has it come to this? Did the desires of twentieth-century women's liberation achieve their fulfillment in the shopper's paradise of 'naughty' self-pampering, playboy bunny pendants and bikini waxes? That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time.

The first chapter of Power’s book is called “Sarah Palin: or How not to be a feminist”. Power starts by investigating two of the more bizarre arguments as to why ‘feminists’ are told today that they should accept that ours is a world in which feminism has been so completely victorious that any suggestion that this is not the case should be met with old-fashioned Victorian suggestions of hysteria brought on by lack of sex.

The first of these arguments is that when someone points out the massive disparities between men and women in salaries, opportunities, the retort of the ‘why-don’t-you-whiny-chicks--get-over-it” brigade is (bizarrely) to point to the fact of a woman (any woman) in any position of power: "What do you mean 'sexism'? Don't we live in a world where Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice, Palin have wielded power that few men could dream of &c. &c.? ? It's, like feminist utopia, babe.'

The bizarre idea underlying such a retort is, as Power points out ,that women should accept any woman in power as a victory for women everywhere irrespective of how much that particular woman might be actively arguing for the abrogation or renunciation of long-fought for rights, or even, advocating the death-and-tortue--by-extra-judicial processes of others (women as well as men): as if ‘feminism’ were (and had always been) nothing but an inverse chauvinism instead of what feminism has always truly been, a flash-point for a universal emancipatory struggle.

Second, Power points out that Palin represents herself as an icon of a ‘new’ (read: non- feminist) ideology that suggests that the e life of a modern woman is inherently a feminist utopia, because women ‘these days’ can ‘have it all’ : work and motherhood, a bad girl’s sexiness with a good girl’s hoices about who she sleeps with, and so on: "surely, says this dominant ideology (particularly prominent. in my experience, of 18-year-old girl students at certain inexplicably prestigious Australian universities) the ‘modern woman’ doesn’t need feminism, because feminism would simply be the partial perspective of ‘hairy man-hating lesbians’ who wanted to deny a woman’s right to party, shop, love her family all at the same time and so on.

To these and other bovine stupidities, Power points out, that Sarah Palin does appear to incarnate a number of allegedly ‘feminist’ ideals, insofar as she “transgresses” several roles or stereotypes whose ‘overcoming’ the dubious ‘post-feminist discourse’ discussed above, would see as inevitably leading to an increase in women’s options. The point of course, is that Palin's ability to be is both ‘attractive-but-powerful/a woman with a job but a dedicated mother and so on’ and so on, does not overcome the fact that Sarah Palin is, well, Sarah Palin: where, Power, asks, did it become ‘feminist’ to say that anyone with a double X chromosome should be treated as a ‘feminist hero’ irrespective of her attitudes, her policies, her use of her power? Wasn’t there something about feminism that had to do with hopes for and attempts at bringing about universal emancipation, from the perspective of which attempts Palin can only be looked at as a reactionary obstacle?

From here, Power turns to the major argument of the book that is suggested by in its title. In the interests of rushing to a conclusion, I would suggest that the central thesis of the book is reflected in its central metaphor: namely, chocolate. As much as this may sound silly, I do in all seriousness think that chocolate is the ‘white whale’ of Power’s book. In her acicular analysis, chocolate becomes a symbol (figurative more than literal) of a readily, cheaply available, perfectly innocuous substance, that is somehow advertised as if access to it were the key to unlocking feminine power, independence, and achievement.

Thus: Power is incredibly eloquent (and also very funny) talking about the way chocolate is advertised to women, as a kind of symbol of the ‘modern woman’ in touch with her capacity for delight. (My favourite two-word phrase in the book has Power talking about the laurels going to the woman with the most ‘chocolatey sex’ among other trophies of 'modern, emancipated, capitalist womanhood'). So chocolate is presented as something naughty, something that combines girly innocence with girly rebelliousness: something that allows you to be half Alice from Lewis Carrol’s Wonderland books and half Angelina Jolie. Something sensual and indulgent that shows a woman’s ability to give herself pleasure without the necessity of men. The problem, as Power points out, is that eating chocolate is, in the end, eating chocolate. But does access to literal or figurative chocolate really represent the pinnacle of the emancipation of women? Power is not, obviously, so much interested in running an anti-chocolate philippic as she is in chocolate’s capacity to serve as a metaphor for the way in which the present phase of capitalism presents the fact that women have the opportunity to “pamper themselves” with consumption as proof that the feminist utopia has been handed down to us -- by capitalism.

But is the ability to have the odd sensual treat (occasional orgasms! occasional sweet treats!) really proof that everything that feminists have ever talked about is now merely the semi-mad reminiscences of the aforementioned ‘hairy lesbians’ (about whom incidentally, Power writes a hilarious passage that basically says something like: “who are these women whose body hair has apparently terrorized the imagination of so many rabid generations of ‘anti-feminists’?”) Never have so many been so frightened by so few.

The fact that ‘feminism is over, according to the chocolate argument’, is an entrée into Power’s broader argument that feminist issues must be seen, not in moral terms, as issues that require the ‘re-education’ of crypto-misogynist tendencies existing in the vacuum of men’s minds, but rather, issues that almost all arise (in the rich countries of the West) from the fact that women (like everyone else) suffer from the vagaries of the market-economy and its determination (‘in the last instance’) of social life. Thus, Power writes a number of incredibly lucid passages on how today’s women are often held up as the models for success and achievement, but that this has less to do with the victory of feminism and more to do with the fact that women are to some extent moulded to be (and thus unsurprisingly considered) ideal members of the ‘new economy’, where that economy is defined by a) the necessity of adaptability and b) a corollary of “a” ; the need that one should sell oneself at all times (in order to avail oneself of opportunities which, to paraphrase Marx and Engels “ossify before they are fully formed.”)

Thus, for Power, the one-dimensional woman of her title (the career woman who – god bless universal emancipation -- has time, for kids, but also the ‘fun and fulfilment’ of handbags, vibrators, and the occasional chocolatey shag), are models of the new economy insofar as they have moulded themselves into (literally and figuratively) flexible people who have the opportunity to work constantly at maintaining ‘breeziness, niceness’, chattiness, sexiness, that serves as a general currency in any situation (the qualities most desirable in the new ‘service based’ job markets). Power’s question, of course, is simply why women’s excellence and women’s potential should be judged by its ability to be sculpted into what is most effective at selling across the greatest number of contexts? For Power, the charming “men’s magazines’” tendency to refer to a woman’s breasts as her ‘assets’ :grasps something of contemporary social reality: namely that the right and imperative to be a one-dimensional women is a right to be on display at all times, an ad for something (even if it is herself), something that is not so much sculpted to have access to all possible opportunities imaginable, but to convey a sense of opportunity to the world in which the modern woman, like the modern male, is supposed to spend most of her time working, preparing for her work, and recovering from work with the odd (blessed freedom!) chocolatey indulgence.

Power also manages to suggest the asset-calculating mentality in the present ‘post-feminist’ discourses about love and desire, as best represented by Sex and the City. What Sex and the City tells us, according to Power, is that the independent woman goes through a phase of working for conspicuous but ephemeral consumption (sex that doesn’t impinge on the rest of her life, job, partying, beauty enhancements, handbag acquisition et cetera), that is supposed to come to an end when she finds ‘the One’. But the sentimental “romantic” fixation on the “One” for whom a given woman will renounce at least some of our chocolatey pleasures in the name of the lentil soup of monogamy and family obscures the fact that the attitude to ‘oneness’ that Sex and the City cultivates is as pragmatic-utilitarian-calculative as the “hedonistic” phase that is supposed to precede it: the whole notion of “The One” is essentially the idea of a guy who is a safer investment than the other guys, someone with whom you can share a mortgage when you make the transition from the phase of working-to-buy-ephemeral things, to the apparently more mature phase of working to buy less ephemeral things (a “nice house at last!")

For Power, this narrow and very obviously consumer-society conception of love and desire, is predicated on the idea that it is the only viable alternative to the puritanical, 1950s housewife vision, which would condemn all women to the fate of a poorer cousin of Betty Draper from Mad Men.

But, Power’s question, is always: is this it? Is Sex and the City consumption the most that women can hope for, the proof of emancipated women, in an emancipated society? What about, as Ariel Levy says, being an astronaut, or, hell, living in a society that gives a shit about its less fortunate one billion?

Aren’t there higher aspirations available to women to men to human beings?

It’s very important to note here that Power’s perspective is never moralistic, never about censuring women for sensual pleasure (or even consumer pleasures). Instead, her book is about pointing out that the capitalist super-ego that always demands that we “Enjoy!” produces the constant anxiety that we are ‘not-enjoying-enough’, while at the same time proscribing us with an incredibly narrow range of possible enjoyments (more consumption).

The best proof of this point is in Power’s discussion of pornography, from which I get the google-bot titillating title of this essay.

In a sense, Power shares with Ariel Levy a good deal of skepticism and bemusement about how what Levy calls ‘raunch culture’ became in a disturbingly common discourse the ‘feminism of the nineties and noughties.’ And one might indeed ask (with Power and Levy) how the “Hugh-Hefner is a feminist hero” camp (a camp of which Hugh Hefner is a founding as well as vociferous member) managed to convince anyone that there’s no better way to prove that GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING and BE WHOEVER THEY WANT TO BE (in our time of post-patriarchal female empowerment) than by giving women the chance to take their tops off for a “Girls Gone Wild” video? As Levy says in her book, what is it exactly about the ability to take pole dancing classes that is proof of women’s emancipation? (Also: s sexuality, as Foucault might have asked, something that needs ‘expressing’, in the sense of ‘displaying?” )

But to see how Power avoids many of the pitfalls that would be laid in front of someone writing on this issue, we must see how she tackles the questions of ‘raunch culture’ via her discussion of porn. In this discussion, Power refuses the moral blackmail that would demand that a feminist writer either except the raunch culture line that ‘feminists should love porn’ (you go girls: emancipate yourselves for that camera!) or accept not only an older feminism’s points about the exploitative and misogynistic qualities of pornography, but apparently a puritanical anti-sex position that would put the feminist into unlikely agreement with the Christian Right.

Power cuts through much of the disingenuous blather on this subject by saying in an essentially Zizekian manner “Hairy lesbian' [c.f. the above comment on this term] puritans or my life as a Barbie doll: yes please!” She does this by making the very simple point that that porn has a history, and that what we know of porn (despite the dizzying variety of fetishes catered for on the internet) shows that contemporary pornography suffers mainly by being beholden to a series of generic conventions which, as the history of erotica shows, could have been otherwise.

Thus, when Power turns from modern porn to French porn of the 1920s she sees things that we would never see today (despite the porn saturation of our culture), scenes that lack the grim seriousness of the standard ‘sex-as-combat’ porn scene and that instead have farcical elements, silly, fun stories: joking scenes about men having trouble with erections and needing to be coaxed into them by understanding women. (Without having seen the films that Power is talking about, I kind of imagine them as hardcore Jacques Tati films)

This is in marked contrast to the contemporary pornography which tends to portray sex as a battle between men and women that is always won comprehensively by the victorious power of the penis. (There is a Lacanian part of me, that has to admit to being amused by the fact that so much pornography contains dialogue that essentially goes: “you have the phallus!”/“That’s right! I do have the phallus. It definitely exists and I definitely have it! Let no one think otherwise!” “Penises. How awe-inspiring are they?!” “We women are awed by our lack of them, and not at all capable of surviving without them!” "Yes, I agree. Having the phallus, is to be devoid of lack/That's soooo true et cetera.)

No matter how much pornography you can find on the internet (“Geese with Trilby hats!”) the one thing, I suspect, that even the most assiduous pornography search is likely to turn up is porn involving men having trouble with erections. The problem with porn, Power suggests, is not so much the fact that sex is represented explicitly for erotic purposes, but the fact that “our porn” reveals itself to be so saturated by the conceits, illusions, and, ultimately the political-economic ideologies of our epoch: sex on film must be about women subdued by the incontrovertible might of the phallus: it must be grim, slightly vengeful, prurient. But why so ‘one-dimensional’ a vision?

Do the clichés of the genre (and as Power points out, the multi-million dollar industry) mark all that the human race can think of as to sex? At this point, Power’s argument recalls not only Marcuse, but Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno, specifically in his review of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In this essay, Adorno argues that on the one hand, Huxley is absolutely right in his portrayal of a dystopian future in which all human needs are perfectly administered to by a totalitarian government. But, Adorno goes on to say that Huxley is right, but for the wrong reasons, i.e. that while Huxley is right to feel the utilitarian calculation of pleasure administered by a new kind of ‘biopower’ no-one can take arms against pleasure itself without making a move to the wrong side of politics: i.e. to say that people’s happiness is bad because it lacks “meaning” is always to step away from the left to right.

Thus, against the idea that Adorno is someone who thinks that people should just listen to Schoenberg until they can endure it no longer, Adorno is saying that it’s not that things are fun that makes them bad, but rather that what is offered to us as fun, is not actually fun, but rather requires us to lower our expectations, grin and bear it, and generally close our minds to other possibilities of pleasure than those on offer by contorting our bodies and souls until we can find the meager offerings of society equivalent to the ‘satisfaction’ of all possible human desires.

Along similar lines, Power’s book absolutely rejects the common blackmail that would say: either we should accept that the opportunities for women (or indeed for anyone) under capitalism represent the full gamut of human possibilities or we implicitly acknowledge our solidarity with the kind of puritan critic of modernity who would demand that women renounce all claim to enjoyment in the name of their being ‘female eunuchs’. Opposing this silly either/or , Power’ suggests that, on the contrary, capitalism doesn’t offer enough pleasure to women (or men) : that, just as the imperative of flexible capitalism makes us take ‘one-dimensional woman’ as the summit of female possibilities, our society also acts as if the few feeble chocolate crumbs we grab between endless cycle of meaningless work should be greeted as more fulfillment than anyone could ever need: that ours is a society in which the imperative to enjoy governs everything to the point of producing constant anxiety (“am I having enough fun? Getting out enough? Is my body primed, sufficiently toned, sufficiently devoid of blemishes for the true “fun” of joining the glamorous glitterati in which sex is treated with all the humourlessness of cocaine”? The point is that the mere existence of this imperative does not by any means suggest any great quantity of actual enjoyment, of unproductive fun, of pointless, lying on one’s back looking at the stars activities that are dissociated from our dominant conceptions of leisure thought under the aspect of work (Make sure you enjoy!) work dressed up as leisure (I go drinking with my boss!) or as the self-stupefaction that we undertake to simply forget the world of work and life.

Overall, in case you can’t guess: Power’s book is a wonderful joy that you should go and read immediately. (with or without the accompaniment of chocolate) It also contains far better arguments and far more lively and engaging writing than my own turgid prose can attempt to do justice.

To end here, I leave with a last – peripheral -- thought:

Power’ discussion on pornography sheds some insight on something that I’ve always thought about - of all things genre fiction, and in particular what I’ve thought about as the pornographic nature of most such fiction.

To explain, I’ve often wondered why so much genre fiction is so bad, given that there is absolutely no necessity that something should be bad, just for adhering to certain conventions of gothic horror, epic fantasy, romance and so on. After all, I can think of any number of great literary works that consist in the masterful execution/exploration/ displacement of some generic convention or another.

However, what I’ve thought is wrong with a lot of actual genre fiction (apart from the fact that the worst genre writers show signs of having read nothing else apart from genre fiction) is it’s pornographic character, by which I don’t mean, its sexual content, but rather the fact that like most porn, bad genre fiction does nothing but ‘deliver’ – in a perfectly conventional form – what the genre fans wants. (Dragons, here we go! Murders! Bodice-ripping!).

But, as Power’s discussion of French erotic films of the 1920s shows, depictions of sex do not have to be confined to the usual, tawdry, woman-meets-plumber-plumber-proffers-pipe thing, there’s no reason that mystery novel mightn’t embrace more possibilities than a pallid Agatha Christie imitation or that a fantasy novel can’t be more than the billionth slavishly unimaginative homage to Tolkien. Thus, what makes for good genre fiction, is also what could save us from the banality of pornography: a world where the generic features of genre are a framework, or a platform and not, as they too often are the point of the whole process.

To believe that genre (like pornography) could not be otherwise is, after all, is to demean ‘genre’ in the name of literature in a way that actually demeans literature by treating literature as its own genre: an obscene habit that results in all manner of decadent and dull contemporary ‘lit-fic’ that seems to consist in syrupy pseudo-lyrical descriptions of inner experience along with moments of vague moralising about the kind of people whom the author finds irritating. But, following Power, following Badiou, we should ask of one-dimensional literature, the same question we ask of our one-dimensional conception of what human beings can do: i.e. is this all there is?

Love,

Mal

Bryan Cooke

Fear and Loathing in the Academic Agora
Sunday, January 16, 2011

Every Good Critic has.no.taste (Part I)
Sunday, January 16, 2011

Another Porn is Possible: Review of Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman'
Sunday, January 16, 2011

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Bryan Cooke

Fear and Loathing in the Academic Agora Sunday, January 16, 2011

Every Good Critic has.no.taste (Part I) Sunday, January 16, 2011

Another Porn is Possible: Review of Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman' Sunday, January 16, 2011

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Fear and Loathing in the Academic Agora
Sunday, January 16, 2011

Every Good Critic has.no.taste (Part I)
Sunday, January 16, 2011

Another Porn is Possible: Review of Nina Power's 'One Dimensional Woman'
Sunday, January 16, 2011