Lars Iyer's Blog, page 19

Similarly [to Terry Eagleton] Willy Maley writes across theoretical, critical, and literary genres, although one might say that his creative writing is influenced by a theoretical tendency rather than explicitly reflects one. This is in contrast to Lars Iyer whose trilogy of short novels Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012) and Exodus (2013) are an account of what it means to have been a humanities academic in the UK since the 1980s and how theory has circulated around the lives of scholars and in the new university of ���excellence��� and human capital. In this sense, these novels are not mimetic but are inculcated within the institutions and discourses they describe, leaving their own mark within them, consciously philosophical, and opening the topic in the manner of speculative inquiry.

From Martin McQuillan���s introduction to Critical Practice: Philosophy and Creativity.

Bouvard and P��cuchet. Robinson (Kafka���s) and Delamarche. Robinson (C��line���s) and Bardamu. Robinson (Keiller���s) and the Narrator. Beckett���s Mercier and Camier, and then Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. The characters played by Richard E. grant and Paul McGann in Withnail and I (1987), written and directed by Bruce Robinson. A recent twosome: Kruso and Ed in Lutz Seiler���s Kruso (2014). And here���s another: W and Lars in Lars Iyer���s Spurious (2011; and then Dogma and Exodus).

Here we are at the end of Literature and Culture, stripped, bereft, embarrassed. We are children tromping in old boots���. This is Lars Iyer in ���Nude in Your hot Tub, facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto after the End of Literature and Manifestoes���.

A belief that one is living at the end of something is not unique to now; many people believed this in, say, the 1990s, and the 1890s. Maybe all people over a certain age. The beginning of the particular end that Iyer is talking about is dated back to the decade during which I was at boarding school, moving on from Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle to Lowry and Updike: Sometime in the 1960s the great river of Culture, the Literary Tradition, the canon of lofty works began to braid and break into a myriad distributaries, turning sluggish on the plains of the cultural delta���. By now ���literature��� as it used to be known ��� ���revolutionary and tragic, prophetic and solitary, posthumous, incompatible, radical and paradoxical��� ��� is ���a corpse and cold at that���; and authors have been replaced ���be a legion of keystroke labourers, shoulder to shoulder with the admen and app developers���. Conclusion: ���don���t be generous and don���t be kind. Ridicule yourself and what you do. Savage art, like the cannibal you are���. This is heady stuff, up there with the manifestos of yesteryear.

Enter two low-level academics, W and Lars, one in the south-west of England and the other in the north-east. Lars lives in an apartment that���s assailed by an apocalyptic damp (it���s ���off the scale���; the professionals shake their heads and mutter that they���ve ���never seen anything like it���). They bicker, tease, read books they don���t understand and drink neat gin. Briefly, they wonder which is them is Kafka and which Brod, before agreeing that they are both Brod. Canada, ���with its pristine blue lakes and bear-filled wilderness��� and its different kind of cold (���not a wet cold like over here���) is the place to go to, a place where one could be ���a different kind of man���, and Lars writes references for W (���the finest thinker of his generation���) and they hear nothing back, the Canadians are ���remote as Martians���. But their joint acceptance that they are living in End Times ��� and the notion that salvation might lie in books is a joke ��� goes to their head as least as much as the gin: ���I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it���s this we share in our joy and our laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching���.

On the other side of ��� or underneath ��� Exquisite doom is Hilarious doom. If the comedy here is black it���s not matt black, it���s glossy, even fluorescent: lurid, twitchy (odd spasms of hope still flickering uselessly, ���like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but exited���), jerky ��� and now I���ve written that word I think of Punch and Judy shows, the way the puppets bash each other flat and then spring up and go through it all again and again. Spurious is threaded through with a crazy End Times glee, the glee that you feel when your team, which you do genuinely support, is losing five-nil and a balance is tipped, no way back now, and you decide that if they���re going to fail then let them at least fail spectacularly, with abject abandon, pile it on.

From Robinson, by Jack Robinson (Pen Name of Charles Boyle)

A favourite song of Blanchot's: Schumann, from 12 Gedichte, Op.35: No. 10, 'Stille Tr��nen', performed by Marian Anderson, in this performance.

The ordinary man survived God without too much difficulty and, rather, is today unexpectedly respectful of law and social conventions, instinctively inclined to abide by them, and, at least with respect to others, eager to invoke their implementation. It is as if the prophecy according to which ���if God is dead, then everything is permitted��� did not concern him in any way: he continues to live reasonably even without the comfort of religion and endures without resignation a life that has lost its metaphysical sense, a life about which he does not, after all, seem to have any illusions.

... he does not end the pathos that distinguished the two figures of the human after the death of god: Dostoevsky's underground man and Nietzsche's superman.

In each act of creation there is something that resists and opposes expression.

In the face of ability, which simply negates and abandons its potential not to play, and talent, which can only play, mastery preserves and implements in the act not its potentiality to play but the potentiality not to play.

��� mastery is not formal perfection but quite the opposite: it is the preservation of potentiality in the act, the salvation of imperfection in a perfect form.

Josephine sings with her impotentiality to sing ���

As Klee writes in a 1922 note, ���Creation lives as a genesis beneath the visible surface of the work���: potentiality, the creative principle is never exhausted by the actual work, but continues to live in it, and rather is ��� what is essential in the world���. For this, the creator can coincide with the work, find in it his only abode and his only happiness: ���A painting does not have specific ends; its only aim is to make us happy���.

Agamben,  The Fire and the Tale

I feel sorry for my grandchildren. I find they are living in an era of ashes.'- Long H��l��ne Cixous interview from a couple of years back.

��� if to constituent power there correspond revolutions, revolts, and new constitutions, namely, a violence that puts in place and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is necessary to think entirely different strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that has only been knocked down with a constituent violence will resurge in another form, in the unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, between the violence that puts the juridical in place and violence that preserves it.

A form-of-life is that which ceaselessly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself to live, without negating them, but simply by using them.

Because power is constituted through the inclusive exclusion of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the lucid exposition of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is what becomes thinkable only at the point where we grasp and render destitute the anarchy of power.

��� there is form-of-life only where there is contemplation of a potential. Certainly there can only be contemplation of a potential in a work. But in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work.

The Arcanum of politics is in our form-of-life, and yet precisely for this reason we cannot manage to penetrate it. It is so intimate and close that if we seek to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the ungraspable, tedious everyday. It is like the forms of the cities or houses where we have lived, which coincide perfectly with the life we have frittered away in them, and perhaps precisely for this reason, it seems suddenly impenetrable to us, while other times, at a stroke, it is collectively innervated and seems to unveil to us its secret.

Agamben, The Use of Bodies

 Don���t be mistaken, what I���ve written here for Maria, is a tale of spiritual transcendence. Maria���s break with the world, her crisis, occurs when she realizes she has accidentally killed her father. This is also the brutal culmination of a day of hard-to-take realities. She has been brought low. She can now see the world for exactly what it is. She has become enlightened. She sees the vanity and pointlessness of human ambition. And begins to transcend these things. That���s her physicality, the physicality of the saint, the person without: simple, relaxed, patient, the clarity of decision and movement. 

Hal Hartley, interviewed by Martin Donovan in 1992 on Trust

The specific form of solitude he praises, however, derives its appeal from its dependence on a logically prior ethical community [���] Solitude independent of community is indistinguishable from loneliness. Nietzsche speaks fondly and repeatedly of his unknown ���friends���, precisely because they represent a community from which his self-imposed exile involves only a temporary respite.

���We Europeans of the day after tomorrow��� ��� ���these brave companions and familiars��� served ���as compensation for the friends I lacked���.

��� the pedagogical aim of his writing is neither to convert not to ���improve��� his readers, but to announce himself to kindred spirits and fellow squanderers. His moral pedagogy is designed not to ���cure��� the sick and infirm, but to embolden and encourage the healthy ��� much as his ���friends���, the fictitious free spirits, served as ���brave companions and familiars��� during his own convalescence.

��� Nietzsche depicts friendship as a mutually empowering agon, in which select individuals undergo moral development through their voluntary engagement in contest and conflict. On this agonistic model of friendship, one has no ethical obligations to those who cannot contribute to one���s own quest for self-perfection ���

One ���becomes what one is��� by overcoming oneself, which always involves elements of both self-creation and self-discovery. While his voluntaristic rhetoric suggests the construction of selfhood, his fatalism recommends the discovery of an authentic self.

��� only the combination of self-creation and self-discovery engenders the cruelty ��� both to oneself and to others ��� that endures the nomothetic impact of self-overcoming.

Nietzsche���s model of self-overcoming is strongly Apollonian, insofar as it promotes the mastery within a single soul of as many tensions and contradictions as possible. But this model is undeniably Dionysian, for it promotes internal mastery only as a means of further expanding the capacity of the soul, in an ever-escalating process that must eventually culminate in the destruction of the soul. The philosopher who constantly overcomes himself thus ���builds his city on the slopes of Vesuvius���. For he voluntarily stations himself on the brink of Dionysian excess and disintegration.

��� the philosopher ���creates��� a community only indirectly and unwittingly, through his expenditure of the excess affect required to turn the hammer on himself. He thus becomes a sign unto himself, irrepressibly projecting his self-directed legislations in to the public space that surrounds him.

��� it is the business of politics, Nietzsche believes, to oversee the production of those rare, exotic individuals who, by virtue of their overhuman beauty, excite in others the stirring of eros.

��� such individuals are ���lucky strikes��� ��� culture itself usually arises only as a fortunate accident within the sumptuary economy of nature.

��� askesis begets eros. ���the experimental disciplines developed by the philosopher arouse in (some) others the erotic attachment that alone forges the ���circle of culture���.

Nietzsche often speaks of self-overcoming In terms of self-creation, and thus fecund metaphor conveys his sense of the nomothetic influence of exemplary human beings. Great individuals are always artists in Nietzsche���s sense, for, in the course of their self-overcomings, they inadvertently produce in themselves the beauty that alone arouses erotic attachment.

��� the irresistible public nature of the philosopher���s self-overcomings. Independent of the philosopher���s own aims and aspirations his overflowing will enters the public sphere as a sign, presenting itself for reception by observers and witnesses who do not share his first hand, artist���s perspective.

��� the ethical life of any community is made possible only by the amoral self-creation of the exemplary human beings who found ��� and then desert ��� it.

Lovers ���attach their hearts��� to a great human being and are thereby consecrated to culture, but their love is not reciprocated. Because eros only strives ever upward, these exemplary figures never come to love those whose eros they have inadvertently awakened. Their gaze fixed firmly on the simmering horizon of human perfectibility, great human beings love only themselves and their ���next��� selves, which immediately vanish upon consummation. In a pithy statement of his own tragic view of the human condition, Nietzsche submits that all great love, but its very nature, stands unrequited.

Nietzsche consequently identifies his own self-overcoming as his greatest contribution to the permanent enhancement of humankind: ���my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them. My humanity is a constant self-overcoming��� (Ecce Homo).

Through his self-experimentation, Nietzsche hopes not only to resist his twin temptations, nausea and pity, but also to furnish his unknown ���friends��� with aversive strategies designed to postpone the advent of the will to nothingness.

Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political

I���m going to write a few lines to you, by which I mean accomplish my first act as a solid living being, because I���ve already accomplished numerous acts as a living being: I���ve cried, for instance, and tears are as far as possible from death. But it is you I write to first because I want you to able to maintain within yourself, perhaps for a little while longer, the wondrous feeling of having saved a man. I say ���a while longer��� because to the same degree that the one saved holds eternally before him the image of the saviour, the saviour has the tendency to see the image of his act grow indistinct and even to render common the subject he tore from evil.

Thus, my dear Dionys, we are in some sense now completely separate. Our consciences respectively no longer weigh the same. There will always be some indiscretion in my eyes, in my words. You will try not to see it.

I���d like to tell you other things on this subject that seem important to me but I���m aware that I run a fairly grave danger. Dionys, I think I no longer know what is said and what is not said. In Hell, one says everything and it must be for this that we recognise it. For my part, it is certainly in this way that it was revealed to me. In our world, on the contrary, we are accustomed to choosing, and I believe I no longer know how to choose. Well, in what represented Hell for me and others, saying everything was where I lived my paradise. For you must know this, Dionys, that during the first days that I was in my bed and spoke to you, to you and to Marguerite first of all, I was not a man of this earth. I stressed this fact that haunts me retrospectively. To have been able to give freedom to words that were barely formed and had no years, no age, but took shape in relation to my breath. This you see ��� this happiness ��� wounded me definitively and, at this moment, I who believed myself so far from death by some affliction ��� typhus, fever and so forth ��� could think of dying only from this very happiness. And now I have begun again to give a form to things; at least, my spirit and my body try to.

But, I repeat, I think I can no longer choose. In what I am saying there are surely tremendous vulgarities and what you call in your laughter ���an incredible tyranny���. So, am I going to have to reclassify myself; whittle myself down so that one sees only once again a smooth envelope? You���ll tell me that my language is ill-fitting and that the best oil is one that reveals a thousand rough points without ceasing to be oil. In reality, I believe that the problem I am posing is nonetheless a moral one. I have the feeling, which perhaps not all of my comrades have, of being a new being. Not in Wells��� sense of the word ��� in the fantastic sense ��� but on the contrary in the most hidden sense, so that my true sickness, which began so tenderly, just a few weeks ago now, and at that time it was still bearable, now reaches its maturity and becomes very intractable.

Here is an appendage that grows; a spirit without channels or compartments. A freedom perhaps ready to grasp itself; perhaps ready to annihilate other freedoms. Either to kill them or, better, to embrace them. So, if one wanted to see a man take form, one might observe me up close, taking into account the morbid character of the formative process.

Forgive me for insisting ��� it must be unbearable for you who go on to hear someone speak of his original indeterminacy. I think there is even something boorish in all this, and then you would be right be right in answering that in a few months I will have ceased being reborn; that I too will get on and no doubt even along that abandoned path that I left a year ago. You will tell me this, Dionys, or not; you���ll think it, or not. Depending on whether you will or will not have some faith in man. You are certainly one of the few beings in whom I fear fatigue; I mean, despair. There are many who I have loved a great deal and whose despair left me indifferent. By which I mean, a kind of definitive state. I left them in this state, or I revelled and struggled to bring them back. For you, Dionys, whose despair must constantly mix with joy, flights and unfathomable pauses, I could not bear that this despair fix itself and become established. I told you I was not afraid and that such was my sole fear. If you laugh, if you tease me in saying you have never seen so much future, I will tell you that I recognised in myself the right to have this fear.

I stopped there because my hand was hurting.

June 1945

Robert Antelme, writing to Dionys Mascolo, transcribed by Steve Mitchelmore, and paragraphed by me.

You can���t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write. I could make them shorter, but it still wouldn���t work. The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn���t a novel. What has been written one day must be affirmed the next, not by going back to correct it (which is futile) but by pressing on, supplying the sense that was lacking by advancing resolutely. This seems magical, but in fact it���s how everything works; living, for a start. In this respect, which is fundamental, the novel defeats the law of diminishing returns, reformulating it and turning it to advantage.

from Cesar Aira, 'Novels Defeat the Law of Diminishing Returns' (1999)