A rant on leftist naivity - Paul Gilroy

Am reading Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia at the moment. I am tempted to say that Gilroy has a brilliant ability to make the debates about multiculturalism break open and reveal their underbelly. However, I find him to be a bit naive when he starts to critique the "civilizationism" of the US. This is because Gilroy celebrates the communitarianism of "ethnic groups" vis-a-vis the individualism of "skin heads" in the example he gives*, while critiquing the products of communitarianism in US - nationalism, global arrogance, etc. I can't figure out how we can celebrate friends without having enemies? This is the Schmitt problem. I think Gilroy sees it. I think his answer is to have nonnational group formations, the first taste of which were feminist and proletariat internationalisms. I find it difficult not to see Christianity and Islam as just older versions of such internationalisms. Which leads me to believe that he is working within a paradigm of civilizationalism without recognizing, or theorizing the way to stunt the growth of such civilazations before they try to take over the world. But don't we need the world to be taken over? I think the only way to keep multinationals at bay is to find some way to take over the world. I don't want some evil leader to do this, but we certainly need to extend the rule of law so far that one cannot evade it by hiring sweatshop workers to make whatevers for horrible pay only to ship this back to a place where their relative economy permits exploitation legally!. Legally. Legal illegality! That is what we have now. Clearly I am juxtaposing small L national law with some type of metaphysical Law, but mustn't we appeal to this? Otherwise we will have exploitation in the name of fashion ad infinitum (indeed we already have it). Communitarianism is the answer but writ large it involves nationalism, defense, civilization. We must face it that when we project ourselves collectively, which we cannot avoid (no one lives in a nameless town), it has the potential to get either ugly or beautiful, but it is the nature of the ethos of the communitas that will fix this. Not a denial of the very species of community. We will never avoid collective identity. If we do we are entirely atomistic, having minimal commonality with our neighbour. I don't want that place. I think I lived in it in Ottawa, the hell-hole of the entire world, where the Canadian apartheid of rich and poor is the Queensway: north of it lies little Italy and China town, as well as dirt poor white land (at least until you get to down town - the desert of capitalism); south of it lies the Glebe where houses sell for multiple millions. People drive beemers and VWs and Suvs. People recycle. Still - Still - this is the inequality of our capital (pun intended) and our liberal vision. Apartheid divides along race, liberalism divides on money and race. Is that any better?

* Gilroy's example:
One man interviewed by the Daily Mirror challenged the civilizationist folklore about the sources of the conflict [between skin-heads and Englishmen of Asian descent] with an important and neglected explanation of how the hatred directed by whites against Asians had come about: "'I'll give you an example of why they [the whites] dislike us so much,' he said, fingering a top-of-the-range Nokia mobile phone. 'It's jealousy. See, we start working young - I started helping my dad at 11 - and whenever we buy anything we pay cash. At 17 we have saved enough for our first car. It might cost two thousand pounds. A coupe of years later we sell it and buy one for five thousand, and by twenty one we've got a brand new BMW.'" (Postcolonial Melancholy 25).

I applaud the communitarianism, but I stick to my objections above.

Here are some lectures on the Canadian Economy by James Laxer.

More Foucault

"Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer of to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in the division and this distance" (Foucault, Rabinow 112)

"the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author - or, rather, constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discourses - is directly derived form the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the text at it disposal..." (110 Foucault then explains St. Jerome's method for determining authorship and creating subjectivity)

What is an author?

Foucault. What to do with Foucault? You can't live with him; you can't live without him. I first read "What is an Author" about 5 years back, and I didn't find it memorable. I think I was getting Foucault through the teeth those days. Foucault was Law, and so I wanted to diminish his hold on me, claiming he knew nothing. Although I did think he knew something.

Rereading "What is an Author" I find that my mind is ignited with insight. I don't agree with the zero-sum positions that F often urges - such as the dissolution of the subject or the complete negation of nature through the elevation of discourse, discipline, and discursively created subjectivity - however, I do think that discourse legitimates modes of being and thinking and to that end I value F very highly. What I will not do is idolize him.

Here is a passage that struck me while I was rereading this afternoon:

"Discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, “sacralized” and “sacralizing” figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act – an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illict, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership." (Rabinow 108)

This reminded me: I was reading Greenblatt's bio of Shakespeare, Will and the World this summer, and I was struck by the violence of the theological battles in Renaissance/Reformation England. Greenblatt claimed that Shakespeare was secular because it was the only way he could survive (I'm not sure I agree). He came from a house of Catholic sympathizers while Elizabeth I was busy killing Jesuits (who were trying to overthrow her rule). Greenblatt describes the arrest of Edmund Campion SJ in his chapter, "The Great Fear". Pope Gregory xiii proclaimed that the assassination of Elizabeth I would not be a mortal sin (99)and Campion, amongst others took him seriously. By 1585 it was treason to be a Catholic priest in Britain (100). Greenblatt remarks "Saints, Shakespeare understood all his life, were dangerous people" (110). While he was free Campion claimed that he could defeat any Protestant that wanted to debate him on theological matters. After he was arrested, two Protestant theologians were brought before him and challenged him to a debate. They were Alexander Nowell, the dean of St. Paul's, and William Day, the dean of Windsor. Greenblatt narrates:

"The theologians, seated at a table piled with books and notes, were celebrated debaters. At another table two other distinguished but hardly neutral figures, William Chalk, the preacher of Gray's Inn, and William Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, were poised to act as notaries. The prisoner would get his debate, but the government would set the stage and the rules.
Campion objected that he had had not time to prepare, had not notes and no books, and that he had been subjected to "hellish torture". ...Campion accepted - as he had no choice but to accept - the grossly unfair terms of the debate. He then proceeded, by what appears to be near-universal consensus, to annihilate his opponents." (115)

In the weeks that followed the Crown staged three more debates with fresh scholars, at which point, (with a little help from torture) the Crown declared victory. They then hanged Campion, then quartered him and boiled the pieces of him in a vat (all public of course):

"One of the bystanders, a Protestant named Henry Walpole, was close to the place where the hangman was throwing the pieces of Campion's body into a vat of boiling water. A drop of the water mixed with blood splashed out upon his clothes, and Walpole felt at once, he said, that he had to convert to Catholicism. He left for the Continent, became a Jesuit, and was sent back to England, where he too was arrested and executed as a traitor. Such are the works of saints and martyrs." (115-6).

In this context, Foucault's claims make sense (well maybe not in this context but in a context that remembered this context well - perhaps during the Enlightenment). I'm also reminded of John Berger's claim that painter began to sign their work during the renaissance (Ways of Seeing). It would be interesting to compare the persecution of authors with painters. Is written truth much more troublesome than visual? Perhaps the iconoclast controversies previously dealt with this topic.

Celebrity look alike thing.

I think I did pretty well. I've got some real charmers on my list - Forrest Gump, Garfunkel, the brat from TV - Malcolm... I'm surprised I wasn't matched up with Will Smith.



It gets even better when I try the second time - Dick Cheney and ....wait for it....
LARRY DAVID!!!! Does it get any better then that?

Reading Cicero

So I picked up a collection of Cicero's works a while back. It was a used philosophy text. I got it for two fifty. I was on the way home and I was about to stop off at the local book store to pick up a copy of On Friendship for about twenty bucks, when I thought, why not wait, see if I have it at home. Lord knows you have other things to read if not.

Low and behold, On Friendship, On Duties and other key texts by Cicero were mine for 2.50.

So I find Cicero to be a bit folksie. His wisdom seems down home, common sense, though I imagine that it is actually a little uncommon. Here was the quote the hit me with a bit of laughter:

"Friendship...the finest equipment that life can offer". About 25 pages in.

I'm also reading book ten of Augustine's Confessions, Hugh McClennan's The Watch that Ends the Night, and a book of short stories I am reviewing called The Shadow Side of Grace. I'm starting to hate short story writers. I find them to be a bit pretentious. Now the best SS writers are great, but the bad ones like to throw characters at you so fast your head is spinning, then they like to play games with erasing details you would like to know (they are fascinated with the fragment - seems a bit derivative of the news clip to me), and pulling plot twists out of their asses. I'm starting to believe the short story is for people too impatient and daft to write novels. Trust me, if you are tempted to write a short story, put the pen down now! If you can put it down, it was probably for the best, if you can't then more power to you, just give me no more then four new characters per page. And don't stroke your genius; if you're tempted it probably means you don't have much.

Infernal Affairs and The Departed

I saw both of these films some time ago. I watched Infernal Affairs because I wanted to go see The Departed. I fear that I may spoil both films for those who haven't seen them. I'll tread lightly. It struck me this morning while cleaning the bathroom that The Departed might be Scorsese's apology for the just war, and I do believe his grammar is Catholic. This is all based on the ending, which is the biggest change from Infernal Affairs. The ending in IA is much different. And its difference seems to be resigned to something, not to apathy, but to perhaps something more Buddhist - all life is suffering perhaps. But The Departed seems to avoid this ending. Scorsese seems to claim that all life is suffering but this doesn't mean you must resign yourself too it.

Does he, however, perpetuate suffering or limit it, if only slightly?
This is the eternal question. Is pacifism the refusal of justice or the only just act? Does pacifism ever act violently on behalf of peace?

When we frame The Departed thus, we find Nicholson falling into the role of Satan, DiCaprio as Christ - especially in his suffering - and Wahlburg as Angel of Wrath, the Wrath of God. Interesting to see that DiCaprio has an absent father, who's legacy follows him everywhere he goes in Boston. Ah the Christian metanarrative, narrative, mythos...whatever.

FYI: A brief, simplistic, yet good account of Just War Theology. One will notice very quickly that America's war of terror (thank you Borat) does not fill the requirements. Might I add that these requirements are from the era of what we call "The Dark Ages". I think we are safe to assume that we are in the "Even Darker Ages" as long as we don't live up to (or supersede) the best of the ethical norms such an age produced.

Mean Boy (2006) Part Duex : Coady on New Brunswick

So I finished Mean Boy around midnight past, and then I woke myself up in a coughing fit at around two. I needed a throat lozenge, which don't go away quickly, so I picked up a book of short stories I am reviewing for Books in Canada (by the way, my last review is going to be on the March cover "Newfoundland in Letters" - 2500 words). The book is called The Watermelon Social, by Elaine McCluskey. It is published by one of the snaziest small presses in all of Canada, Gaspereau Press in NS, so it is a great aesthetic experience just to be around this book. Opening the cover though, I must say, the experience dims. And in this dim light, Coady's brilliance hovers over me like a sublime thing (Wordsworth's Mountain in the Prelude). Damn, Coady was in control of her writing in Mean Boy. The text was more sparse then that of Strange Heaven, which was decorated like a rococo palace with Catholicism. Mean Boy is crisp. She is able to twist and turn around the social world she has created, she also does backflips with the whole writing about writing thing. The book is ironic to the core, yet Coady's irony avoids the dark nihilism that hovers around so much of postmodernity (especially in pop-rock from NY). What bothers me about Mean Boy is that it is not as rich a text as Strange Heaven, but I would say this is because of two things: Coady no longer lives in the Maritimes, so she writes with a stale pallet (though she is still sharper than I); she has attempted to push herself beyond what she knew in terms of setting - we're no longer in Cape Breton Toto.

This last point is significant. Who, besides the great David Adams Richards, choses New Brunswick as a setting for fiction? Coady has done just that. And NB is no walk in the Lake District, let me assure you, especially the Tantramar Marsh area, where her book is set (Sackville). Tantramar has barely risen from the ocean. It is a mud flat with some golden sprouts of wild hay and more radio towers then you can safely count while driving by on the THC (I mean TCH, though the last is true as well). The British would treat NB with no more nobility then they would Lancaster. All they used it for was a shipyard - a place to find masts for tall ships. This is why the forest of NB looks like freshly grown stubble (well perhaps the Irvings have something to do with this). NB is a woodlot (a woodlot that I have a fondness for, mind you).

Here's Coady on Moira, Jim's wife:

Larry: "You told her to fuck off?"
Slaughter puts his sandwich down on the table between us.
"You ever meet his wife? Oh, yeah, you met here out at their place that time with the dumplings. She's a complete bitch, right?"
"Well," I balk. I want to explain to Slaughter that Moria is not actually a complete bitch. Slaughter is from suburban Ontario and so he wouldn't understand. Moira is a New Brunswick woman, I want to explain - but that doesn't work because I've met women like Moira in PEI as well. Moira is a rural person, is the best way I can think to describe it. She doesn't put on airs. Moira would never have been exposed to airs in her life, is the thing - and if she ever was, she would dismiss them immediately.
As airs.
"She's just - she's harsh," is what I end up saying. "She's blunt."
"She's a douchebag," Slaughter contends... (271)

Moira in action, hosting a party:

It's hard not to watch the way Ruth watches Moira. She sits on the couch beside Dekker, draped in a shawl the colour of dried blood over a burgundy velvet dress. She looks like mulled wine. She is the best-dressed person in the room.
"Can I help you with anything?" she said to Moira upon our arrival.
Moira, in a pair of floppy-assed jeans, seemed physically unable to look upon Ruth. Her eyes kept darting toward and then bouncing away from her.
"I don't plan on doing a goddamn thing," she huffed. "Beers in the fridge, food and wine's on the table. If anyone needs anything else they can talk to that one there." And jabbed her cigarette at Jim, crouched by his record player. "I been cutting fuckin' vegetables all afternoon." She held up her hands to show us where she had nicked herself in the process.
"Well, its very nice to meet you," said Ruth after a glance at Dekker.
The comment met with Moira's back.
"Don't tease the dog." she was yelling, hustling her assless way across the room.
"She's so thin," murmured Ruth. (343-4)

Moira on the way students treat Jim:

"The bunch of you," Moira complains, "just treat him like King Shit. I don't know what in hell is wrong with you. Your husband, too," Moira turns abruptly on Ruth, who doesn't even flinch, who actually smiles a little [Ruth is Scandinavian - If that explains anything]
"For Christ's sake, that one could be - he could take a crap on your kitchen floor," Moira sputters, turning toward me again. "He could be hitting himself on the head with a hammer saying, how do you like that, now, boys? Whaddya thing about that little trick? And what would you bastards say?"
At this point Moira actually pauses as if I'm going to answer her.
"I don't know," I tell her.
She folds her arms. They remind me of two tree roots woven together above the earth. [how poetic - Coady likes to interject the poetic aspect with Larry - makes him real]
"You don't know," says Moira, turning to Ruth. "He doesn't know."
"Perhaps they would say," offers Ruth in her strange accent, "yes, King Shit. Very Good, King Shit."
For the first time since I met her, Moira laughs. She laughs worse than Ruth. She coughs as she laughs, a smoker's cough, harsh, wet, and red-sounding. Gravel scrapes her windpipe. It makes me want to shrivel up and die.
"Very good, King Shit," caws Moira, smacking Ruth across a velvet thigh. Aren't they just getting along like a house on fire...(356-7)

Well Moira is a minor character, but shit is she sharp. I do believe it is the little local details that Coady taps which make her work universal.