Thinkling

May 17, 2008

Musil's World without Qualities

Musil's Man without Qualities is a book almost impossible to review. The difficulty is not due only to the book's length and blurred boundaries (it was never finished by the author himself and various existing editions incorporate more or less of the material that was left by the author at various degrees of completion). The difficulties are even more substantial than the impossibility to provide an adequate summary. It is not even easy to decide what genre this work, though ostensibly a novel, quite belongs to. And even allowing that it is in fact a novel, that it is telling a story, one will find it exceedingly difficult to determine quite what the story is. It would not be far-fetched to claim that this is perhaps rather a protracted philosophical essay in the guise of a narrative, say, a fictionalized version of Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences. But it is also a political novel, at least in sense of suggesting some of the political context of modern man's predicament. In the narrative, the ‘man without qualities’ does refer to an actual person, Ulrich, as much of a main character as the novel ever gets. But at the same time, the whole world of the novel is strangely ‘without qualities’, without firm point and characteristic. And this is also Musil's main subject matter, the strange sense of doomed pointlessness which pervades Central Europe during his lifetime. One of the worst lifetimes, too, a human being could have ever been awarded.

Austrian-born, Czech-educated Robert Musil (1880-1942) is nowadays generally acknowledged, alongside Marcel Proust or James Joyce, as one of the luminaries of modernist fiction of the early twentieth century, although still generally less known than the others. His lucid but very intellectual style does not make him easy reading, but an undeterred reader is certain to profit.

The stage is Vienna, k.k. capital of that peculiarly heterogeneous and obsolete entity, the Habsburg Austrian-Hungarian Empire (‘k.k.’ being the shorthand for kaiserlich und königlich, or Imperial and Royal, the notorious abbreviation for anything officially Austrian, which provided Musil's novel with the empire's irreverent nickname ‘Kakanien’). The time is the turn of the years 1913-14, while the longest serving emperor in its history, Franz Joseph, is approaching the 70th anniversary of his rule, due in 1918. This is obviously an occasion which calls for a major celebration, a symbolic milestone in the history of the k.k. nations. But world has changed and it seems increasingly difficult to identify precisely what values, which ideals should be singled out for manifestation of the highest aspirations of humanity at the occasion of this unprecedented moment. It is never entirely possible to forget about the geopolitical realities of the competition with Germany and keeping in rein the revolting nationalities within the empire. Yet, for the moment in any case, nations, commoners, churches, nobles, all stand united at the feet of the throne eager, so they claim, to realize the eternal hopes of humanity, to carry out in the Austrian Year 1918 a great project enacting mighty and universal ideas. But what exactly are those eternal hopes, what ideas are worthy enough to be made the ultimate goal of striving of the Collateral Campaign, the semi-official VIP gathering intent, under the leadership of a high-ranking courtier, the old count Leinsdorf, on channelling the spontaneous energies and imparting desirable and generally beneficial direction to the planned Austrian Year 1918? The Campaign, its committees and representatives shuffle along with much self-importance and idealist enthusiasm and with even more empty rhetoric and opportunism and vanity, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly one of undiluted Kafkaesque aimlessness and absurdity (Musil admired Kafka's prose and sought his acquaintance in Prague). The Habsburg stage setting may seem provincial, but Musil's canvas is a supersize one with no lesser ambition than to portray the modern human condition, paradigmatically present in the closing days of the Central European monarchy.

Ulrich von…, in his early thirties, abandons his promising scientific career as mathematician amid deep misgivings of its meaning and of his own place in the world which may well have no real use for his qualities (the newspaper front-page description of a racing horse as ‘genius’ being the ultimate trigger of his decision). Well connected, however, he is promptly recommended as personal secretary to the count Leinsdorf, the head of the Collateral Campaign’s organizing committee, which devolves into an opportune celebrity social occasion around the salon of Ulrich's relative, nicknamed by him in Greek like several other female characters, Diotima, in allusion to Plato’s Symposion. Other characters quickly crowd the scene and it is impossible to even roughly account for the many intertwining lines along which the complex narrative develops (among Musil's literary inheritance there is an extensive hand-drawn map of the architecture of characters and their relations for just the first part of the book). Grand financier and polymath Paul Arnheim, Ulrich's brilliant and pompous intellectual adversary; self-destructively Nietzschean Clarissa, one of the steady trickle of Ulrich's problematic relationships; small and corpulent general Stumm, who decides to bring some military discipline into the disorderly vagueness of Collateral Campaign's proceedings by drafting a list of civil spirituality, a ‘cadastral survey of modern culture’; these are only a few of the many who remain in memory. Another symbolically parallel line concerns the states of mind of a psychotic mass murderer Moosbrugger, sources of the self, freedom of will, and limits of law as model for self-understanding of the society after the birth of psychoanalysis (another Musil’s field beside his studies of mathematics and philosophy).
But the novel's point is not its story and it is at once characteristic and almost inevitable that it should be as open-ended as its author finally unwillingly left it. The impossibility of arriving at any kind of conclusion is inherent in the setting of the problem, just like it is paradigmatically embedded in the modern condition which is the book's theme. What must and will be the effects, for example, of really making cars, airplanes, electricity, neurology, psychoanalysis, molecular science, astronomy, theory of relativity, division of labour and expert specialization, part of self-understanding of man and his society? Musil raised these questions (by confronting a shocked Thomas Aquinas with a whizzing metropolitan tramcar, among others) but also, it seems, searched for modes in which these questions can be spoken of. This probably accounts for the peculiar style, the unsettlingly unstable modes of the third-person narration, (observing the ironic observer Ulrich) wavering between cynical skepticism, romanticism played with and dismissed, grotesque theatrical stylization, poetic impressionism, and highly abstract meditations.

Musil wrote the book through the 1930s and died in 1942 in Swiss exile (fleeing the Nazis with his Jewish wife) while trying to somehow complete it. He deliberately chose a perspective of writing from the hindsight of a Europe which had already lived the nightmare of the First World War and was heading for the Second, about a Europe which was still more or less innocently heading towards it. This is a powerful way of telling a story, for without adding a word it provides the reader with foreknowledge of the threateningly dark horizon of all events and lives portrayed in the novel, the horizon which the reader and the author see already approaching at scary speed while the characters on the novel's stage remain blissfully unaware of it and continue fruitlessly planning celebrations of anniversaries which will never arrive.

Posted by david at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

Into our Hearts of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, a less well-known piece than his notorious Heart of Darkness (to become the Francis Coppola film as Apocalypse Now), but with sufficient renown still to have merited a Japanese translation, poses as fiction with elements of black humour combined with a spy story and a political thriller of sorts. But the looks may deceive, and seen in the context of the author's other works, the portrayal of paradoxically tragic consequences of a complex interplay of hidden human motivations, The Secret Agent may well be read as another profound inquiry into the darkness of our hearts. And in this respect it matters little that the novel is set in the dull lazy backwaters of Victorian England, rather than in the exotic wilderness of black Africa.

Serialized originally in (to modern sensibilities rather inauspiciously named) magazine "Ridgway's: a Militant Weekly for God and Country", the novel was soon out in book form in 1907. The center of the plot, however, takes its hint from an actual event of some years earlier, a mysterious failed bomb attack, by an anarchist Martial Bourdin, at the Greenwich astronomic observatory, in 1894. Obviously fascinated by the grotesque incomprehensibility of the choice of such target for a terrorist attack, Conrad set it in the middle of a stage of a dark drama of absurd causes and their absurd effects.
The story unfolds at several levels: Mr. Verloc, posing as a small nondescript shop owner in a narrow London backstreet, leads an uneventful family life beside his wife Winnie with her mentally handicapped brother Stevie and her aging mother; in his other life, however, Verloc turns out to be a long-serving secret agent of some renown, in the pay of the embassy of an unidentified continental power, entrusted with the task of infiltrating the leading circles of the anarchist movement in Britain. The ironic depiction of the motley assembly of comrades constituting the revolutionary headquarters, as well as the subtle political intrigues on the background of the police investigations into the terrorist attack, including the clash of wills and agendas between the respective top officers responsible for the inquiry, represent the other planes of the unfolding of events.

The new First Secretary of the unspecified embassy, out of vanity, self-importance, or sheer idiocy, tries his hand at scaring and blackmailing his long-serving spy, Verloc, into resolute action, thus setting in motion a train of unpredicted events whose effects reverberate through Home Office and Scotland Yard and ultimately cost lives of the principal actors. Britain is too self-complacent in its illusion of civil liberites and public order, and its authorities must be shaken into ruthless suppression of the sprouting revolutionary anarchist movement which finds a relatively safe haven here. This view is to an extent shared by the only true anarchist, the unfathomable "Professor", an expert in explosives in search of a perfect detonator, a pure terrorist devoted entirely to the destruction of the entire social order, of which the other anarchists merely write fashionable books. (Reproaching his comrades, Professor declares, in a speech that resonates with more than one aspect of our contemporary predicament: "To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half of our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its own temple. This is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionises will never understand that.")

A fake terrorist attack of a great symbolic impact should serve to provoke British police and government to precisely such response. But things go grotesquely wrong for Verloc, enlisting his feeble-minded brother-in-law to carry out the bombing, and as things lose their previous appearance of normalcy, individuals overstep the boundaries of their conventionally defined paths of life and take shockingly destructive and self-destructive courses of action. The reader is left without a hero (or heroine) to look to and with little light to be made out at the end of the tunnel. Conrad's bleak world is one perceived through the optics of an intelligence and powers of observation so penetrating that they tend to leave their bearer in a disillusioned and deeply sceptical position regarding human condition in general.

Black humour mingles ominously with genuine chilling effect of revelations of motives which reflect the darkest of motions of the psyche of individuals. In the world of Conrad's explorations into our hearts of darkness, people give each other signals, disguised as information, which either intentionally or by mere impossibility of better mutual understanding, provide often fatally false clues as to the real motives and real thoughts of the actors. Short term practical decisions of an old lady caring for the well-being of the family, providential professional insights of a police commissioner, lifelong loyalty of a wife, or political deliberations of a leading statesman, all of these can be based on an entirely misled interpretation of those signals which reach us from others. Conrad's world is built around the scary but very real paradoxical possibility that we may and probably often do act, both privately and publicly, on beliefs about motives and feelings of others which can be fundamentally misconstrued and desperately wrong. It points not only to some very dark sides of human nature, but hints at a possibly even darker suggestion, namely that we very probably pass our lives in one huge lonely misunderstanding and that the others we thought we knew are potentially ominous universes of unknown motives and unpredictable decisions.

I have a deep respect and admiration for the man who became known under the name of Joseph Conrad, but I also privately and perhaps rather immodestly harbour a feeling of sympathy and a sense of a certain almost personal closeness. Conrad was a man who moved with some prowess across linguistic borders, a talent I envy, finding myself in a similar situation. A Polish emigré (his original name in fact was Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski) and something of an adventurer, he settled at last with the resolve to professionally write in a foreign language. He only first started learning English in his twenties; but by his thirties he already managed to have his first works published and, with a fairly extensive list of novels and short stories, Conrad ranks with Vladimir Nabokov as another Eastern-European to have become a full-fledged classic author of the English speaking world.

Posted by david at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2007

Other Men in Other Cities: Orhan Pamuk's White Tower

There had been rumours, well before the name of 2006 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature was made public, that what with all the moral and political considerations at play behind the scenes at the award, the prize was bound to go to a writer from an Islamic country. So the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk in the end perhaps did not come as so much of a surprise. Whether rightly or not, and almost certainly unwillingly, Pamuk became something of a symbol impersonating freedom of expression and unprejudiced openness in a presumed clash with forces of atavistic nationalism and intolerance. In a widely publicised case, in 2005, he was taken to court on charges brought against him on the base of the infamous article 301 of the Turkish criminal code, which threatens prison sentences for insult to the Turkish Republic, because of his straightforward statement concerning the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey. (This happens while Turkey is still largely in denial about the genocide of a possible million Armenians in 1915). The prosecution caused a worldwide outcry, which arguably contributed, in a Turkey sensitive to the eye of the onlooker ahead of the EU membership talks, to the charges being dropped.

But the sceptics who might denigrate the Nobel committee decision as reflecting much politics and little genuine literary worth had better read well before dismissing the fresh laureate. In his work, Pamuk addresses from various angles a crucial issue of the day, the problem of culturally conditioned identities, especially those along the dividing lines of East and West, Islam and Christianity, tradition and modernity, avoiding any formulaic dichotomies there. He does so with a degree of complexity which can probably only assume the form of a story, because no sort of documentary journalism or anthropological and sociological analysis may possibly do it justice. And he does so from the perspective of a man firmly rooted in the past and present of his country, or perhaps his city (as his loving autobiography–cum-cityguide "Istanbul" shows). Beside that, Pamuk frequently resorts to interesting formal experiment in building up his story; and the language in the translations of his works has a strange and unfamiliar, almost disturbing quality which (excluding the possibility that they are merely bad translations) presumably reflects something powerfully original in his usage of Turkish. All that safely adds up to highly intriguing literature in its own right, regardless of any added value of political correctness and fashionable curiosity about the world of Islam.

Much of the above is exemplified in the recent novel Snow (first published in 2002), a story of tensions of shaken identities at the crossroads played out against the background of a small eastern provincial town of Kars. Another important novel, My Name is Red (1998), digs deeper into Turkey's past and portrays, in a postmodern detective story, the world of Ottoman miniaturists in 16th century Istanbul, but in terms of structure also displays an unusual set of narrators, a different one for each chapter, including such curious voices as that of a dead corpse, or of the colour red. However, while both Snow and My Name is Red have now been translated into Japanese, the translation in this country of another crucial book, The White Castle (originally out in 1985 and the first to reach international stage through Pamuk's first ever translation into English in 1990) is still waiting for publication as this review is written.

On the face of it, The White Castle is a rather straightforward story set in 17th century Istanbul and told by a young educated Venetian who falls into the hands of Turkish enemy on the sea to become slave and assistant to an Ottoman scholar (designated only as Hoja, i.e., 'Master') of approximately same age and presumably striking physical resemblance. The not too numerous pages of the slim novel proceed to describe the relationship of the two as they explore not only bases of science and technology, but increasingly also what makes them each what they are, or what makes the 'fools' around who they are. But the straightforwardness is deceptive. The story unfolds from the first technological achievement of the two, a major public fireworks show over Bosporus, through their sanitary and logistic measures undertaken to curb the epidemic of plague raging in Istanbul, and further to the growing intimacy of the two with the Sultan. But the actual events recede into background and the stage is fully taken by the disquieting amalgamation of the two main characters with their respective universes of individual experience and religious and cultural background. There is little attention to the particulars of the setting of the story, there is minimum of description of the scenery, characters or circumstances, and the language seems to effectively increase the claustrophobia of being caught, as it were, inside the mental world of the two partners.

Just like in Snow, where the main character is a journalist, and in My Name is Red, which revolves around old books playing crucial part in new events, The White Castle uses centrally the theme of writing and text. Hoja, increasingly nervous and keen on his obsessive question of ‘what makes me who I am’, first forces his counterpart to make a written record of his own introspection. Tracing long-forgotten memories and real or invented mischiefs and sins, this project ultimately drags them both on the path of months and years of tortuous self-revelation and self-discovery by means of writing. This development as well as its depiction has a distinctly pathologic feeling to it. And the story which previously spanned years in the space of a few pages suddenly appears stuck in one place and claustrophobically closed into itself. The claustrophobia reaches its zenith in the scene in front of a mirror, almost precisely halfway through the length of the book, where fear of the plague death appears to work as a catalyst to the completion of a metamorphosis of the two originally separate identities. Beyond this point, the borderline between the two characters becomes increasingly blurred even while the contours of the world of actual objects and events grow hazier and things appear onstage ever more as symbols, like the ultimate weapon Hoja is commissioned to construct for the Sultan, or the indomitable white castle of Doppio at the feet of the Carpathian mountains during the last military campaign which brings the story to its climax.

Yet, even as the end approaches, the reader finds himself left with more questions than answers. The last chapter in a way undermines the whole preceding story. Here, the narrator claims to reveal the real purpose and authorship of the text. But which of the two was it that told the tale then? And whose voice is it that narrates this afterword? Did the two men entirely exchange each other’s places in their respective worlds? Or even, had there ever been two distinct individualities to start with? Where did fiction become reality and where did reality melt into fiction? Pamuk’s journey through the labyrinthine tangle of east-western identities is certainly worth exploring.

Posted by david at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2006

Crossing the Borders of Orient

Back in Europe, with my specialisation in Japanese studies, I am, reluctantly, an "Orientalist". So it was with a sense of indulging a deliberately produced self-irony that I found myself, on an early autumn day last year, crossing the Bosphorus straits on a cheap 1-Lire Istanbul ferry with a copy of Edward Said's notorious title at hand. For passing through no checkpoint and remaining within the jurisdiction of the same country, I was yet just moving across one of the most formidable and influential borderlines in mankind's history: there behind me, with the silhouettes of Topkapi palace and the great Suleymania Mosque, were receding the banks of Occident, while ahead, with an indispensable palm tree by the battered moorings, lay the Orient.

To sum it up very roughly, in his long-serving classic Said describes an ideological complex called "Orientalism" which involves Western scholarship, political and economic science, poetic imagination and fiction, linguistics etc., to a major extent in a project of "Orient's" domination by the "West". Behind what many Westerners said and fancied on the topic of the "Orientals", Said perceives a consistent hidden agenda of patronising condescension, dominion, robbing of individuality and construction of essentialist collective identities. He points out a line of cultural dominion fabricated and recreated in works of scholars and artists which runs conspicuously parallel to the line of actual colonial dominion of Orient (here largely Middle East extending to India) by Western empires.

About ever since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the end of the 18th century, "Orientalists" – Western experts studying about the area and its peoples – occupied themselves within frameworks of their respective fields of study with, in fact, "inventing" the Orient and its "typical" identity. What Said subjects to critique is not so much an overt condescending racism with regard to "the Oriental" (the Arab, the Muslim…), but rather the subtle forms of allegedly neutral and unbiased scholarship and, later, literary fiction which in turn fabricate, justify, and reinforce images of the Orient suited, ultimately, to political expediency and the justification of colonial empire.

As a lifetime reader of European and American literature (Said taught comparative literature at Columbia University) with the background of a Palestinian émigré, the author was uniquely situated to detect the marks of Orientalist attitudes latent in the works of Nerval or Flaubert or Conrad or Kipling. The very crude version would be the following: Orientals are essentially such as they are (lazy, passionate, irrational, fanatical, incapable of restraint and self-control, etc.) and thus destined to remain in disorderly and backward misery unless saved by the mercy of White Man's dominion with its values of humanity, civilisation, hygiene, and economic progress. But Orientalism, particularly in its modern forms (we are made aware as we follow Said through his book) is rarely all that crude.

I was intrigued to discover, with a shiver, a very recent example of impossibility of innocent Orientalist scholarship when I came across Bernard Lewis's conclusions on the character of Islamic culture and society featuring prominently in a training manual for U.S. troops destined for deployment on the ground in Iraq. An admittedly brief but all the more authoritative set of statements – by this supreme expert in contemporary Oriental studies – providing the gist of "what an Islamic society is" was here supposed directly to inform how soldiers with loaded guns should perceive the country and its people and how they might interact with both.

It is interesting to note that the same Bernard Lewis (who actually appears in Said's book several times), with his weight of disinterested scholar with unsurpassed knowledge of the "culture of Islam", apparently had a real impact on forming the decision leading to the U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2002.

The breadth of reading and scope of critical evaluation is impressive, but Said's is not careful and meticulously documented scholarship. (This has brought on criticism pointing out factual mistakes, misinterpretation and alleged libel in Said's treatment of many texts and authors: recently, for example, Robert Irwin's "For the Lust of Knowing – The Orientalists and their enemies".) Even to a reader who does not backtrack the author's footsteps to verify all the quotations and check for possible inaccuracy, Said does not sound neutral, calm and disinterested, and he is probably not even trying to. It is clear, though, that the book does not go down in history as a major achievement in scholarly analysis of an academic field, but perhaps precisely as a manifesto pronounced by an identifiably human voice, if sometimes prejudiced, sometimes angry, and sometimes probably wrong.

But Said's main issue remains very pressing subject for consideration: in what ways and to what extent do the seemingly innocent pursuits of meek and endearingly distracted scholars or imaginative story-tellers inform the running of empires in their hard or light forms?

There is more than a touch of Orientalism in much current discourse on "Islamism" and "Muslim threat", notions which evoke images of threatening and eerily incomprehensible culture defined by an essence of fanatism, extremism, irrational backwardness and scary unpredictability. Such Orientalism is no intellectual exercise. It is obvious that such notions inform actual policies and through those affect actual human lives (and deaths). As long as that remains true, it will remain our duty to try and understand the "Orientalist" elements latent in our worldviews and considerations. And Said's book remains a useful handle in that.

Japan, to conclude, has an ambiguous position in all this: the Japanese have been subject to a lot of Orientalist perception on the part of the West (from early on but recognizably still in the post-war era with all the essentialist definition-making in Ruth Benedict's style) and participated quite eagerly in academically reproducing some of that Orientalism in volunteering various all-encompassing definitions of "what the Japanese were" (in all the varieties of the so-called "Nihonjin-ron"). Yet at the same time, from early on in Meiji, Japan found itself in its turn fabricating a lot of discourse recognizably "Orientalist" in its function (of justifying dominion and empire) with regard to other less developed Asian nations. Whatever the case, I do find Said's treatment of Orientalism unobtrusively suggestive for thinking Japan.

Posted by david at 03:35 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

Doing Things with Verbs

What kind of word – what kind of logos in the Greek original – was presumed to be there at the beginning of all things? John's Gospel was probably not trying to pose or solve such problem, but it forces itself on the reviewer's mind anyway, doubly so when considering the theme of present issue. Was the First Word perhaps something else than a noun, say, an adverb, a pronoun, even a numeral? Or was it a verb? And if so, was it in the imperative, the mode of the rule and power, of providing the initial kick? (Or could it have been something more friendly, like "So, there we go…"?)

It seems to be a reasonable conjecture that when asked to "say a word, any word", an average human being in control of randomly chosen language will most likely come up with… a noun. Nouns are mentally easy and readily available to the extent that many of them serve as names for what appears to be reliable and well established objects of our world. Consequently, a word like "house" or "dog" may seem somehow more real and fuller example of a word than, say, "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize". As long as we think of nouns as representative language phenomena, we can get by with some theory of language as a set of code-signals referring to objectively existing outside reality. The word "dog" means what it means, because it designates a class of real entities an example of which we can touch and point at and say "this is a dog" when teaching the language to foreigners and children. Unfortunately for any such neat theory, things begin to complicate immediately when we take other examples than nouns into consideration. What do we point at to explain the meaning of "behind", or "frankly", or "emphasize"?
It was grappling with questions like that what led Ludwig Wittgenstein to his later days reflections on verbs, words, languages, and meanings, as recorded mainly in his Philosophical Investigations. This is not a book anyone will confidently claim to entirely understand. Wittgenstein never made that much effort to be particularly lucid either, but even more than that, this text is a good example of form closely reflecting the subject matter: pursuing his thinking about language to places which no one had ever trod before him forced Wittgenstein, as it were, to abandon any idea of classical organization of argument, its systematic gradual build-up in the course of flowing paragraphs connecting up to chapters. We do not find any structure of that sort in Philosophical Investigations. As if thinking too far and too deep about language and about how come something means something for us, disrupted a delicate uncertain balance on which the possibility of language and understanding had heretofore so innocently rested. What awaits a reader of Investigations instead are loosely related short statements – even aphorisms – standing on their own in their lonely independence and stubbornly resisting editors' attempts to impose on them a unity of a single purpose, heading or chapter. This has the fascinating effect that almost no two readers of Investigations will agree on what it is that Wittgenstein is saying here, but all will agree that he is saying something really important.
It is perhaps not necessary for a reader to attempt an all out frontal attack at Philosophical Investigations as a whole. Most of the aphoristic propositions in it provide plenty of food for thought on their own and many of the problems sketched out here in a few lines have become notorious starting points of extensive treatments and controversies. The theory of language games or the argument of impossibility of private rule-following – both taking their origin from Philosophical Investigations – certainly deeply influenced all subsequent thinking on the subject of reference and meaning. After Investigations, language will never be sufficiently accounted for as a representation of some objectively existing outside world.
In the first volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer was not working on a mirror-theory of language confined to the "reflection-of-objective-reality" either. But his neo-Kantian project is obviously very much distinct from anything Wittgenstein aims at. Far from being a mere reflection of an outside world, the "symbolic forms" of language and symbols/signs in general, are the foremost medium which to an important extent actively creates and awards meaning. So far so good. But although careful of his phrasing, Cassirer appears to be presenting a basically evolutionary scheme of development of languages worldwide. He seeks to uphold a Kantian notion of universally valid categories of judgement by showing how those correspond to forms empirically manifest in grammar; and how language expression evolves from the stage of particular depiction of concrete spatial and temporary distinctions toward the stage of designating pure syntactic and logical relations. Man's body in space and in its relation to things close and distant provides the fundamental reference point from which the dichotomies of "here-there", "this-that" refine into the categories of personal pronouns "I-you" and ultimately into the grammatical and logical concepts of "subject-object", while awareness of the flow of time provides an impetus for developing the tense structure of verbs and the "subject-predicate" formula.
Although he relies on secondary treatments regarding non-Indo-European languages, drawing particularly heavily on Wilhelm von Humboldt, Cassirer's point here is clearly meant to be a philosophical analysis of generic linguistic forms as types of forms of "knowing" and "having meaning", and not a comparative analysis of respective language groups. In spite of that a reader seems to be left with impression that although all language forms inherently contain the tendency to express pure epistemological relations in their various grammatical forms, still, for Cassirer, the grammatical constructions of developed modern Indo-European languages (Cassirer's synonymous term actually is "Indo-Germanic") are the ones most advanced on the journey toward expressing pure relations not facts (and therefore epistemologically most promising): the moment the verb "to be" in a language ceases to denote only the particular occurrence in time and space (like "be at home") or existence (like "to be or not to be"), and makes possible a pure expression of predicative relation in its function as copula in nominal phrases (like "A is B"), philosophy of judgement first becomes logically and grammatically possible with the expression of "pure being" this linguistic development brings. Such development is more or less explicitly contrasted with the absence of such pure grammatical forms in languages of primitive tribes and nations or those of other language groups (Japanese gets little mention, although Uralo-Altaic languages or Chinese are dealt with a bit more extensively). Although it was not Cassirer's aim, his argument seems to imply the conclusion that particular grammatical forms of modern European languages are at the same time the forms best suited to universally valid categorial cognition.
Let us bring in Wittgenstein for just one more brief turn to venture a response: "Over again we hear repeated that philosophy is not making any progress, that we are still dealing with the same problems ancient Greeks were already engaged with. Those who say that, however, do not know the reason why this must be so. It is so because our language has remained the same and tempts us ever to ask the same questions. As long as there is the verb "to be", which appears to us to function in the same way as the verbs "to eat" and "to drink" …, as long as there is talk of the flow of time and expanse of space etc., people will always run into and fixedly stare at the same mysterious obstacles which no account can probably explain away."

Posted by david at 06:59 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2006

House Defied & Architecture Revolted Against

“There is no manifesto, no architectural debate, no doctrine, no law, no planning, no ideology, no theory, there is only – skyscraper…” – Rem Koolhaas

In the view of most of us non-specialists, architecture probably can be vaguely summed up as a field of human activity dealing with the problem of how to build a house, while its more sophisticated sibling, urban design, would consequently tackle the issue of how to arrange houses into a city. To find out just how much of an oversimplification such laic view may represent, therefore, it may be instructive to make an entirely non-expert excursion into the field, to discover how the practitioners of the seemingly simple subjects of architecture and urban design themselves conceive of their subject matter. After all, to the extent that we find ourselves in the position of urban dwellers, we cannot help being daily users and witnesses of the feats of urban design and construction. We had better care to know.

Rem Koolhaas, Dutch founder of the OMA/AMO office for metropolitan architecture, and famous unorthodox rebel of contemporary architecture, or certainly of thinking about architecture, met the fate of many an unorthodox rebel in being made into a great classic. A respected figure of international renown, he might be familiar to Japanese audiences for his enthusiastic engagement with the challenges presented by the mind-boggling growth of the many megalopolises in the Far East region. At a public lecture in Tokyo earlier this year, Koolhaas bluntly declared that in face of the speed, density, and scale of expansion East Asian urban centres are undergoing, all of the neatly accumulated western experience which informed most classical urbanism is simply irrelevant. He has repeatedly criticised "architects" for enclosing themselves inside their expert vocabularies and preconceived notions of what architecture “is”, and has himself consciously posed equally as a public intellectual actively involved with the social, economic, and political contexts of contemporary urbanism.

Yet all that started decades ago with the book, which has since been twice reprinted in its Japanese version under the above title, distinctly tamer than the English original: "Delirious New York - A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan" (first published 1978). Anyone who so wishes can actually successfully read this lengthy essay as an insightful enquiry into the architectural history of that self-conscious modern icon: the island of dreams and nightmares, which no decent monster, no alien invasion, no apocalyptic catastrophe of the 20th century cinematographic imagination can possibly fail to choose for backdrop. But “Delirious New York” is completely serious about being a manifesto. At second sight it becomes obvious that the historical narrative serves the author as a pretext for releasing upon his reader a project of his own: to formulate the principles of the hidden doctrine, ideology, philosophy, embodied in the growth, structures and motions of the soaring city. Koolhaas’ language balances on the edge between the matter-of-fact informative tone of historical narrative and outbursts of colourful associative energy which might perhaps suitably be called poetry. And from his provocative stanzas a vision of a living entity does emerge: a passionate, unpredictable, chaotic, bustling creature of Manhattan with a personality of its own.
In 1811, a committee named to regulate the “final and conclusive” occupancy for Manhattan lays out The Grid: projecting on an as yet relatively empty island the fictitious lines of 155 east-west non-existent streets and 12 north-south non-existent avenues the commissioners predicted for all times the shapes and volumes of yet unbuilt houses for often yet unborn populations. Another crucial development came in 1870s with Elisha Otis’ invention of The Elevator, when the city, released at last from the ground level, feverishly started exploring the potential of endless vertical multiplication of its surface area: and the skyscraper was born and the skyline of towers.
The limited land closed off irrevocably by the two arms of ocean and Hudson river invites the rationale of economy and Manhattan will be perceived as a child of utilitarian polemic of how to make the best use (and largest profit) of the available surface. However the author ever seems to suggest that while such view may be superficially correct, there are much deeper and less controllable forces at work under the guise of maximization of utility: a chaotic, disorganized explosion of accumulated powers latent in growing urban masses and supplying Manhattan with its lifeblood, permanent state of crisis and congestion.
It is indeed one of the most prominent features of the author’s vision – for vision it indeed is, hardly an argument – that there is always at the bottom of modern urban experience an unresolved tension between rational attempts at a radical and definitive solution to the state of crisis which the city is in, and a subconscious awareness that the state of crisis is the city itself. That the rush, congestion and permanent crisis represent an inseparably defining moment of modern urbanism. While Koolhaas identifies in the emblematic Manhattan the state of crisis as the fundamental modus of modern metropolitan experience, he refuses to apply to such discovery any moral standards, he refuses to start with identifying such crisis as a problem to be solved, and indeed seems rather to enthusiastically embrace the vision of burgeoning chaos as a source of life-giving creative energy. This is the spirit in which he guides the reader through symbolic nodal points where major architects, investors and projects encountered the subliminal forces of the city: the Rockefeller Center, the Downtown Athletic Club, the Empire State Building are not portrayed as venerable solid monuments, but come to life as dramatic events.
It is not entirely easy to see what would be the program of contemporary urbanism on such terms in the world according to Koolhaas, though the fire he turns against such iconic representatives of architectural modernism as Le Corbusier perhaps suggests what it would not be. It would be anything else but the clear-cut cartesian blueprint of Le Corbusier’s otherworldly Radiant City, an antithesis of Manhattan which the latter disparagingly described as “city of panic” and compared to jungle. The closing part of the essay’s is a dramatically construed depiction of Corbusier’s private war with Manhattan where he at least partially manages as an act of revenge to finally cut across The Grid and impose on Manhattan his concept of UN headquarters. For a more positive expression of Koolhaas’ own urbanism we may ultimately need to turn to his own realized projects. For now, we may walk through our urban jungles with more perceptive eye.

Posted by david at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2006

A Postmodern Tomb of Ideologies or a Toilsome Path to Mother's Grave?

“Man is born in chains. In chill – he gropes his path to decay. Without end he drags the cart of evil through history. Heavy wagons along muddy roads.”
– Patrik Ouředník. Opportune Moment, 1855

Unlike his famous emigré compatriot Milan Kundera, Patrik Ouředník – another Czech writing from France, where he exiled himself in the 1980's – remained largely unnoticed, until his short fiction-documentary Europeana came out in 2001. The eerily unorthodox overview of the twentieth century has by now been translated into 20 languages and made something of a hit in places as historically disparate as Hungary and the Netherlands. In author's own words, if a book like that sells more than a couple of thousand copies, there is almost certainly a misunderstanding involved. But might there not be a real passion, on the part of those who lived through at least part of it, to try an grasp that strange century by any as yet untried means?

Far from a history by any standards, Europeana is somewhere between the stream of consciousness and the Macbeth's ‘tale told by an idiot’: a semi-absurd sequence of facts, quotations, anecdotes, and margin captions meant to evoke a history textbook, it stubbornly refuses to conform to any hierarchy of events by making no distinction between the (allegedly) major currents of the times and insignificant incidents accompanying them. That everything in the narrative is factually correct only adds to the chilling effect.

It is language that features prominently: slogans and rallying cries and newspaper headlines and contemporary ditties and lists of clichés, the uses of words create the portrait of the strange and rushed century. Ouředník’s editorship of the first dictionary of Czech slang and argot, compilation of another dictionary of the history of usage of biblical terms in everyday speech, his own experimental poetry, translations between French and Czech, essay "A la recherche de la langue perdue", all point to a concern with language, its uses, twists, distortions, genres, ideological manipulations, misappropriations. But then this might be something central-Europeans are somehow fatally predisposed to.

The latest novel by Ouředník, now published simultaneously in Czech and French versions, deals with another moment in history: the ‘opportune moment’ to create a new world overseas which for many Europeans came in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the revolutionary enthusiasm still vivid in memory but already frustrated enough by realities of the diseased Old World.

The book consist of two distinct parts corresponding to two types of text, both first-person narratives; the first a letter, the second a (possibly fragmentary) diary. There is no bridging unity of a preface or afterword provided by the author himself. The letter is apparently written by an aged and disappointed man, an Italian and passionate anarchist, an ideologue and organizer of the movement of sorts, educated, but hostilely sceptical toward the course of western civilisation. Writing to a woman he once loved and surveying his ending life, he concentrates on his failed project – half a century ago – of founding in Brazil a free settlement Fraternitas for volunteeering European enthusiast revolutionaries and poor commoners. The diary, then, is a record kept by one of the motley group of participants in the project back in 1855, and also the only extant trace and memory of the settlement.

The voice of the diary has an uncouth ring of unsophisticated naivety, as it ranges indiscriminately events, quotes of speeches and bits of conversations, rarely attempting to establish any order among them. The only feeble suggestion of some sort of connection between the ideal of anarchist socialism and the actual practice of lives of the settlers are random transcriptions in the diary of ever more hopelessly and hollow sounding pronouncements on nature of man or freedom, on the promised land, on liberation from the shackles of civilisation, made by the various leading figures in the group: an authoritarian Zeffirino, French communist Gorand, an eternal nonconformist Decio.

While the same effect employed in Europeana produced an atmosphere of scepticism bordering on cynicism, the Opportune Moment is more than an explosion of yet another utopian ideology which proposes to build up a new world and either crash-lands upon encountering the everyday reality of human natures, or transforms itself into a deadly tyranny over bodies and minds in an attempt to channel the resisting world into predestined courses. The Opportune Moment is arguably more profound, or at least more complex here: the idiot’s tale is not a total judgement over the meaning of history; here it has behind it a real human face and a painful path through a real life. There is an honest desperation and hope in the hopeless search for a better world.

Language of the diary gets stuck and runs in circles as Fraternitas approaches its final crisis. Time seems to stop as consecutive entries now all bear the same date, 15th October 1855, and the same sentences keep reappering in increasingly disorderly fashion, creating an effect rather like that of the Theatre of the Absurd, the collapse of meaning emergent in plays by Ionesco, Beckett, or Havel. With the end in sight a rarely personal record of a dream appears: diarist’s mother rises up from her deathbed and leads him to the cemetery where she sinks into the ground telling her son they will now have chance to see each other often. Where Europeana led us to a postmodern scribble-covered tombstone of an absurd century, Opportune Moment leaves us by the side of mother’s grave. And that’s perhaps still a humanly more hopeful alternative.

Patrik Ouředník. Příhodný okamžik, 1855. Torst, 2006
–––. Instant propice, 1855. Editions Allia, 2006
(English translation under title of Opportune Moment, 1855, due to appear shortly)
–––. Europeana. A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. Dalkey Archive Press, 2005
–––. Europeana. Une brève histoire du XXe siècle. Editions Allia, 2004

Posted by david at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2006

Men and Women of Letters: Samuel Richardson's Epistolary Sensibility

Samuel Richardson. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
⎯⎯. Clarissa Harlowe, or The History of a Young Lady

"My talent is scribbling; and I the readier fell into this freedom, as I found delight in writing..."
Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe
Thursday Afternoon, April 13 [Vol.2, Letter IX]

When Samuel Richardson (1689—1761), an honourable printer of London (official publisher for the House of Commons, among others), published his first novel-in-letters and became famous for it, he not only established a literary genre, but became probably the first Englishman to gain renown abroad purely for his literary achievement. His Pamela was almost immediately translated into all major continental languages and was to all effects a genuine early world best-seller. For some reason, however, today's reader does not find Pamela or Clarissa quite as exciting and these early samples of fiction in prose have gradually gathered dust as objects of pedantic interest of literary historians. This may partly be so, because their role as thrilling entertainment for wide commoner readerships has in the meanwhile been taken over by other genres and different media. (And is it really so inconceivably more difficult to persist over hundreds of pages of an epistolary novel than it is to endure dozens of instalments of a TV soap-opera?) Part of such change in taste, however, might perhaps be attributed to a difference in perception of the relative importance of the letter and the act of letter-writing itself between our age and Richardson's.

When Richardson chose the epistolary form for his first novel — which in terms of plot is basically a variation on the Cinderella-theme — he was not opting for a formal experiment. On the contrary, he quite naturally reached out for a form of narrative which was the most familiar to himself and majority of his readers. Richardson himself had already earlier in his life compiled a sort of manual of letter-writing — this noble art of cultivated interaction providing channels of expression to the commercial urban society. Yet, the letters written by his heroes are certainly more than a collection of recycled clichés. The epistolary narrative contains plenty of direct speech alongside faithful rendition of thought and feeling, and many scenes have a dramatic thrill unhampered by the form, like some pitched exchanges between Clarissa and her suitor, and finally raper, the libertarian Lovelace, or the tense debate on the verge of a duel between the latter and Clarissa's cousin, colonel Morden.

Letter becomes not only a form of the narrative, but also its crucial subject matter and often a focal point of the plot. The act of letter-writing itself is depicted; letters serve as solemn evidence of one's true and unrehearsed intentions; letters are intercepted and different letters forged to deceive the addressee; letters are written about other letters; parcels of correspondence are exchanged as powerful evidence of events and states of mind; copies of letters are meticulously taken for future reference; and letter-writing becomes suspect as an activity potentially politically charged in the sense of threatening the borderlines of class. In the centuries to follow, the type of literary fiction which renounces the omniscient disembodied narrator and turns to multiple voices of situated storytellers emerged out of concern about ambiguity of truths and parallel versions of reality. More modernists followed Joyce and Virginia Woolf into the minds of storytellers who were at the same time participants in the story. So does Faulkner or Lawrence Durrell. Even a Tanizaki, in Kagi, shakes the reader's comfortable faith in an unproblematic unity of narration and reality, when he lets him see the stage of events only through diary notes of the characters, which might but well might not give an honest and undistorted report of facts.

Richardson's aim in employing the multiple narrative voices was not to render truths ambiguous. His world appears still to hold together by the categorical visions of chaste and pious virtue opposed to licentious vice, although the unshakeable validity of the same visions has already begun to crumble under the sceptical eye of his contemporary Daniel Defoe, say in the cynical view from below of a Moll Flanders, which seems to offer a rather unflattering picture of strong social and class conditioning latent behind many moral categories.
But we are in an England of rising sensibilities, in an England of emerging commercial empire, an England whose Scots have just asserted that morality does not equal subjecting crude passions to noble reason, nay, that it has a lot to do with cultivating of emotions in civilized social intercourse. And Richardson's novels, not even the happy-ending Pamela with the heroine's virtue ultimately rewarded by marriage with Squire B., to say nothing of the much more complex and longer Clarissa with her virtue asserted to the point of self-sacrifice full of forgiveness, amount to more than simple illustrations of catechism. Conventional chaste virtue is exalted, but so is the pure feeling of uncorrupted heart, and still alongside those it is accomplished manners and mastery of complex patterns of accepted behaviour what provides the standard for practical evaluation of individuals.

To the extent that they offer thrills of excitement to the readers, enticing their imagination to recreate the realities implied by the words, Richardson's novels are unmistakable children of the age of sensibility, regardless of their ostensible moralist bend. The same is manifest in a slightly earlier sample of roughly contemporary prose written for wide audience: in the first decade of Richardson's, Defoe's, Hume's and Rousseau's century, Addison and Steele publish their famous periodical The Spectator, which at times enjoys a circulation of an impressive 3000 copies. Frequently, the contributions take the form of letters, authored by Mr. Spectator himself, in response to enquiries written by readers. Ostensibly committed to moral cultivation of the general public, the Spectator does not unswervingly stick to the course of moral upbraiding. Describing, in one issue of 1711, Plato's commendably persuasive and morally elevating notion of hell, the author proceeds to illustrate his point by a story brimming with mischievously provoking eroticism of Boccaccian proportions. In Plato's underworld, Spectator explains, the voluptuous and lustful souls have to go on suffering their burning desires for which there is no gratification, like king Tantalus they must forever reach out for fruits which escape their grasp, and thirst for water which dries up the moment they bend to drink. Desires can sentence us to the same kind of suffering in this world, too, the author goes on to argue. Promptly presented is a fictitious letter by a French gentleman who, having courted two ladies simultaneously, was taken terrible vengeance upon by them when they swaddled him up so he could not move and made him spend a night with both of them in the same bed, the truly tantalizing effects of such torture described in excitingly vivid detail clearly exceeding all requirements of the moral purpose of the story, indeed, presumably undermining such purpose altogether.

The ironic contradiction presumably provides an answer to itself. The sensibilities of the first commercial century inevitably consider themselves superior in cultivation and civilization to the stark medieval images of austere chastity and hell's horrors. The mind of this early modernity needs to embrace both the Boccaccian erotic innuendo and thrill of imagined debauchery on the one hand, and the social codes of conformity, restraint and pious virtue on the other. Social appreciation of wit and sophistication requires one to be master over both sides of experience; and to restrict oneself merely to the aloof ascetic virtue carries a distinct tint of obsoleteness. A concept of manners, which makes its unobtrusive appearance in moral and political thought of Hume and other Scots, might represent a tool for such impossible synthesis. It is precisely the civilized cultivation of sensibility, accompanied by a relatively conservative commitment to existing social norms as embodying cumulated experience what characterizes not only the Scottish Enlightenment, but also the literary achievements of Samuel Richardson. Read as a portrayer of manners, incidentally, he is much more readable than as a puritan moralist obsessed with dread of sex.

Posted by david at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)