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The Bandarlog should have a rule: for every negative post, you owe two positive ones. So here, following my Philippe Sollers translation (note that I could weasel out of this by noting that I never said anything directly negative about his essay), are some good things about France.
First, Le Monde's number factoids. If you subscribe to LeMonde.fr (and you should -- the subscribers' site is Dao's project!) you get access to all kinds of wonderful extra content. For example, weather reports that are not wholly random. (Just kidding, Dao -- I know the subscribers' forecasts are just as random as anonymous users'.) But seriously, there's this cool Flash thing during December that gives factoids about the number of each day, from 1 to 31. Sounds potentially lame, I know, but I will vouch for them. Example: Did you know that the names of the 8 notes of the scale (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si, do) come from the first syllables of a hymn to St. John the Baptist? Did you know the French equivalent of "Eeny meeny miney moe"? (It starts "Am, Stram, Gram".) All this and more at the Numeriks thingy on LeMonde.fr.
Second, wonderful as LeMonde.fr is, you sometimes want a more straightforward approach to the news. The Figaro is a solid alternative, the established right-of-center paper, but for something even more radically unstodgy, head to 20minutes.fr. 20 Minutes is a free newspaper distributed in the subway and financed by advertising. It's succinct, full of facts, colorful, useful for daily life in Paris, and when they want to say, for instance, "northern", they'll say "du nord", rather than "septentrional", like some newspapers I could mention. I always try to support common sense and enterprise in France; 20 Minutes combines both. Don't let my harping convince you that they don't exist here.
(Moreover, its stories appear to remain freely linkable at their addresses in perpetuity. In my book that's a sine qua non of a "newspaper of record", although the New York Times seems not to agree.)
Hell, while I'm on the topic of common sense, I'll give you a third good thing about France: Nicolas Sarkozy. I follow French politics no more closely than American politics, so I have nothing particularly insightful to say about him, but I think he is somebody Americans should be aware of. Sarkozy is the interior minister of the young center-right government. His overall platform is that laws should be enforced and criminals punished. If that sounds banal or tautological, consider pre-Giuliani New York. Sarkozy is France's Giuliani. He is injecting common sense into a system mired in useless socially-conscious platitudes. Crime has already fallen. By and large, people are thrilled with him, especially after his much-watched TV debate the other day. Even Le Monde's commentators -- from whom you'd expect to hear "Let's examine this simplistic 'crime is bad' mantra from a Heideggerian perspective" -- are gushing.
It's interesting how, when an institution (like the French justice system) is radically, systemically malfunctioning, it takes an outsider to restore common sense. People within the institution have gotten used to the dysfunction, and fear disturbing its equilibrium lest they fall in its internal ranking. When New Yorkers elected a Republican mayor for the first time in I don't know how long, it was a way of admitting that a radical solution needed to be applied from the outside -- nobody in the Democratic machine could overcome the city government's sclerosis. Sarkozy is the same way, especially because, being ethnically Hungarian, he can't be written off as a scion of the reactionary "establishment". Giuliani's Italian background may have helped the same way -- would New Yorkers have welcomed a Rockefeller vowing to reinstate order?
On a smaller scale, Dao has achieved the same thing at her company here in France. Her colleagues are smart and capable, but their way of working was, well, typical of Latin countries. If some French guy had been appointed to put some organization into the organization, they would have said "Who does this guy think he is?" and used typical office-political ploys to put him in his place. But Dao, in addition to being perfect for this sort of job, is a female Asian-American, hence off the radar of internal politics, and is there at the direct behest of the CEO.
... Which is another key thing. Outsiders may be the only ones who will risk shaking up malfunctioning institutions, but that isn't enough. They need to be deputized by whatever or whoever has ultimate power over the system. In the cases of France and New York, it's the voters. In Dao's case it's the CEO.
Who is the ultimate power in the case of American humanities departments? The students' parents. But now we're back to the street-fair paradox: a self-serving minority (charlatan professors) screws the majority (the parents), no quorum of which will take the considerable trouble to stand up for itself. One way to make it stand up for itself is to make it realize how badly it's being screwed. The West Prize that Ben A. proposes is a good way to do this. Ivy League parents do not, I wager, have any idea how far the humanities have fallen. If they hear of Elaine Scarry or Homi Bhabha, they'll probably write them off as anomolies. And even if not, they may think of the humanities as a little fun thrown into leaven the whole wheat of the sciences. Or maybe they don't care what their kids learn at all -- the diploma is their $100,000 ticket to the Establishment, as Ben H. once put it, and if they learn something too, well that's icing on the cake.
But I doubt many parents are quite that cynical -- I think many could be shocked into resenting, if not opposing, the humanities classes they pay for.
My own suggestion, complementary to Ben's, is the Parallel Humanities School. I think we should set these up in Ivy League towns and convince parents to pay us to do the job their $30,000-a-year universities no longer perform.
[12/13/02 14:03] |
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Pretentious nonsense is everywhere; here, for example. But it's uninteresting there, on a University of Idaho website that nobody would ever see except by Google accident. Only when major institutions put their full weight behind pretentious nonsense does it become interesting. Hence our fascination with Homi Bhabha. And hence my translation of Philippe Sollers' front-page Le Monde essay below.
I translated this article because it epitomizes (or rather, because its publication on the front page of France's newspaper of record epitomizes) a trait of France's culture that is totally foreign to America's. I thought Americans might want to see this trait in its purest form. (Memri.org serves a similar purpose for the Middle East: It translates Arab and Israeli local-consumption press, so that we can see what they really think, or at least say among themselves, without the spin one has to suspect taints full-page New York Times advertisements taken out by the Saudi information ministry.)
I don't mean to say that "the French" are epitomized by this article, or even that Le Monde is epitomized by it. I say only that it epitomizes a salient trait of French culture. What trait? I can't say. Just read the article. Probably there is no good way to describe it in English. Now maybe Ben H. will say I'm shirking my duty, but I don't think it matters so much in this case. When Le Monde's commentators say silly things that have some bearing on world events, I'll take the time to comment on them, as I did here. In Sollers' article -- you'll see what I mean -- there is no place to get a handhold. As Ben A. said of the Elaine Scarry article that he nominated for the West Prize, it has an orthogonal relationship to reality.
Philippe Sollers is Le Monde's favorite author, period. That's all you need to know of him, except that the following excerpt is representative of his work. He bears comparison with another adulated Frenchman, Pierre Boulez. Remember, Ben H., when we went to that Boulez concert? He did one of his own pieces, thirty minutes of textbook modernist squawking, at the end of which the audience burst into a simultaneous orgasm of applause. How would you go about doing a line-by-line criticism of that piece? "That squawk is inappropriately followed by this higher-pitched squawk." You can't do it. All you can do is register that you are not a dupe, that you perceive its overall worthlessness, and ask whatever cultural institutions care to listen to please pass over his work for that of more deserving composers.
Just remember as you read this that it is on the front page of France's most prestigious newspaper.
Thought, Year Zero
by Philippe Sollers
It should be dawning on us little by little: it is not "free thinking" that is threatened today, but, more violently, thinking itself. Thinking itself is ceaselessly discouraged, put down, put off, used, and abused away from its origins and its essential possibilities. This phenomenon is not new, it comes from afar, but it took an "information era" to drag it into broad daylight.
The absence of thought is full of little feverish and contradictory thoughts, of justified claims, of founded accusations, of legitimate complaints. It dresses up all its adversaries in the same simplified, reactive, stunted way. It stands up for; it stands up against. It denounces, it fumes, it ruminates, it takes itself to analyze what it mererly relays. It happily rails against "the media", as if television were the cause of flattened brainwaves. It sees enemies everywhere, and not without reason, because they resemble it. Walk into any office anywhere: security, buttons, mice, screens, keyboards. Where are we? Men and women, all day, become prostheses of their communication machines. It comes, it goes, it circulates. Misery grows, abundance too. Raita at Tabla, tabbouleh rasa [a free translation for New Yorkers; original has "table pleine, table rase"]. Think? Yes, of course, we think, we have ideas, beliefs, opinions. Society is in good shape, but could be better. The market rises and falls, its respiration contains us [?]. The Left is not leftist enough, but, thankfully, the Right keeps itself from going further right. Much remains to do to expand human rights. Good is still Good, and Evil Evil.
Think? But what do you call thinking? Here's a thinker: "A single way of thinking, propagating itself more and more and under various forms, is one of the unforeseen and discreet aspects of the domination of the essence of the Technic. This essence, in effect, wants the absolute unity of signification, and because it wants it, it needs it."
From when does this proposition date? From 50 years ago, in 1952. And the name of this prophetic thinker? Here I hesitate, I weigh the trouble that citing his name will cause me. Well okay, yes, it's him, the devil in person, Martin Heidegger, in that admirable book, What Is Called Thinking?
The "single way of thinking" is not what certain hurried journalists have called "pensee unique" [monolithic opinion?]. The "one way" (like a railway) is "the absolute unity of signification". There you have the goal, the engine, the target. Excluded of course as superfluous and slowing are leaps, lurches, nuances, digressions, layered meanings, wordplay beyond the merely entertaining, allusions, useless perspectives, doubts, untimely culture, muffled irony, in short, anything that could derail us.
Terrorists are everywhere, waiting for you at the end of the sentence. Emergency in the transportation system -- a bomb is quickly planted, you're afraid and rightly so, invisible viruses are watching you. The more perfected the machine, the more dangerous the parasites. An identity breakdown threatens you. Your God is in danger, your convictions too, whatever they may be. It's difficult to admit, but you tend not to believe in anything anymore, the future of humanity tires you, disease and pollution roam the land, even death is not what it used to be, nor birth, and sex -- well, let's not even talk about sex, today it's every which way.
Would you be a reactionary? No, you don't have the impression that it was better "before". Before what, anyway? Electricity, telephones, microchips, planes, missiles? No, you are firmly in favor of science, peace, birth control, diversity, women's rights, the right of humanitarian intervention, obligatory secular education. It's the future that worries you, a strange future that no longer corresponds to the past that led up to it. It's Time itself that has lost its familiar rhythm. Recall the famous anecdote of Arthur Cravan visiting Andre Gide and asking the question: "Monsieur Gide, ou en sommes-nous avec le temps?" And Gide pulled out his watch: "Quarter past six." But that wasn't the question. [A play on the word for "time" that I don't understand --Doug.]
Too Simple
I shouldn't have quoted Heidegger, and I know I should also restrain myself from quoting Nietzsche. Their thoughts do not fit with the "one way". They were terribly wrong, we're reminded every day. Heidegger is definitvely Nazi, and Nietzsche misogynist. What we need is wisdom, retooled Buddhism, reinforced humanism. And yet anguish [or just leave it as "angoisse" if you prefer -- certain words really ought to be in French, as Nietzsche knew when he wrote of "ressentiment"] is there, it tells us what exists, namely the strange destiny of the earth as a whole right down to its farthest nooks. "This destiny will shake all human thought at once, and in dimensions along which what today's people take for death throes limited to one sector -- the jumping around of Literature -- will look like a simple detail." Another passage of What Is Called Thinking?
The shaking in question here is not a simple overthrow or collapse; it's not even impossible that it prepares something else, a new horizon, a new rest. So could we be talking, paradoxically, about a progressivism? No. Not pessimism or optimism. Rather a different relation to time. But just that, maybe, is what we don't want. It would be too gratuitous, irrepresentable, inevaluable, an enormity. Too simple, above all. Too liberating, too free. After all, there is a little book one might re-read these days (and I'm astonished that it's not on the Index): Voluntary Servitude by Boethius. Modern translation: The abyss of masochism. Good old death has its attractions, even its force. Eros is most often, alas, only its servant. The will has its secret, which consists in preferring nothing to willing nothing.
On this point, today's news is full of chatter. Nauseatingly so. Which is precisely what, at a turning-point in History not unrelated to our own, Sartre's hero feels: "When one lives alone, one forgets what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as one's friends. Events too. One lets them flow away, one sees people suddenly surface to talk and then leave, one plunges into stories nonsensically, one would make a terrible witness. But as a consolation, all the implausible, all that wouldn't be believed in the cafes, one has no lack of that."
Sartre, before he too decided to instrumentalize his thought, had a very strong tendency to think. Which moreover, at bottom, is what people hold against him. With him, an important character comes onto the scene, which passing time has decided to forget: Existence. Why yes -- pure, central, annoying, crushing existence: "The only real thing left in me, is the existence that I feel existing." And again: "The truth is that I cannot put down my pen: I feel that I'm going to have Nausea and I think I can put it off by writing. So I'll write whatever comes to mind."
Black Tide of Chatter
That's it, tell us of your existence. We will see soon enough who's lying, posing, loving, hating, or telling the truth. "Let me tell you where I'm coming from" was not at all a stupid expression. It ought to be picked up again; it's not heard enough. It came at the right time. It's more memorable than hackneyed slogans like the famous "It is forbidden to forbid" [not sure if there was a 1960's English equivalent]. Your existence, it alone, not your opinions, your ideas. Not the movie you saw, or the conversations you heard. What is close to you, intimately close. If you escape the "They say ...", you put off Nausea. You have a chance to escape the black tide of chatter.
How curious it is -- poetry, suddenly, the real thing, signals to you. Almost nothing, however, barely a neglected color. It's not a matter of "telling", of making up stories, of transforming life into a novel, as illusionist merchandising so passionately wants it, but just -- click -- to feel yourself existing. You have forbidden youself to do so? In the name of what? In truth, nobody would wish it on you. So bet on the implausible. It's not worth anything, only thought.
[Here's the original, although before long its free-viewing period will expire]
[12/13/02 06:51] |
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