From San Francisco to South Korea on Route 1

As Said argued in Culture and Imperialism, the core of the British Empire and of cultural generally was defined by the literary form of the novel. Though the times have changed and television, movies, and the internet form the definitions of contemporary culture, I have turned to the literary novels of the second half of the twentieth century of South Korea in attempting to acclimate to my new surroundings here in South Korea. As such I found a series of translated novels, published by the Jimoondang Publishing Company of Seoul. One in this series I’ve read thus far is titled Deep Blue Night translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton and published in this series in 2002. The piece was originally published as Gipgo Pureun Bam by Choe In-ho in 1982. This particular work in the series appeals to me because its heroes are on a sojourn through California, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, by way of Route 1 - a trip I have taken well more than a dozen times myself.

The story captivated me by recounting my own experience of traveling from San Francisco to Southern California in a detail I haven’t felt since the first time I took the trip. Choe recounts the way the homes in Carmel hang over the beautiful sands below in a style that moves quickly and leaves no trace of the experience lacking. The tale is wrought with indulgences commonly forbidden in South Korea, such as the use of marijuana. Choe uses these indulgences to emphasize the cultural abyss between South Korea and the U.S., which I have seen and felt in this side of the Pacific. The author transforms the use of marijuana as one of the two obvious metaphors in the story. The characters Jun-ho had left his wife and children behind in Korea before coming to the states, having gotten in trouble for smoking marijuana, and had abandoned Korea for the states in search of a different life. This, coupled with the actual trip itself, outlines a journey for both characters through a couple of years of self searching.

The narrator and voice of reason, tells the story of his friend, a mirror image of himself, except that within the foreign Korean community of Los Angeles his associate and travel companion is of far greater disrepute. The story lends itself to an outline of the feelings of culture shock as transformed into a cultural nationalism itself. For the western reader, the story has several levels of utility. The story outlines at the outset the nature of Confucianism, Korean style, from solidarity to social castigation and deference based upon age, and just reads fluidly.

The expectation of arrival builds towards a conclusion each character begins to approach. Choe writes a tale of life in America as a journey not just into debauchery from the point of view of Korean values, values Choe pens into the narrator's reflections, but into cultural annihilation for the two characters. Choe almost uses the form of the novel as a manifesto of return to Korea. The arrival at Los Angeles eventually no longer represents a conclusion of their journey back to their home there but signifies the desire to return to Korea itself. Choe outlines a journey towards the comforts of ones own culture. In this respect the novel also explains much of the culture of Korean solidarity which I have encountered in my time here. Many of my Korean friends quickly jump to the protection of South Korean culture as a highly valued commodity even as western forms of culture deteriorate existing Korean cultural artifacts. This sentiment has political backing too. Haksoon Yim, the Director of the Department of Policy Development in the Korea Culture and Contents Agency, has written a book entitled The Emergence and Change of Cultural Policy in South Korea, published by Jinhan Book of Seoul in 2003, arguing this point lucidly. Deep Blue Night reads well and appeals to Koreans and Californians as well. It also sketches a cultural encounter between divergent world views and cultural nationalisms increasing in the frequency of their exchanges.

Claude Lefort, 1924-2010

It's October, which must mean that one or more of my French theory heroes has died. This time the bell tolls for Claude Lefort, true relic of a particular France I've learned about and loved.

Though lesser known among Anglophone readers than the post-structuralist superstars of the 80s and 90s, Lefort's intellectual efforts in political theory deserve wider recognition. A student of Merleau-Ponty, Maussian sociology, and a founder of post-Trotskyite council communist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, the early Lefort brought phenomenological tools to bear on some of the major political problems and events of his time. As a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he joined Castoriadis, Lyotard and others in furthering the critique of bureacratic deformation in communist states and workers' movements. Though for a time a contributor to Sartre's Temps Modernes, Lefort bloodied Sartre's nose in a penetrating Leftist critique of "The Communists and Peace". This singled him out early on as an upstart and, possibly, a major contender.

Essentially unmooring himself from Marxism, Lefort went on to make major contributions in the history of political philosophy and the philosophical critique of totalitarianism. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty and Arendt, he theorized democracy as a perpetually shifting, centreless and interminably constituting political field; totalitarianism on this view being an attempt at drawing up final accounts and foreclosing the political as such through total mobilization. Lefort's analysis of actually existing communism and its collapse, however, was nuanced enough to trouble the simplistic notion of totalitarianism bandied about by other political commentators.

Lefort was, in sum, a rigorous Leftist thinker who responded to the general political disillusionment of his generation with sustained critique and searching forays into intellectual history. This made for less sexy fare than Baudrillard's apocalyptic irony and Deleuze's offhanded comments on anal sex, but I think we could all benefit from a close reading of Lefort.

Congratulations to Dr. Young

Mark Young successfully defended his PhD. thesis, 'Intellectual Virtue and the Good: A Theory Concerning the Constitutive Value of Intellectual Character' on September 22, 2010. 

Sure this post is a bit belated, but  Dr. Young stalled on sending me the title of his dissertation until after he had submitted the final version on October 1st.

'Amir Khalid's Views on Muslims in Europe

In the last video blog I addressed the expulsion of Roma in France and showed a clip on Canadian Roma people. Another contentious issue in Europe (and growing in America) is the increasing Muslim community. The popular Islamic Egyptian preacher 'Amir Khalid discusses his views on the realities and solutions to this growing tension. His commentary reveals much about the current situation. It is also interesting to see him give an Islamic response to the backlash against Muslims. Whatever one makes of 'Amir Khalid's views, he gives insight to how Muslims are feeling about their precarious role within Western civilization, Europe particularly.

Continuum's Philosophy Catalogue Now Online

Continuum Books has posted its 2010-2011 philosophy catalogue online. On page 27 you'll find:

Yukio Mishima, "The Sound of Waves"

(Vintage, 1994)

With respect to Mishima, so far I've blogged mostly about the more spectacular aspects of his life, particularly as these are staked out in or reflected by his various novels. I've argued that a work of fiction by Mishima cannot be adequately understood unless one takes into account the larger work of fiction, the larger spectacle, that is Mishima himself. 

The Sound of Waves appears on first blush an exception to this rule. The action takes place postwar on a small Japanese island populated by fishing families. The story concerns a poor but virtuous young fisherman who falls in love with the daughter of one of the island's more well-to-do patriarchs. The burgeoning romance fuels much gossip and ill-will among rivals, as well as many of the island's other inhabitants; the would-be couple seems doomed to unhappiness until certain decisive events and interventions change the course of the story. As in no other novel of his that I've read to date, Mishima's prose is here masterfully spare and controlled. Despite its ostensibly modern setting, the story reads like a timeless folktale and can be digested in a sitting of a few hours.

For all this, I don't think the novel can be chalked up to its regionalism, or to a mere genre exercise. My hunch is that it has a role to play relative to Mishima's larger vision. As I've argued elsewhere, manliness and purity are two of his abiding concerns, and here as elsewhere, the important thing seems less the tale itself as the man and woman he constructs in the telling. Shinji and Hatsue, the fisherman and his beloved, embody the kind of masculine and feminine ideal hinted at (and mourned) in Mishima's other novels. What is more, they embody this ideal unconsciously; through their unthinking strength, modesty, and determination, they stand as anathema to what he considered to be urban postwar Japan's self-devouring, neurotic, superfluous men and women (it is of course a fair question where Mishima himself would fit on this reading).

For this reason, I might be willing to rank The Sound of Waves among the great socialist-realist novels of the last century. But here I need to be more specific: I don't mean to suggest that Mishima's work is socialist in any meaningful sense of the term, and for this reason it should be considered quite apart from e.g. Gladkov's Cement. As I've stated ad nauseum, Mishima's politics were ultra-nationalist and rightist. What the novel has in common with socialist realism is, rather, its reactionary, nostalgic and mythical character (think here also of National Socialist art). Irrespective of the social form for which the fictional new man and new woman are constructed, they are offered with a view to criticising the urban/technocratic bourgeoisie of liberal democracy, and for standing as models to emulate. Mishima's future, in a word, is drawn from the past: the new imperial guard is the timeless stuff of Japanese soil and shore.

Whence the strange feeling the book produces: one gets the impression of being taken on a feel-good journey into a world that has largely disappeared, but where something sinister might be lurking in the corners. Mishima's trademark violence makes an odd but telling appearance early on in the book, when the narrator describes the death of Shinji's father in an American strafing raid. The effect is to suggest that there is no quaint village without its sea of blood and gasoline.

Greek Manuscripts Online

The British Library is making a quarter of its collection of Greek Manuscripts available online. Like Mikhail Emelianov at Perverse Egalitarianism, I think that this is one of the better uses of the digitization of books--  creating increased accessibility to rare texts; or, as he states, delivering "manuscripts to the people."

The collection has been long available to scholars who could afford a trip to the British Library's reading rooms, but not for those who are less likely to already live in the proximity (relatively speaking) or who could not find a prestigious source of funding for such a trip. At the NYT reports:

...curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.

McKendrick said that London could be an expensive place to spend time poring over the Greek texts' tiny, faded script or picking through hundreds of pages of parchment.

"Not every scholar can afford to come here weeks and months on end," he said. The big attraction of browsing the texts online "is the ability to do it at your own desk whenever you wish to do it — and do it for free as well."

The manuscripts can be found at the British Library's site here.

Roma (Gypsies) in Canada

The controversy over France's expulsion of Roma people is still reverberating throughout the world. I thought I'd post a video on Roma closer to home: the Roma of Canada. This video is just a preview of an entire documentary. It's not a bad time for more knowledge about so-called Gypsies to take place. A Roma man says at the end, "I am Roma...Gypsies do not exist."

Sorel on Pessimism, Part 2

This is the first post that discusses topics that I will be addressing in my talk at the Radical Philosophy Association's conference on Violence: Systemic, Symbolic, and Foundational, which takes place November 11-14, 2010 at the University of Oregon.

Last week I finished reading Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1908). In my first post about his work, I could really only suggest that he's a figure who is difficult to place politically (and I don't necessarily mean that as a compliment) due to a particular set of concerns that he ties together within a philosophy of the general strike, in which he appropriates Bergsonian intuition, parts of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals and Marx's Capital. [1] From a biographical standpoint, after the turn of the 20th century Sorel wavers, depending on the moment, somewhere between anarcho-syndicalism and fascism, although his final works focus on William James.

The purpose of this post is to complete my sketch of Sorel's pessimism. As I wrote in the first post, he proposes that pessimism has three primary characteristics:

• First, pessimism refuses to deny the wretchedness of mankind, and the constant threat of pain and suffering.
• Second, "the pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded...and which can only disappear through a catastrophe which involves the whole." As much as he condemns all Marxism after Marx, Sorel takes up the fatalist current that fixated on the iron laws of development.
• Which is why the third element, which he calls the "most fundamental," is the "path towards deliverance." Despite the necessity of catastrophe, the pessimist still proposes a way to end the tyrannies of "wretchedness or of fate." For Sorel, the contemporary form of deliverance with be the proletarian violence of the general strike.

Now our typical image of a pessimist precludes what Sorel calls 'deliverance.' Does not the idea of deliverance suggest the spectre of optimism lurking-- in a telling reversal-- in the shadows? As I've already mentioned, Sorel rejects the comparison of optimism and pessimism, arguing that they have distinct kinds of the metaphysics of morals (and different genealogies). While he doesn't say much about optimism, it's clear that he thinks the metaphysics of optimism rests on the presupposition of progress, that is, it assumes that history is an unbroken development of civilization in a progressive direction. Pessimism, by contrast, recognizes (as he would say) that history takes qualitative leaps through revolution or catastrophe (which in the general strike mean the same thing).

In the rejection of the idea of progress, Sorel is not unique, which makes it important to place him across the spectrum of the critics of necessary historical progress. On the left, I think a good but under-appreciated figure (in this regard) is Marx, because his confidence in proletarian revolution is often mistaken for a Victorian confidence in progress. [2] On the right, the critiques predominantly attack and lament European decadence and nihilism (a civilization which just they argue just can't be as heroic as it should be,  followed with the idea that one particular nation could pull it out of its morass), providing a moral critique. 1930s Heidegger dabbled in this kind of 'search for heroism.'

And Sorel? He argues that only way for the proletariat to avoid the decadence of the bourgeoisie is to reject all its intellectualizing ideology in favor of the "ethics of the producers." The latter holds, first, that all the morality required for proletarian rule can be found in the process of production (after the proletariat seizes the means from the bourgeoisie) [3], and, second, that the path to this deliverance is through the general strike. Rather than organization and education, Sorel argues that the general strike provides the much stronger intuitive forces of myth and heroism, which makes it "the most striking manifestation of individualistic force in the rebellious masses."

The general strike, he argues, is the myth or the "drama" that gives an intuition of the totality of socialist practice. The selfless heroism of proletarian strike contributes both to the ethics of the producers, and to preventing the moral decline of the workers. And this is where it becomes clearer that Sorel is utilizing some critical moves more often associated with the right, or even (later) with fascism. For Sorel, the central problem is to animate the proletariat with an epic sense of heroism and confidence to guarantee its success, so that it does not fall into decline and decadence as did the bourgeoisie, who no longer recognizes its honor and its duty. Hence the secondary purpose of the general strike: "It is here that the role of violence in history appears as of utmost importance; because in an indirect manner it can operate on the bourgeoisie so as to reawaken them to a sense of their own class interests." If so, proletarian violence serves the purpose of dividing society between the last two warring classes, dividing society for the struggle from which the proletariat will emerge victorious.

This argument, however, aestheticizes politics: class struggle takes on epic and mythical proportions as both an economic and moral struggle. The valorization of heroism is, indeed, a slippery slope, and arguing that proletarian violence has the important purpose of reawakening the bourgeoisie to its class interests mistakes the hegemonic weakness of the ruling class for economic weakness; for Sorel should have seen (I realize that this 'should have' has a touch of anachronism) that concessions won by the working class could contribute to cracking the hegemonic bloc of the bourgeoisie. The problem is that Sorel blurs the distinction between the parliamentary socialists and the bourgeoisie in general, even if each group requires different combat tactics (as is clearly shown, for differing reasons, by Luxemburg or Lenin).

Nevertheless, I don't want to suggest that one shouldn't read Sorel. Reflections on Violence, and its emphasis on the spontaneity of the masses, had some influence on Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, and, it must have been at least an implicit reference for Georges Bataille and several figures in French syndicalism and, later, the popular front. Nor can the book be reduced to the outline that I have given here, given his defense of violence (in distinction to state force), and his interest in Bergson. If one of our intellectual tasks is to rethink the revolutionary history, especially the vicissitudes of the debates over spontaneity in struggle, Sorel is an important and challenging figure.

Notes

1. I should also mention that he has the unfortunate and offensive habit of comparing his opponents' intelligences to those he assumes are possessed by non-European peoples.

2. A good example can be found in Capital, Volume 1, when he cites the rates of consumption (not consumer consumption either) in modern domestic industry in order to attack the ideologues of progress, noting that the "advance in the rate of consumption" between 1852 and 1861 in women who produced lace "ought to suffice for the most optimistic advocate of progress."

3. Interestingly, he suggests that art is an anticipation of "the highest form of production," in which future producers innovate because they will not be content with "the unending reproduction of models which are not [their] own."

Rancière on Racism

Wrong Arithmetic has posted a rough translation of Jacques Rancière's recent talk "Racisme, une passion d'en haut" (delivered at a forum on the expulsion of the Roma from France. The title translates as "Racism, a passion from above"). Rancière, like Badiou, is a long time critic of both state racism in France and the so-called left wing intellectuals that support it. Rather than view the expulsion of the Roma as a ploy to exploit racist passions for electoral gain, Rancière notes (I'm using Wrong Arithmetic's translation below) that:

The last racist campaign wasn’t at all organised by the so-called ‘populist’ extreme-right. It was directed by an intelligentsia that claims to be a Leftist, republican and secular intelligentsia. Discrimination is no longer based on arguments about superior and inferior races. They argue in the name of the struggle against ‘communitarianism’, universality of the law and the equality of all citizens before the law and the equality of the sexes. There again, they are not embarrassed by so many contradictions; these arguments are made by people who otherwise make very little of equality and Feminism. In fact, the argument mostly creates an essential relation [l’amalgame requis] for identifying the undesirable: thus the relation between migrant, immigrant, backward, Islamist, chauvanist and terrorist. The recourse to universality in fact benefits its contrary: the establishment of a discretionary state power that decides who belongs and who doesn’t belong to the class of those who have the right to be here; the power, in short, to confer and remove identities.

He concludes that:

a lot of energy has been spent against a certain figure of racism—embodied in the Front National—and a certain idea that this racism is the expression of ‘white trash’ (‘petite blancs‘) and represents the backward layers of society. A substantial part of that energy has been recuperated to build the legitimacy a new form of racism: state racism and ‘Leftist’ intellectual racism. It is perhaps time to reorient our thinking and the struggle against a theory and a practice of stigmatisation, precariatisation and exclusion which today constitutes a racism from above: a logic of the state and a passion of the intelligentsia.