Posted on October 7, 2014 by Louis Roux

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The Introduction; in which the author mangles Hamlet and attempts to explain the project of Nihil Moralia.

 

Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this.

- Hamlet, I:ii:129-138

 

Bunny Lebowski: Uli doesn't care about anything. He's a Nihilist.
The Dude: Ah, that must be exhausting.

- The Big Lebowski

Like Hamlet, many of us – the denizens of contemporary society – are struggling with the questions of meaning and purpose. And, like the Hamlet from Act One, we conclude that there is no meaning, no purpose, only vague and arbitrary laws and expectations (formed by God or society, which may end up being the same thing) that keep us on the beaten track of existence. Hamlet’s ethical predicament is truly our own: the predicament of nihilism, and its consequent feelings of “fatigue, ennui, melancholy and above all boredom with life.”i In our contemporary situation, like in Hamlet’s, and Nietzsche’s, “[t]he aim is lacking: ‘why?’ finds no answer.”ii But thousands of young Hamlets, those that are not paralyzed by existential dread, or have been pushed beyond it, those who have come finally to the decision to kill the king, take to the streets in Ukraine, Greece, Spain, Palestine, Venezuela, almost everywhere it seems – too long have they withstood the whips and scorns of outrageous Fortune 500 companies and, filled with fear and anger, they take arms against a sea of troubles and try to tear down systems that are inherently corrupt and destructive. Whether they succeed, or end up as corpses in a final act blood bath remains to be seen.

When Adorno states in his introduction to Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life that the purpose of his book is no less than the purpose of all good philosophy, “the teaching of the good life”, a ‘how to’ guide to ethical living, he knows very well that this might be an impossible task (15-18). Jakob Norberg defines Minima Moralia, rather surprisingly, as advice literature, albeit advice literature of a different colour. The post-war German society, torn from its previous exceptionally harmful way of organizing society, was emerging from a self-imposed stupor and undergoing massive economic, political and social upheavals and its populace – having been taken in, seduced, or coerced into the Fascist system that stripped them of autonomy and subjectivity – had an increased demand for “books that offered guidance on social interaction, demeanor, and moral issues” (‘Adorno’s Advice’ 399). Adorno’s intervention in this field, as a German intellectual, would seem completely normal, even necessary – but, as Norberg notes, he “does not believe in the viability of advice. Whatever good suggestions the reader may find in Minima Moralia, it is framed by repeated, even obsessive, announcements of the end of the bourgeois era, as well as the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice” (400) – confronted with the myriad horrors, absurdities, and banalities of modern society (that he feels is regressing into Fascist barbarism), this project of teaching ethics can no longer be a naively positivistic or prescriptive one – it must be carried out negatively; what to do can be found in the gaps of what not to do – “[t]he text does not abstain from the modality of advice so much as it seeks to show how any advice has become impossible” (‘Adorno’s Advice’ 406). One can only speak of the world as it is (or as one sees it) and let the ‘advice’ be inferred from there. In Adorno’s inversion of the genre, self-help means to see that the Self is socially constructed, and thus to see that society must be changed if we can ever hope to help ourselves.

Though this negativity seems nihilistic, I believe that this way of looking at the world in fact reveals optimistic prospects that are not in the text itself. Andrew J. Douglas, in ‘Democratic Darkness and Adorno’s Redemptive Criticism’, argues that “Adorno’s characteristically pessimistic diagnoses of our modern condition – his claim that we find ourselves ‘in the face of despair’, caught in the throes of an arresting ‘totality’ of late capitalist exchange – can be understood as a kind of rhetorical strategy, a means of critical provocation that is constituted and sustained by a subsequent commitment to redemptive or alternative possibility” (821). If Adorno’s work, then, is obscure, shocking, even depressing, it is only to awaken us, to remove us from our stupor, to enable us to find the solutions to problems we didn’t know we had. But where do we find the real-world examples and implications, and not get bogged down in the abstract theory that Adorno seems to disdain? As noted Adorno scholar and biographer Brian O’Connor says, “Adorno’s critical theory is an attempt to identify the damaging social influences at work in social phenomena [...] not only to explain the behaviour influencing operations of the totality, but to show, indeed, that those operations are objectionable” (Adorno 44-51), a task that is extremely difficult, and getting more so all the time.

According to Ben Agger, the critical theorists, by necessity, deepened “Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into the analysis of reification”, and eventually took it even deeper “in a more evolved stage of capitalism. Thus the Frankfurt theorists conceived domination as even more intractable than reification” (Critical Social Theories 83). He continues: “Lukács and the critical theorists argue that ideology has been “routinized” [...] in everyday life through the various cultural discourses and practices that suggest the inevitability and thus the rationality of political conformity. Ideology in postmodern capitalism has become even more dispersed into the semiotics and discourses of everyday life” (ibid.). Thus our experiences of alienation, whether social, political or personal, are not accidental by-products of living in the world of global late capitalism – the alienation, the reification, serve specific ideological goals: to keep us isolated and afraid and powerless to oppose the domination, to leave us unable to reach political maturityiii and resist, since we are always tired, always hungry, always wanting, always chasing what capitalism promises is just around the next corner – freedom from the system itself: ‘If I could just make enough money to get out of my job, my house, my country, my life, I could finally relax and really live’. Happiness is what capitalism consistently promises and consistently fails to deliver on purpose, in other words.

The aforementioned shock to the system/System is also the purpose of this project. Culturally, at least, things have only gotten worse since Adorno’s time. With the fall/corruption of communism the capitalist hegemony/heteronomy has spread to all corners of the globe, infiltrating almost every aspect of public and private life. If Adorno’s greatest fear was barbarism, what would he think of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, the show that follows (exploits?) the family of an obese child beauty pageant contestant, and the myriad similar ‘reality’ TV shows? If Auschwitz was the only possible outcome of modernity’s emphasis on progress, efficiency and automation, what are the labour camps in Saudi-Arabiaiv, the Nigerian oil fieldsv, the dumping grounds for e-waste in Ghanavi, the unsafe and immoral factories in Asiavii, the internment camps in Isrealviii, the rise of Nazis (though they may not call themselves that) in Greeceix and elsewhere in Europe? If he was disgusted by the musical ‘degeneration’ evident in jazzx, how would he react to Britney Spears, or Rebecca Black? That is why I believe that the project of Minima Moralia is still an important one today, perhaps even more so.

For Adorno gaps are all-important. In a letter to Walter Benjamin he posits that “both high art as well as industrially produced consumer art ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up’” (in Bernstein 2, my emphasis). It seems then that the freedom that we seek from the all-encompassing capitalist machinery lies not in the works of art, nor in social conditions or praxes, nor in what we say of them, but somewhere in between, between the fragments. For Adorno, somewhere between Hollywood and Auschwitz; for us, perhaps it is somewhere between Apple HQ and Asian sweatshops, between America and Russia, between Sharpeville and The Rainbow Nation and Marikana.

The aphoristic structure of Minima Moralia, then, becomes more than a stylistic choice – it reflects the damaged life of the subtitle. The aphorisms of Minima Moralia spring out at seemingly random locations, no single one being more important than the other. What are at stake here are the places between aphorisms, between single parts of aphorisms, between fragments: The lines that connect points and nodes that create a more complex picture than could be achieved through positivistic, instrumental reasoning. Adorno argues, in ‘The Essay as Form’ that “[t]he usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness of totality and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal” (159). The critic of the essay here wants the true totality of the essay (with its inherent contradictions, slippages, and self-critiques) to become the servant of the false totality (totalitarianism) of society, in which dissent has been smoothed over completely. If every aphorism, then, is a small essayistic ‘constellation’ – a picture formed from seemingly disparate points – the book in which they are contained also becomes a constellation, or even a multiplicity of constellations – depending on what aphorisms are read, and in what order: constellations that are themselves parts of larger constellations, and through this technique we can critique and resist the ever-expanding heteronomyxi.

Adorno knows that “knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience” (MM 80). The essay, or the aphorism, does not pretend to be completely rational, mathematical, or ‘scientific’ – its very form exposes both the world, and the way we think about it. Thoughts do not come to us logically and well-formulated, and in that way the essay shows the process of thinking by working through the process instead of presenting the sterile ‘conclusion’ to thought. So it is here then, in the gaps, the lines of interaction, that his “prose radiates the promise of happiness beyond catastrophe – a happiness which the total system, to this day, denies its constituent members, simply because it is the catastrophe” (Redmond 1) – with this fragmentary, essayistic mode of thinking that emphasises disjunction and contradiction we can find and explore the cracks in the systems of total administration and discipline, and perhaps widen those cracks and destroy the entire edifice. Adorno wrote that “Marx believed that the possibility of changing the world from top to bottom was immediately present, here and now. Only stubbornness could still maintain this thesis as Marx formulated it” (‘Why Still Philosophy?’ 14, my emphasis). Perhaps we just have to change the direction of Marx’s formulation, and begin from the bottom...

Using both serious world news events as well as supposedly empty or irrelevant pop-cultural phenomenon is not an accidental choice – I, like Judith Halberstam, “believe in low theoryxii in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely” (The Queer Art of Failure 21). I do not wish to win anyone’s agreement – I am not a lawyer stating a case. Raymond Geuss affirms Adorno’s view that “traditional academic philosophers seek to convince others of the rightness of their views by presenting logically irrefutable arguments. The coerciveness of this project, even if it is a highly sublimated form of coerciveness, is part of the general obsession with control that is characteristic of the Enlightenment” (‘Adorno’s Gaps’ 163). Adorno works in opposition to this tradition, says Geuss; that “[t]he micro-treatises that constitute Minima Moralia are supposed to be series of images, suppositions, insights, even “arguments” (of a kind), etc., that do not demand agreement but which have other kinds of plausibility” (ibid. 164, my emphasis). This plausibility might be bound up with the notion of failure – a failure on the part of Adorno, as well as Benjamin, to be properly analytical, to give clear and concise answers and definitions. It is also the failure to be happy or content with ‘the way things are’, the command that is constantly being barked at us from billboards and magazines and televisionxiii. But if “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (MM 39), if a life that is lived with unconscious and unexamined obedience cannot be a moral life, is this failure not in some sense a great triumph, or at least a worthwhile rebellion?

Adorno’s own words, in Critical Models, ring true: “Critique is essential to all democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom to criticize and need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique” (281), again evoking the idea of a totality that can only be complete with the inclusion without judgement of contradictions. So the focus of this project, its task, is not to answer the old Communist question ‘what is to be done?’ in any dogmatically ‘practical’ sense – I believe that any real, radical, redemptive praxis can only happen once we change our minds. I would like to echo Louis Althusser in his critique of the May ’68 slogan ‘Get rid of the cop in your head!’, which he replaces with a more complex, but more accurate, formulation of the fight against oppressive and repressive ideologies and systems: “Fight false ideas, destroy the false ideas you have in your head – the false ideas with which the ideology of the dominant class pulls the wool over your eyes, and replace them with accurate ideas that will enable you to join the revolutionary class’s struggle to end exploitation and the repression that sustains it!” (On the Reproduction of Capitalism 231). This does not mean that the ‘masses’ are what conspiracy theorists refer to as ‘sheeple’. In the age of Google it is easier than ever to do some research and find the gaps in the dominant ideology. We can very easily see through lies but choose to ignore this knowledge. Robert Pfaller, working with Žižek’s analysis of ‘canned laughter’ in comedy TV, states that “Žižek drew the conclusion that our supposedly most intimate feelings can be transferred or delegated to others. Our feelings and convictions are therefore not internal, but rather can lead an external, ‘objective’ existence: a television sitcom can laugh for me; weepers can mourn in my place; a Tibetan prayer wheel can pray for me; and a mythical being, such as the renowned ‘ordinary man in the street’, can take my place and be convinced of things that I cannot take seriously.”xiv It is, in the end, easier to pretend to believe in things that pretend to be true, than to actively try to change what seems immutable.

We cannot afford to brush aside ‘mass culture’ as unworthy of our academic, critical attention. Even though “[t]he cultural commodities of the industry are governed [...] by the principal of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation”xv, we know that the industry is an ideology-machine constantly producing and reproducing the conditions of its own survival, built on the assumption that we do not know any better and that it can never change, since “conformity has replaced consciousness”xvi; a machine that does its best to keep us away from political and historical maturity “almost without a gap”.xvii It is exactly in these gaps that we can learn what Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 might tell us about genetically manipulated food, what Pokémon might tell us about ‘eco-terrorism’, what Jersey Shore might tell us about sexuality. If the culture industry, along with church and state, is one of the largest producers of ideology and heteronomy, by sifting through the cultural detritus of contemporary life, by engaging with, and not merely looking at, but looking with and through products of culture and society (most of which seem at first glance to be completely vapid and devoid of meaning), we must be able to escape the wilderness of the nihilism that contemporary systems of discipline create, even if it is through the negative space left by the fragmentation and alienation of societyxviii, and – hopefully – “[h]aving started from an anguished awareness of the inhuman, the meditation on the absurd returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt” (Camus 55), so that we can accomplish “the insoluble task [:] to let neither the power of others or our own powerlessness stupefy us” (MM 57).

 

 

i Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. 6.
ii Nietzsche, F. The Will to Power. 9.
iii Adorno: “Politically mature is the person who speaks for himself, because he has thought for himself, and is not merely repeating someone else” (‘Critique’, in Critical Models, 281).
iv See: Abdul-Ahab, Gaith. ‘Inside Dubai’s Labour Camps’: http://www.theguardian.com/global/gallery/2008/oct/08/1
v See: Vice on HBO. Episode 9: Gangs and Oil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Xa2oKKVR0#t=866
vi See: Reid, David. ‘Making a living from toxic electronic waste in Ghana’, BBC Click: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26239741
vii See: Qiang, Li. ‘Beyond Foxconn: Deplorable working conditions characterize Apple’s entire supply chain’: https://www.chinalaborwatch.org/pro/proshow-176.html
viii See: Kane, Alex. ‘Journalist David Sheen delivers blistering indictment on Isreal’s racist war on African migrants’: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/journalist-blistering-indictment.html
ix See: Vice on HBO. Episode 4: Love and Rockets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEk5-MAKlHE#t=711
x “The resulting enigma that millions of people seem never to tire of its monotonous attraction” (Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’, in Prisms, 121).
xi Which, according to Adorno, is no less than the necessity of philosophy “from time immemorial” (Critical Models 10).
xii According to Halberstam, “[l]ow theory tries to locate all the in- between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal” (2).
xiii See, for instance, this commercial for the anti-depressant Prozac (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of22ROQxvn8), or think of the Coke slogans with their injunctions to ‘Open Happiness’ and ‘Enjoy’, or the viral Pharrell Williams hit ‘Happy’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM) which tells us to “clap along if you feel that Happiness is the Truth”. All of which implies that if you are unhappy or angry there is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with you, and not with the world you are living in.
xiv Pfaller, R. On the Pleasure Principal in Culture, 17.
xv Adorno, T. ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Culture Industry, 99.
xvi ibid. 104.
xvii ibid. 98.
xviii “Because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite” (MM 247).

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Blackface: a lesson in cultural sensitivity

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Lunette Warren

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On Heritage Day the newspapers bombard us with this headline: “Blackface scandal hits Stellenbosch”. Oh, man, the irony. Are you surprised to read this headline? No, of course you’re not. Indignant, perhaps, but not surprised. It’ll be a long time before this headline surprises you.

What is happening in the minds of two young white males who decide to dress up as Venus and Serena Williams, and to make it as authentic as possible by donning blackface? During this entire planning process, is there no point, not even when they’re at a store buying an enormous amount of whatever they’ve decided to use to ethnicise themselves, at which they stop and think that maybe this might offend someone? Is the thought process different to that of two white females who dress up as domestic workers cum blackface?

Strange, of course, that we allowed Leon Schuster to don blackface for so long without this outrage, but then again, strange that anyone ever allowed him on the silver screen at all. UCT scholar Roger Young suggests that Schuster perhaps treads a fine line between being offensive and some sort of social commentary; that he’s turning blackface on itself. Does that mean there are levels of blackface, some of which may or may not be acceptable to varying levels? To be fair, Young himself is not yet sure. It does raise an interesting question, though: where is the line, and who is drawing up the scale?

I’m curious: Is dressing up as Venus and Serena Williams different to dressing up as domestic workers (big bottoms included)? The former are two of the most famous sportswomen in the world, and directly responsible for women in tennis receiving equal pay to men (a fairly recent development). As far as women go, they’re heroes. Domestic workers, however, stand in a very different relationship to the South African white person. Our relationship with them is a complicated mess of white guilt at best, at worst we pay them a pittance and work them to the bone, claiming we do them a favour by giving them lunch and a job one day a week. Does that mean, that on the scale of offensiveness, the latter offense is worse? If we’re talking feminism, maybe you could try to make that argument. But in this case we’re not talking feminism, we’re talking racism, and there are no levels of racism. You’re either racist or you’re not.

This is what it comes down to: it’s offensive to dress in blackface. At its very core it's racist, designed to be a depiction of a stereotype. And don’t you come here with that “stereotypes exist for a reason” bullshit, because you’re just reinforcing social constructs. White people need to just stop doing that. Don’t claim it’s all harmless fun, because it’s not harmless; by blackfacing you’re invoking centuries of oppression and telling black people that we can just put all that behind us now, it doesn’t matter anymore, we’re all equal now. The state of our country and the state of the world in general begs to differ. In fact, if ever there was an example of blackface in recent South African history that so clearly illustrates both the racial and the gender divide it’s the UP debacle. What we really need is a serious dose of cultural sensitivity.

Pinky Khoabane asks what universities are teaching their students to still allow these things to happen. He wants to know how students born after 1994 can be so insensitive. He forgets that their parents, their families, are pre-1994. He dismisses the effect a parent can have on a child, how long it can take to get out of that mindset. He expects children who grow up in conservative white families to simply pop into enlightenment. It’s a noble idea, but it doesn’t work that way. These are ideas that are so ingrained in the very identity of some whites that they almost religiously pass it on generation by generation. It takes years and a hell of a lot more than an undergraduate degree in marketing to break those shackles. Both secondary and tertiary education need some diversification, there’s no doubt about that. We can do more to engender a sense of cultural sensitivity in the next generation. But let's admit that the problem is much more multifaceted than just that. It’s right there in the culture, in the traditions, in the media, in Leon Schuster’s painted face. We cannot stay silent while he dons blackface, but scream bloody murder should anyone else dare.

These students made a terrible mistake, this much is certain. But calling for their expulsion is taking the short-term view of the solution. Stellenbosch University seems to be taking the long-term view, and has decided not to take action against these students, but instead to involve them in discussions related to the issue of blackface on campus. What we have here is an opportunity to stop shouting isms at one another and talk earnestly about long-term solutions, and we’d be stupid to let it pass us by in favour of finger-wagging and knee-jerk reactions.

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Another sinless season

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Chantelle Gray van Heerden

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I often wonder what it is that makes some writers good and other ones great. What that ethereal quality is that makes some literature/s stand out. Deleuze and Guattari call it a ‘stuttering’ – that which bifurcates; that which leaves other literature/s diminished by its existence. It’s hard to describe, but all avid readers know what it feels like when a novel makes you sit up, makes you read late into the night, makes you wonder why you ever read anything else. Damon Galgut is such a writer for me. His works aren’t flashy, catchy; in fact, for me they’re often the opposite – they make me uncomfortable, uneasy, but in a way that makes me keep reading. So I was happy to learn I’d be interviewing him at this year’s Open Book Festival.

I want to start with Arctic Summer. I love the quote at the beginning: “Orgies are so important, and they are things one knows nothing about” (E.M. Foster to P.N. Furbank, 1953). It seems to be a kind of framing device of Foster’s life. How do you think this shaped who he became? (I mean his ignorance of certain aspects of life, but at the same time his perceptiveness.)

Foster was probably the most repressed man that ever lived. And though it was a different time, he was somehow surrounded by other gay men who found a way to live openly as gay men. But he was timid sexually. I think it had a lot to do with his relationship with his mother. Yet at the same time it was precisely his timidity which gave way to his writing. It was his need for love which led to the creation of Passage to India.

At the launch of Arctic Summer I heard you say that writing this book was a very personal experience in that you share certain things with Foster. Would you mind elaborating on this?

I always tell students who want to write not to read anyone with too strong a voice because it inevitably influences your writing. But in the case of Arctic Summer, it actually helped my writing because he became a voice in my head; a way of writing and perceiving. And we share a love of India. That was important for me – to concentrate on the things we share rather than the things we don’t.

Place – I mean setting, milieu – seems very important in your novels. It seems more than merely contextual; almost as if it is a separate character.

Yes, that’s accurate. I can’t write until I know the setting. I also don’t write much about cities; they don’t speak to me in the same way. But the setting is important; it evokes a presence for me.

One of the things I like about your novels is the way in which they stretch time; I mean you take your time to say things, which I find so the opposite of many things in life today. Can you say something about this?

Most novels are constructed around an event – something happens. I’m more interested in what happens when decisive action is not taken, because that also sets events into motion. But it does suspend a moment, which then stretches time.

Many writers have thought about memory and what it does. And you also explore this in In a strange room. What intrigued me especially is the way memory takes place between Damon and Reiner; how it shapes them both, and how at times one is suddenly aware of the observer.

I wanted to write something about remembrance – how it takes you back in a moment, how you can be detached in that moment but also zoom in on it. And how what you do then becomes strange. I have a voice in my head that often does that to me; makes my everyday habits seem odd. So I wanted to express that in the novel.

Who do you read when you have time?

Sebald, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Beckett, Raymond Carver. But many more.

Your novels seem to me often to be about authenticity – even from your very early novels. Is this accurate? What makes it such an important theme for you?

Small talk consists of a lot of bullshit. A lot of conversation between people is nonsense. So the moments of real connection takes on a meaning beyond that which is talked about. I am interested in that.

What do you think humans can do without?

Cellphones. TV. Meat. So many things. This list won’t make me popular. But I guess people like to be comfortable.

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Jazz, the human condition and the ongoing moment

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Chantelle Gray van Heerden

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Geoff Dyer, like his mentor John Berger, writes about almost anything and everything that piques his interest. Funny and cocky between the pages, I was rather surprised to find him a sweet, thoughtful human being. (My judgement was clouded by my experience of Ian Rankin last year, no doubt!) Geoff is originally from the UK, has travelled and lived in a number of places, and now resides in Venice Beach, California. He has written four novels, a critical study of John Berger, two collections of essays and six other genre-bending books. His work has been awarded numerous times and his most recent publication is titled Another great day at sea: life aboard the USS George H W Bush. I chatted with him at the Open Book Festival to find out a bit more about the man with the many hats.

I read somewhere that someone described you as “eager to live, wary of writing”. What is it about living and being in the world – in this current world that fascinates you?

I am a writer who bases a lot of what I write on my experiences, rather than my imagination. So it’s important for me to live and be in the world – to gather experiences – because that enables my writing.

In 'Capitalist realism', Mark Fischer describes the effects of capitalism as the failure to be surprised. This seems to me quite close to your ideas of boredom (what you call “instant boredom” – the idea that we have so much choice, but the irony that most people exercise that power as consumers – that something about that makes life dull. Is that part of your fascination with boredom? And the human condition in general?

Well I guess I’m always looking to counter that boredom; I’m always looking for surprises and creating situations which lend themselves to novel encounters. I also like to be surprised as a reader and I guess for me the novel as a form – even experimental novels – have lost the ability to surprise. For me writing is about experimenting. But then I guess that’s what many people dislike about my writing.

It’s been almost 30 years since the publication of  'Ways of telling', your book on John Berger. What do you think of him these days?

John Berger is quite old now but he was the first famous writer that I met. And he was a kind of mentor for me. I mean he certainly shaped the way I write and think about the world in many ways. John has since become a friend and I am happy to say that my admiration for him is undiminished. He’s a great man and a great writer.

Something I love about your books is the way you describe – there’s an objective detachment but also a subjective insertion. It makes me think of the line at the end of  'Death in Varanasi' when the narrator says: “I didn’t renounce the world; I just became gradually less interested in certain aspects of it, less involved with it.” Do you feel this way as you get older?

I’m not one for renunciation, to be honest. But I do feel that there is so much on sale these days, so much on offer that one doesn’t need. But I don’t feel the need to renounce it; I just don’t need it. Of course one can’t get away with as much as you get older either. I mean one can certainly indulge, but recovery definitely takes longer. Certain things change; I am less involved in certain aspects, yes, but not as a renunciation for any ascetic reasons.

I read your article on DeLillo and Booker Prize. Do you think he’s an important writer?

I certainly think he should have gotten the Booker Prize once or twice. And yes, he’s an important writer, even though I don’t think all of his books are successful necessarily. And there are many other more important writers. But I think he gets something about the metropolis that was ahead of his time and of his peers.

I want to ask you about 'Zona'; your book on the movie “Stalker”. I hadn’t seen the movie before I read 'Zona' and of course it made me go out and get it. The funny thing is that I hadn’t heard your voice when I watched the movie so I heard comments from this book being narrated in my head in Werner Herzog’s voice! But what I really want to know is what you think about cinema and the cinematic experience these days?

That’s not a bad voice to hear in your head! Perhaps I should ask Werner to do the audio book… But about cinema, it feels to me these days that most movies are pitched at the level of 16-year-olds. And there are many Indie movies of course, but I don’t think they are interesting from a cinematic point of view. Stalker is not only a great movie; it’s really a great artwork. And that’s a rare experience. I recently watched Borgman and certainly I was aware of being in the presence of greatness then, so these moments do still happen.

I like the idea of you not having seen all your homes yet (as you write in 'Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it'). Are there any places in particular where you would like to live that you haven’t?

To tell you the truth, living in California has always been an ambition of mine. I wanted to live in San Francisco. I don’t live there but I live in Los Angeles and I’m also more centred now than I was when I was younger, so I feel less of an urge to move. I am happy living where I am now.

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Beats and Beatings

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Kate Ellis-Cole

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Separated by space and time, by race and religion; counter opposites regarding upbringing and society, legendary poet Allan Ginsberg and the controversial Kgafela oa Magogodi are in unity in one aspect: their art. The works produced by the respective poets face up differing realities, and yet echoes are expelled by each that serve to intersect and interfere in a manner that combines their meaning and their hermeneutics to the elucidation of a greater reality. The poems Howl, by Ginsberg, and beautiful ones are dying, by Magogodi, are both resplendent of “an embodiment of a philosophy of experience” (Wojahan and Myers) and serve to collapse the perimeter of restriction. As the reader engages with each text and falls further into the worlds described by the poets, there can be no argument that the frustrated heart of a suppressed people is lamenting its capture to an extent in both works. And the readers own heart can’t help but join in the cry.

By virtue of the fact that Ginsberg was a member of the Beats poetry movement of the fifties, his poem was greeted with trepidation and anticipation by many of the readers of the time. The movement were perceived as group of whom others should be wary. Fiercely liberal, communistic and outspoken, the content of Howl mirrors the attitude of the non-conformist genre. The fear invoked in the average individual in the society in which Ginsberg found himself does not differ all too greatly from the anxiety ensnared in Magogodi’s society. A black writer and performer in a freshly engendered non-racist social order, it is undeniable that the roughness and harsh reality of Magogodi’s poems excites the same fretful exhilaration that Ginsberg’s did. Both poems are pregnant with criticism, and heavy with commentary on the society of the given day. The poets’ regard for the delicate or sensitive reader is completely eclipsed by the intensity with which their truth is expressed, and the magnitude of observation that is exposed.

Howl, in its very title, makes clear to the reader that what follows is an extensive, mournful wail, a literal outburst of emotion and expression: a protest. However, it also seems as if Ginsberg’s title is also an instruction. The poet is almost commanding that the reader join him in his lament, insisting that they ‘howl’. The opening line makes reference to Ginsberg’s contemporaries, “the best minds of my generation”, being “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”. This opening alone is dichotomous in function. In the initial sense, Ginsberg is grieving this fact as a point of departure, but simultaneously it calls to the reader to allow themselves to be affronted and aggrieved by the statement. It is interesting that Ginsberg refers to these “best minds” as being “naked”. In an interview that was published in the biography Dharma Lion, Ginsberg asserted that “what [the Beats] were trying to prove” was “nakedness”, and that the poet was under the imperative to “stand naked before the people…[stand] naked before the world” (Schumcher). Although this insight is a select piece of information, realising the effect it has is of vital importance. It causes the reader to recognise how this simple understanding, combined with an extension of the meaning assigned to the word “naked”, imbues the lines with infinitely plentiful interpretations. The use of words to form this dynamic and kinetic understanding is part of how Ginsberg’s poem has come to “be all things to all people” (Burt). The sheer magnitude of content encapsulated in Howl is not apparent in every aspect of the writing, and what this does to the reader is of equal magnitude.

When confronted with the poem, the reader is assaulted by dense blocks of prose, one after the other, in a seemingly endless parade of figures and signifiers. There are no line breaks in the entirety of the work, and Ginsberg uses run on lines to mesh together the thoughts evoked in one sentence with those elicited by the successive one. These factors all contribute to make Howl a physically imposing work to its audience. The words seem to engulf the reader, and the readers find themselves in a field of information, in stretches of understanding and misunderstanding extending to the horizons, in a world of semantics and semiotics in which everything is in flux, and yet everything is concrete. Despite the confusion of this outset, the excitement that accompanies this timidity compels the reader to delve further. This aspect of the poem was characteristic of the Beats’ intention to replace the “given [codes] with an emphasis on individual experience” and to remove poetry from being a “set of aesthetic principles…[to being] a program of action” (Wojahan and Myers). To engage with Ginsberg’s work is a verb; an activity.

The content of Howl is similarly dense and thick with meaning. The poem refers primarily to the social order and era in which Ginsberg found himself. Many references are made to American locales, most notably the cities, in which the characters of the day are illustrated in their esoteric, harsh and drug-fuelled activities. Reference is, further, made to race, sexuality, politics, academia, music and various institutions, from mental hospitals to jails. The language of the academic is melded with the lingo of the street, and the jargon of the youth, to pack into the context the comprehension of the behaviour of the people represented. Cityscapes and scenes of debauchery are littered with religious connotation and spiritual references. The use of such juxtaposition in the line “the madman bum and the angel beat in Time” is arguably a reference that Ginsberg makes to himself, and the duality of his poetic nature. Divorcing the content from reason entirely in parts, Ginsberg tends to completely undermine the logical deductions a reader may make. This subversion of the process of analysis is further achieved by Ginsberg’s refusal to abide by traditional laws of grammar and sentence structure. Despite this, Ginsberg creates dialectic discourse between the crude and obscene, and the ephemerally beautiful and whimsical.

Ginsberg's undaunted use of love and sexuality, both homosexual and heterosexual, is an aspect of Howl that a large quantum of its early readers was disturbed by, and an area in which this atypical discourse is recognizable. Ginsberg treats the ideals roughly and often discourteously. The lines: “who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a packet of cigarettes [and] continued…with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness” are a principal example of this. Similarly, Ginsberg seems to blend his affirmations in the counter-culture of the Beats with the inextricable and ever-present classical past, accordingly this includes his approval of the former and his derision for the latter. Through intertwining the two concepts, Ginsberg forms an irony that establishes the importance of the past in the intensity of the poet’s present.

The fascinating dichotomy of the beautiful and the hideous is recurring, and employed repeatedly in Howl. Ginsberg uses this relationship to protest heartily against the exclusion of the “greatest minds”, as he perceives them, from the American ideal. In so doing, he serves to underscore his disdain for the culture, and his disillusionment with the establishment as a whole. Ginsberg continually emphasises that which is misaligned, which is misplaced, which is disjointed in the psycho-social realm of his reality. By bringing to the fore the harshest and most aesthetically displeasing imagery, social taboos and historical occurrences, he howls his lament, logically asserting the louder and longer the wail, the more people will respond.

Ginsberg begins every new line with the word “who”, a pronoun which has been explained to be an actual reference to people Ginsberg had heard of or knew personally. The word, however, extends to cause the reader to ponder whether every line is intended as a question. The rhetorical nature of these lines further encourages readers to think and consider who each of the individuals described in the lines may be; a challenge to the reader’s mind, and a tool that ensnares imaginations in an even more personal dialogue between reader and writer. “Who” is also visually akin to “howl”, this trait alone forming an ocular continuity from title to conclusion. What seems more remarkable about this relationship, however, is the phoneticism apparent in the pronunciation of the vowel in the word “who” and the sound of a literal howl. This assonantal representation elongates the cry aurally to the reader in a very tangible manner. Ginsberg relies heavily, but seemingly inadvertently, on alliterations and assonance, often repeating not only entire words continually in a single sentence, but sounds and beats from one to the next.

Ginsberg, interestingly, personifies concepts such as “Eternity” and “Time” in an almost traditional and Victorian way. He grants such ideals a sense of reification as the only real acknowledged entity as having some sort of dominance over him. “Time” is the only construct to which he apparently submits. Ginsberg uses metaphors at various other junctures too, however, referring to “the lamb stew of imagination” and “orange crates of theology”. The images implied are astounding and often startling, at once very direct and very vague. The phrases appear direct as the images evoked are very specific, yet simultaneously the unusual and unexpected combinations and constructions are so surmising, that the image that is eventually perceived is not at all familiar. The poet’s use of metaphor in such instances is noteworthy for comparison with the works of Kgafela oa Magogodi, a poet who personifies the very country in which he bases his poems.

Magogodi opens his poem not altogether differently than Ginsberg, also referring to the demise of his contemporaries, calling them “beautiful ones”. The imperative embodied in this revelation is the instinctual desire of the reader to rush to the aid of those in peril, or to somehow prevent this death. The word “dying” suggests a continual action, bringing the verb into present consideration and in so doing evokes a sense of immediacy in the reader. This urgency immediately catapults the reader to the place and time in which the poem is set, as it invokes the same sense of harried hustle and bustle as suggested by the soulless, dead streets which are “just machinery faking heartbeat”. Words such as “mad”, “electricity” and “crazy” furthermore contribute to the reader’s understanding of Magogodi’s setting and a particular state of consciousness is immediately summoned.

The arrangement of the poem is not as dense as that of Ginsberg’s work. The prose is, however, similarly dense, and again no line breaks are present. Instead, Magogodi’s poem snakes irregularly across and down the page, representative of the people hurrying along streets and indicative of increasing and decreasing decibel levels; creating visual noise. The lines also echo the city skyline as it riddles the horizon, interrupting the plane of the page as skyscrapers and towers do the sky.

Magogodi uses the content of his poem as a medium through which he specifically employs the city to offer “social and political commentary” (Mistry 53). Magogodi submerges himself in the excess of the city, walking metaphorically, but alarmingly convincingly, through the images he describes placing himself in the role of the first person actor. The visual and semantic content of the images described often present a hermeneutical challenge to the reader. The city’s avenues are so overloaded with imagined happenings that the reader is often stunned by the degree of fullness that one has to mentally wade through. In his article entitled “The 'Thing' and its Double”, Achille Mbembe makes reference to this city existence, and the metaphorical presence it has in language. Mbembe writes that the first grouping into which comprehension can be ordered is “overloading”; namely, “overloading of language, overloading of public transport, overloading of living accommodation…Here, everything leads to excess” (153). This occurrence leads to noise. The cacophony of imagery and interpretations that assail the reader’s senses in the reading of Magogodi’s poem are all indicative of what Mbembe calls a noise that “constitutes an aspect…of the culture itself” (153). The poet uses vivid adjectives, such as “diamond hugs” and “screaming soil”, and extreme forms of verbs such as in the line describing how “beautiful ones” that are referred to “marinate their souls”. This contributes to the sense of overloading, as the intensity of every hypernym exaggerates imagery and accumulates in the reader’s perception as the reader experiences the poem.

Like Ginsberg, Magogodi makes multiple references to sex and sexuality. Magogodi himself asserts the belief that “sexuality is an important aspect of identity” (Mistry 56). Perhaps it is this added ability of making the reader able to identify, that influences him to include the vast quantity of sexual imagery and metaphor that he does. Magogodi refers to the country as refusing to “take off /its clothes/ and show its unpublishable [p]arts”. The reference to the eroticism of nakedness is a nod to the prevalence of the solicitation of prostitution in the city, but more pertinently echoes Ginsberg’s own comments on the role of the poet; the role of appearing naked and revealing to the world what lies beneath.

As in Ginsberg’s work, Magogodi’s writing also represents a past disapproved of in parallel with an intense present. Jyoti Mistry calls this the capturing of the “multi-faceted nature of the city’s geographies, while alluding to its historical anchor” (54). His language is also multifaceted, as Ginsberg’s was, also combining modern imagery and colloquial phrases, with terminology and jargon that is industry-specific and expressions which are unique to Black culture in South Africa. The use of such interweaving of language captures the reader on a personal level and increases the sense of direct communication between the reader and Magogodi; an occurrence that was similarly experienced in the reading of Howl.

Beautiful ones are dying is written with an irregular internal rhyme scheme, rendering the poem reflective of a poetry slam. The beat that is invoked by this rhyming compels the reader's attention, but further resonates with the “[fake] heartbeat” of the city that Magogodi describes at the outset of the work. The use of repetition, for example of the phrase “my country” and the word “bum”, not only assists this meter and beat, but emphasises the poet’s attitude toward the socio-political climate in which the poem is set. Magogodi also uses repetition in an assonantal manner, most pertinently in the line that refers to “shack’s shackles”, which combined with the apparent alliteration invokes in the reader’s mind images of chains and restrictions on the individual. All of these auditory constructs create a work that is ripe with the music and thumping of a rant, of the rhythm of a uniquely African-style protest.

Both works of both poets are famed for their public performance as well as their literary contribution. Listening to the poem as spoken by its creator is an experience that speaks to the very heart of the audience. Far from the tangibility of text, which allows for reader manipulation and review, the performance provides an immediate, real-time and highly emotional interaction with the words. The focus thus shifts from the reader’s interpretation to the performer’s proclivity. Ginsberg’s rendition of  Howl is monotonous and repetitive at the outset, gaining pace as the spell of the poem grips the listener. This leads to the almost trance-like transcendence that overwhelms the audience, indicative of the drugged haze that seemed to be a perpetual element of the Beats’ existence. The auctioneer-like speed and rhythm which Ginsberg eventually reaches, suggests the lack of personal control Ginsberg has of his situation and his social context; it is ‘for sale’ and subject to being lost in transaction, and ultimately the individual with the most money owns the people. Magogodi’s performative rendition of beautiful ones are dying is worlds apart in its presentation. As part of the spoken word film "i mike what i like" (dir. Jyoti Mistry, 2006), the visuals present the viewer with images of the stage and traditional stage performance, and yet is uniquely film in its incorporation of editing and multiple forms of media to convey the poem’s meaning. The film opens with Magogodi himself typing the words of the poem on a traditional-style typewriter, but quickly proceeds to him reading the poem aloud to a painter, and finally sharing the words with a bassist. As he endeavours to reach ultimate expression through a combination of media, the words that were displayed while Magogodi was typing begin to diminish and eventually disappear. This is indicative of the truth that no medium is able to convey absolute meaning, and that which is lost in translation can never be regained. The filmed renditions of Magogodi’s poetry are also indicative of the overloading principle, as the audience is often subjected to numerous images in quick succession and the screen is filled with colours and figures and icons. The performances are similarly noisy in the audio sense, as Magogodi regularly combines his speech with the music of a jazz instrument.

Through the individual and group appeal apparent in these two poems, the outcry of generations is embodied, shared, echoed. Despite their entirely alternate realities, Kgafela oa Magogodi and Allen Ginsberg share a particular type of consciousness and poeticism. Their social commentary and jarring exposure of contemporary constructs leaves a lasting and moving impression on all and any who are victims of, and receivers of, their respective works.

 

Bibliography

Burt, Stephen. "The Paradox of Howl." 19 April 2006. 6 October 2010 <http://www.slate.com/id/2140162>.

Ginsberg, Allen. Extract from “Howl”. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Ed. Paul Hoover. New York: WW Norton and Co. Inc. 1994: 131 – 135.

Mbembe, Achille. "The 'Thing' & its Double in Cameroonian Cartoons." Readings in African Popular Culture (1997).

Mistry, Jyoti. "Johannesburg: Vocabularies of the Visceral and Expressions of Multiple Practises." African Cities Reader (2008).

Oa Magogodi, Kgafela. “beautiful ones are dying”. I mike what I like. South Africa: Laugh-it-Off Media, 2004: 112 – 115.

Schumcher, Michael. "Dharma Lion - A Biography of Allen Ginsberg." American Poets. 6 October 2010 <www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/howl.htm>.

Wojahan, David and Jack Myers. A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. USA: Southern Illinois University Publishers, 1991.

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