• About

affecognitive

~ religion, film, affect, academia

affecognitive

Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Elegance of the Hedgehog and our Ignorance of Marx

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Elegance of the Hedgehog, Marx

regular_60  Muriel Barbary’s 2008 novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (l’élégance du hérisson 2006) works a certain deceit on its readers. Perhaps the effect of this deceit is less intense or more obvious on its initial French readership (I have not ventured to discover that; do they get the joke?), but U.S. reviews seem to have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. Reviews and blogs outline and accept the basic plotline of the story. The main character, Renée, is a 54-year old concierge at a wealthy apartment building in Paris. At the start of the story her only life companions are a Portuguese maid, Manuela, who works for many of the apartment owners, a cat, and Culture. Renée doesn’t mind her solitude; in fact, she portrays herself as assiduously protecting and inculcating it. Her words craft a sense of herself as a fine mind, a purveyor and consumer of the best of human intellect and creativity. She names her cat Leo after Leo Tolstoy, wallows in the beauty of classical and avant-garde music, waxes poetic on the difficulties of Husserlian phenomenology, slides easily into conversation about novels and oil paintings, and is acutely offended by grammatical mistakes committed by the wealthy tenants of the building’s apartments. And yet Renée hides this proclivity for “the best that has been thought and said” from her employers, the rich Parisians who are, one would think, the legitimate heirs of this Culture. Why?

The novel never really says. It wobbles about a presumption shared between character and reader that somehow it is imprudent, unseemly, to ‘let on’ to the wealthy tenants that compared to them their concierge is more. More…what? More civilized? More of a citizen? More intelligent? More cultured? I, for one, was not convinced. Not only were these wealthy and well-connected Parisians too indifferent really to care that their employee—their servant—was imbibing the culture meant to bolster their own class status, but they also are portrayed as cultural plebians unable to love, appreciate, patronize, or sustain the truth, goodness, and beauty that Renée finds so utterly, transparently compelling. So why should she hide it?

The fact is Renée is a snob. At the very least she is an unreliable narrator. We know this because the man who ‘sees’ her has the same surname as a famous filmmaker (Ozu): his truth is fiction. We know this because the other companion she comes to love in the novel is a child, the 12-year old Paloma who is as cynical and worldly-wise as Renée (seriously, how realistic is that?) We know this, finally, by blunt textual evidence (if, that is, these oblique judgments drawn from the novel’s character relationships are not convincing), namely, the novel’s brief, two-page opening, titled “I. Marx (Preamble),” in which Renée claims to cite The German Ideology and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”. But what she says about these texts is absolutely wrong, though I have found no one who has seen through this clear arrow marking Renée’s fundamental unreliability. In response to a tenant’s son who declares that “Marx has completely changed the way I view the world,” Renée suggests he read The German Ideology, and she then proceeds apparently to sum up the critical work of this text: “mankind, doomed to its own ruin through desire, would do better to confine itself to its own needs. In a world where the hubris of desire has been vanquished, a new social organization can emerge, cleansed of struggle, oppression and deleterious hierarchies” (EH, 2). But a quick word search seems to verify that The German Ideology does not discuss desire at all, and it frames ‘needs’ as both necessary and (dialectically) the inevitable engine of alienation—certainly not the crystallized answer to ruinous libido or conatus. Quite the contrary, this beautiful text, which was co-written with Engels and never published in their lifetimes, is famous for presenting a word-image of a communist utopia, the closest we get from Marx of his hopes for a communist society, since he more typically refused to image or prescribe the future, preferring to keep communism as the telos of a historical drive, a horizon that is always, necessarily, on the horizon, a “to-come”, as Derrida would say.

The text states: “For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.”

Renée’s summary, in short, fits no extant analysis of The German Ideology. She goes on to “nearly murmur”, “Whosoever sows desire harvests oppression,” and in light of the tenant’s son’s confused stare, she seems to link this sigh to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Concierges do not read The German Ideology; hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach” (EH, 3). But this is sheer nonsense. The 11th thesis—as any good critical theorist knows—is the famous line, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Much interesting reflection can devolve from Renée’s unreliability. Is her desire for Culture less a resistance to the “fixation of social activity” and more a means by which she herself sows oppression? Is her misquoting of the 11th thesis a way of acknowledging that she would rather wallow in desire than consider how to change the world? What is the value of a working class snob, anyhow? Is she really a better (person)(citizen) than the wealthy Parisians she disdains? Does she actually get all that Tolstoy that she loves? Does she betray her class in reifying Beauty over against an analysis of reified relations of production? Such questions, I would suggest, would be a better way to begin a conversation about the book. But the deceit worked a bit too well. No one checked the citations of Marx, not even the reviewer for The Washington Post.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Ahmed, Will, and Cloud Atlas

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

affect, Ahmed, film

“There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time.” –Ralph W. Ellison, Invisible Man, 573

“It is as if the very tendency to use the language of injustice is explained as a symptom of willfulness.” –Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 224

Cloud Atlas (Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, 2012) opens with images of a man on a beach, a forest, a business transaction between men, a signed paper thrown into a small chest and locked. But the story begins with a touch of eyes. This touch is slight and tenuous, a connection less like a plea or moral command than a slim needle sliding into thin cloth. In sewing, a hem is basted by hooking fabric with big loops of thread, loose and approximate, just to hold it in place. This look was like that. Atua (David Gyasi) is tied to a pole and being whipped. Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), lured by the noise, peers through the undergrowth to see its cause…and his body is the fabric hooked by Atua’s eyes.

11026146_1057108907635818_2998842459022812386_n [My thanks to Carson Webb for finding this image for me!]

The film’s premise is that action, will, or choice in this life impresses lives in other times and places. More specifically, the premise is that a willful action—what Sara Ahmed calls an action that refuses the social will, or that takes its own way, or that insists obstinately on self-will or perversion—such action is more the rudder of history and more the story of justice than social cooperation and quotidian projects of consent. “Willfulness,” Ahmed writes, “becomes a sweaty concept if we can reveal the labor of its creation” (Willful Subjects, 18). The paragraph continues with an aside: “To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasoning of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before?” Cloud Atlas flows lucidly through a temporal and affective cascade of just this echo, of just this chiding repetition, and the good and evil rendered to humanity by the insistence and limitation of refusing the rod of compliance (Willful Subjects, 18).

The film (and David Mitchell’s book on which it is based) is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, a sci-fi alternative history organized around a jadi (group) that sticks together through the bardo between death and life, and returns to live in loose association for ten different lifetimes, each in a different century and different country. Instead of a kind of Tibetan reincarnation organized around the staying power of personality traits (the fighters, the compassionate, the questioners), Cloud Atlas is organized around what Sara Ahmed discusses as the plasticity and “setting” of character through the molding of will (Willful Subjects, 70). Mitchell’s (and the directors’) regulative principle doesn’t lie on the axis of religion so much as justice, not the truth or speculative generativity of reincarnation so much as the truth of something like epigenetics (the sedimentation of stress and action into inheritable genetic dynamics ancillary to DNA/RNA replication and transcription) and the generative speculation of how a willful act—or, equally, a willful failure to act—can realign both the obvious orientation of one body’s life and the temporal waves and currents of history that are so diffuse and huge that maybe we should call them hypernatural (in materialist resistance to Morton’s hyperobjects because these hypernatural dynamics do not recede from us; quite the contrary). Maybe, indeed, this is something like the “transnatural” dynamic of love that Ètienne Souriau writes about in L’Ombre de Dieu. Adam, caught by Atua’s eyes, orients his life away from slavery and toward abolition. Other times and places ring the harmonics of his willfulness in actions against racial, gendered, sexual, and environmental injustices. [Class, as always, is invisible. Hardly any grist for that particular mill, especially in Hollywood.] Like Ahmed’s book, the film is a profound meditation on how individual choice is and is not real, on how individual lives both matter and don’t matter. Social or individual will, Ahmed notes, indicates a disjuncture or self-variance in that it registers a present command to bring about what is not yet accomplished (Willful Subjects, 29). We might say that Ahmed and Cloud Atlas, differently, show how that material-affective gap is more real and more influential than either pole of the self-society binary. And without mentioning love, both scholar and film make it clear (like Ellison) that the feelings of care, commitment, eros, and friendship are the rational powers that thread the willfulness of will.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • More
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2021
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • April 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Categories

  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: