Fate + Grace
“My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts, they’re a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.”
“I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid.”
–Chris Marker, Sans soleil (1983)
There is an anarchy essential to multiplicity. In the absence of a plane common to the totality (which one persists in seeking, so as to relate the multiplicity to it) one will never know which will, in the free play of the wills, pulls the strings of the game; one will not know who is playing with whom. But a principle breaks through all this trembling and vertigo when the face presents itself, and demands justice.
–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)
Image – Dhauladhar Range, Himachal Pradesh, India. Photo: Ishita Jain.
I.
I have often tempted Fate, to see if Grace might not outmaneuver “It,” or if they might not be the same thing.
She wrote from India: “We must be careful that this does not become an albatross around our necks.” I was, in part, puzzled. I was also, in part, intrigued. What did she mean? What was “this,” and was it the same thing as “It”? We had been dancing with “It” for years – almost eight years – in our study of works-based agency, and in our battle with the art-academic industrial complex.
Eventually, totality takes its toll, multiplicity and finitude give way, and what is nominally bespoke returns to the universal. The great outside (Levinas’ Il y a) returns. Is it the same thing as Blanchot’s “outside” (the “unthought”)? The nominally bespoke was never what it appeared to be. It is irreducibly connected to prior art (Marion’s “the given”), making intellectual property rights a farce. Post-phenomenology is a useful tool for demolishing pretenses underwriting dialectics and critical theory. And Marion’s “the given” is connected to Kant’s “The Sublime.” A leap occurs, according to Marion, when all rationalizations collapse and some-thing else arrives. It scares the wits out of authors and artists, when it appears out of no-where, and history likes to explain it away with terms like genius or the muses. History then savages the glimpse of The Sublime by returning works to authors and concocting “legends.” This permits the abject commodification process. This hagiographic impulse in Big History is best undone (canceled) by auto-hagiography. Authors and artists should tell their own truths/stories versus wait for historians (e.g., Vasari) to invent their so-called sainthood.
II.
That “It” was what we called dark vitalism, but as a path to some-thing else and else-where. We had no intention of honoring dark vitalism unless it could be redeemed. But we also hardly knew if dark vitalism could be redeemed. It was (and is) a huge risk. But we were willing to see. Her albatross suggests (per Coleridge) some sort of fatalist end. Yet, we (as artists and scholars) are all “ancient” mariners, after all, whether or not we are “smoking [whatever] by the lakeside” (up in Kendal) with Wordsworth and Coleridge, or whether or not we become reactionaries, like Wordsworth, in old age (if we ever reach “old age”). The High Romantic spirit is inviolable, even if, as Camus claims in The Rebel (1951), it often leads to oblivion. Novalis’ “blue flower” is the Empyrean, or the wild blue yonder of Romanticism charged with ultra-sublimity, per Dante. Self-sacrifice, so to speak, pays dividends. I was aware that Bergson and even Deleuze were called vitalists – and not always in a complimentary fashion … I recall George Steiner’s essay on Bergson’s “dark end” – in the TLS or such. Apparently, he (Bergson) gave up on transcendence (in the spirit of his time), while Steiner was always willing to wager on transcendence. That was the day of his (Steiner’s) Real Presences (1986). It was a bit late to pick on Bergson, of course. But Steiner needed a straw man to make his point. And then there is W.J.T. Mitchell, great protagonist of iconology versus iconography, and, despite all denials, dancing with vitalism. His great gift was destroying art-historical narrativity. Whether it scared him or not, which caused him to deny all claims by others that his work was a form of vitalism, is a moot point. He can decide for himself – one day – when The Totality comes calling.
Perhaps we have lived out the dark years of Nietzsche’s prophecy of an era of nihilism, to end Modernism – as passage or rite of passage else-where? Is the whole universe truly rolling toward “X”, as he proclaimed? What is this “X”? Hard to say, certainly. But it is instructive that both Schopenhauer and Husserl vanished into subjectivism. (And what other than abstruse subjectivism was Heidegger’s game?) Hegel, of course, preferred to equate The Totality with “Spirit,” and then define its terms of engagement. Kierkegaard and others would, notably, object to Hegel’s forms of mediation as forms of bombast, and rightly so – Kierkegaard actually writing a play mocking the entire fracas. Perhaps we have lived through postmodernist relativism and all of that, with its embrace of Aristotelean generativity, as the secret of language (gramma), and all that comes with it under the contemporary name of cultural production? Time will tell. The recent emergence of the “creative industries” catechism (in the EU, in particular) is utterly frightening. The commodification of culture has long been underway, but now we are expected to bow down, to the emperor with no clothes, and hand over our wares, willingly, to the neoliberal malefactors.
III.
Thus, three versions of the following, semi-divine “algorithm” appear, as if, out of no-where:
Totality will claim its toll.
Totality will take its toll.
Totality stakes its claim.
Choose one and proceed as one must – but with full knowledge that the very concept of totality (capitalized or otherwise) only makes sense in its other-worldly status. Try to place it “here and now” and you end up in totalitarianism. Try to enforce it across cultural production and you end up on the side of fascists. Try to enforce it in your own life and watch what happens. Poof! Otherwise, enjoy the dance. It is never at all what it seems to be at first glance. Dark vitalism leads some-where and else-where. But that some-where or else-where depends on the subject (the so-called self). And the subject is not co-equivalent to the ego. They are, clearly, not the same thing. The eradication of the subject failed across postmodernism. The subject always returns (sometimes with a vengeance). In Vedantic philosophy, The Self is the auspicious moment. What is this Self? So, forget Barthes, forget Foucault, and forget Baudrillard (who told us to forget Foucault). Forget post-structuralism. Remember, instead, The Self. The earlier attempts via structuralism (including attempts at divining deep grammar, e.g., Jakobson and Chomsky) were, however, instructive. The anti-capitalist critique of cultural production will never make much sense until authors voluntarily abdicate rights to works versus have critics malign authors as blind agents of fate. That 500-600-year history of fabricated rights is clearly over, anyway. It was all co-terminous with the emergence of Capitalism. (Marx has taught us this.) The writing is on the wall. That writing says “No Rights.” The double negation is telltale. It comes with the territory. It is extra-territorial in terms of conventional wisdom. It is purely elective – for now. It doubles back. We are transiting a classic, presentist paradox – we know the writing is on the wall, and we have turned our backs to the wall. We are facing ourselves as firing squad. We are, with Dostoevsky (post-firing-squad and post-Siberian-prison), at the stage of enlightened nihilism – not such a bad place to be. As dissident artist-scholars, we are always already writing up a storm. Where we go from here is an open question. Yet, as Dostoevsky said (via Berdyaev), “All revolutions will fail that are not spiritual enough.”
Is The Totality “Death”? Perhaps. Who cares? For, as Tarkovsky taught us, “Death does not exist.” And, as Augustine taught us, “Time does not exist.” Anything we engage with “here and now” is purely contingent and, ultimately, corrupted by Power. Caveat emptor. (Walter Benjamin taught us that.) That is the magic of “here and now” – or, of “Now-time.” Angelus Novus is being blown backward into the future. (Listen to Laurie Anderson’s “The Dream Before” (1989).) Such irony is not even lost on fools, since fools have long been given the task of speaking truth to Power (from Shakespeare forward, and from Saint Francis backward).
She did, of course, already (always already) know all of this. She was, after all, a “child of India.” The West is not always “the best,” as they say – though it does try.