Ernesto Cardenal’s Epigramas: The Claudia Poems (part 1)

Te doy, Claudia, estos versos, porque tú eres su dueña.
Los he escrito sencillos para que tú los entiendas.
Son para ti solamente, pero si a ti no te interesan,
un día se divulgarán tal vez por toda Hispanoamérica

According to Achugar’s thesis, the syntax of poems within a poetic text tells us something about how the poems themselves should be read. This is immediately clear in Ernesto Cardenal’s Epigramas whose first three poems are all addressed to the same woman, “Claudia” and demonstrate a progression from intimate language to public language which is reiterated throughout the text. The Claudia poems set the tone for how throughout the Epigramas intimate love becomes discursive and then interacts with politics. For Cardenal, intimate communication, either through conversation or through the writing of love poems is always problematic, due to the intrusion of the state or the hostile environment for lovers created by class divisions.

In this first poem, the lyrical speaker intends the epigram as an intimate communication between the loving subject and the loved object. He writes them for her, “Tú eres su dueña¨ and fashions them out of a simple and direct language so that she would understand them. The potential reticence of the beloved, however, creates an obstacle whose result, strangely enough, converts a private communication a public one. This is emphasized by the centralization of the conjunction “pero” in the third line. The verses meant as private correspondence from lover to beloved (epi-stole) are stopped at this conjunction and diverted outward into public communication (epi-gram).

By moving beyond the personal into public discourse, the poems reach expand their level of effectiveness. They are able to inspire love in not one person but many, both other women who might be receptive to the poet´s feelings “otras” as well as other couples who may come together in “kisses awakened”. The poet, thus, compensates for the miscommunication and rejection by creating a lovers discourse which instead of being private, becomes public, integrated into the collective and accessible to all those who want it. On the level of politics, love will also extend beyond erotic couples to the larger territories of nation and region. Cardenal’s use of the term Hispanoamérica, instead of América Latina or even América –a term which the Latin American Left commonly uses to challenge the United States’ symbolic appropriation of the region through its name—places a strong emphasis on language and through it discourse as a common, a linguistic space connecting disparate regions to each other. The loving communication will move along the discursive space and to connect with others.

This transformation from personal love to public love language is reemphasized in the other two Claudia poems where the lover’s discourse begins to become part of the discourse of the nation. In “Cuidate Claudia…” Claudia´s personal habits “el gesto más leve” “la palabra” “el menor descuido” become fodder for study and parts of public memory. The political undertones of this poem are interesting. Claudia has become the subject of public scrutiny. Her every gesture, even those which are done carelessly or in intimate company, is potentially historicized, inscribed with public and temporal significance. She is discursive, an ideological subject in the Althusserian sense whose being is no longer private, but fully and indivisibly public. Similarly, in the third Claudia poem, (De estos cines) this transformation is extended to the elements of the courtship between her and the poet, the trips to the cinema and parties and horse-races.

These activities also seem to be both mindless distractions and indicators of the social milieu in which Claudia moves. These elements of her public identity as a classed ideological subject are removed in a discursive purification process. One is immediately reminded of Neruda’s “Los Versos del Capitán” in which the beloved who used to be the “compañera del baile” who used to dance “con su traje de seda en la sala” is called to rip apart her dancing shoes on the march. Claudia is essentially a party girl. Her romantic life occurs in a series of territories where love is replaced by entertaining performances and substitutions, films (where love is a literal performance) parties (a public terrain where performances of flirtation begin the love process) and horse races (which simulate sexual pursuit). These elements of an ideological identity, one which implies a class division and thus a barrier between the poet and his love-object are obliterated in the lover’s discourse which the poet commands.

In this third Claudia poem we see the beginning of a theme which will continue to manifest throughout the text, the confusion and blending of the figure of the ingrata or belle dame sans merci the reticent, cruel or disinterested beloved with the tyrant Somoza and the poet´s political enemies. This is one of the particular ways in which Cardenal expresses the fusion of the lover’s discourse with the discourse of history. “ y el nombre de Claudia que yo puse en esos versos/y los de mis rivales, si es que yo decido rescatarlos/del olvido, y los incluyo también en mis versos/para ridiculizarlos” In these lines Cardenal fuses the name of his beloved with the names of his enemies through a series of clauses beginning with the conjunction “y” which serves to create an equivalence between both groups. The only slight differentiation between them is that the one is named, the others have not yet been (and may not be). This creates two different types of discourse-level punishment which the poet metes out to those who betray him. The one who seeks to be forgotten will live in infamy; the other who seeks to be remembered will be forgotten. All of them will made objects of ridicule, in Dantesque fashion, in inverse relation to their ambitions.

The confusion of the tirano and the ingrata reappears constantly occurring at several discursive levels. It´s interesting to note that the two aphorisms which appear in the book, “Tú no escaparás de mis yambos” and the second “Tú no mereces ni siquiera un epigrama” could be addressed to both Somoza or the poet’s beloved, as the Tú is condemned but not identified. Both Cardenal´s poems in condemnation of Somoza and those in reference to his spurned love apply the Yo-Tú discursive model, in which the Tú is characterized as ambitious or arrogant:

Tú que estás orgullosa de mis versos
Pero no porque yo los escribí
Sino porque los inspiraste tú:
Y a pesar de que son contra ti.
Tú pudiste inspirar mejor poesía
Tú pudiste inspirar mejor poesía.

Unlike Neruda who often separates intimate from political poems in poemarios in which both are explored –In both Los Versos del Capitán and Cien sonetos de amor for example, politically oriented verse is given a chapter of its own— Cardenal blends political and amorous epigrams together, failing to establish any difference between the two so that certain epigrams and aphorisms addressed to “Tú” as in the above example in which the poems are described as written “against you” can be read as either addressed to the ingrata, or Somoza:

Este será mi venganza
Que un día llegue a tus manos el libro de un poeta famoso
Y leas estas líneas que el autor escribió para ti
Y tú no lo sepas.

In this epigram, the “ti” is not specified by any markers of gender or relation to the poet, making both readings not only possible, but very much intended. The beloved who spurned the poet and the tyrant who oppressed him are both avenged by receiving the lines of a famous poet of whom they inspired. These lines may be insults and criticisms or statements of love. In the first case, the tyrant is being insulted without realizing it. In the second the beloved is being flattered unknowingly. Once again discursive punishment is being meted out through naming and un-naming, the one is being remembered and snickered about behind his back, the other is being prevented from receiving the ego-boosting benefits of flattery.

Here we see in action not only Barthes notion of a lover´s discourse in which discursive fragments generated by poetry are disseminated into a larger social discourse but also Octavio Paz´s belief that poetry severs an experience from the spatio-temporal circumstances which surround it and allow it to “remain alive” in an intemporal poetic realm until it is evoked again in other circumstances. Indeed, as Urdivinia suggests, Cardenal’s poems exhibit a consciousness of the work of art as something which transcends the circumstances in which it was created. Paz’ concepts provide an apt reflection of Cardenal’s discursive activities in Epigramas. Paz describes the poem as “consecrating” a privileged instant, a particular moment in time which is, by being enshrined in the poetic word, anointed with an especial light and separated from the chronological flow of time. This moment then remains living in the poem as “un instante henchido de toda particularidad irreductible y es perpetuamente susceptible de repetirse en otro instante, de re-engendrarse e iluminar con su luz nuevos instantes, nuevas experiencias” (233). For Paz, the poem is thus a temporal fragment which contains a whole world. Cardenal, very clearly applies this concept of poetry in Epigramas as a kind of warning to both his loves and his political enemies, that as a poet he has a privileged relationship with discourse, and through discourse, history itself.

Achugar, Castillo and the problem of the Book of poems

Well, as of January 1st I am officially on pregnancy leave from my PhD work until the following year. Thus I am not permitted to do any more work on my thesis until then, or even get in touch with my advisor. It’s hard for me to just do nothing, however, knowing that when the baby is born that writing time (and sleeping time) is going to be a much more precious commodity. What I am going to do is blog on the readings in the meantime to at least keep my research muscles warm and to create a series of notes that I can use when I do actually start my research up again. It’s not like UBC can stop me from reading (can they?)

I’ve come up against a rather interesting problem regarding how to approach source material with one particular poet. Hugo Achugar’s much cited article the book of poems as a social act has been the basis of my decision to focus on books of poems rather than individual pieces. Achugar’s essay focuses on the book of poems (particularly the books of poems produced at the end of the 19th c.) as a total and consciously articulated ideological product, one which is “marked in its discourse by the process and conditions of production” and “comprised of not only the poems themselves….but also….title, epigraph, date, place of publication, visual design and choice of typography, illustrations and printer’s mark”. These elements external to the poems themselves are particularly relevant in the case of works distributed in war conditions (he uses Vallejo’s España as an example) or books distributed in the underground (as Neruda´s Canto General was originally). In addition, Achugar also points to the syntax of the individual poems, or in the way in which the author organizes the book as a part of this totality.

This certainly applies to texts such as Belli´s Línea de fuego in which there is a definite progression from a collective vision of love to an intimate vision, in Cardenal´s Epigramas in which the three poems dedicated to Claudia describe a process of collectivization of the intimate which is taken up in the later works. In the same poet´s Salmos the Psalms are in laid out in numeric order and involve the conscious selection of a specific type of Psalm form (psalms of supplication) among the various types.

Indeed, the tendency of poetic criticism has generally favoured the individual poem over the book, using the book as merely an temporal and spatial marker in order to provide some sense of context (the where and when of each poem) a process which, by the way, fails in Cardenal simply because the publication of his poems in book form had little relationship to when they were written. Achugar´s approach challenges this tendency by suggesting that the author´s choices in the organization of his poetry book are as much a reflection of social reality as the content of the poems themselves. This is an approach I really want to experiment with, and see if poetry criticism can be done this way without sacrificing attention to the text itself.

Now the problem arises when one comes up against a poet whose work was published in book form only posthumously. Such is the case with the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo, who I´m considering adding. Castillo, like Gioconda Belli often fuses intimate love and revolutionary concerns together in a way that is almost seamless and would be an interesting poet to compare in relation to Belli, since he as well as Belli writes from guerrilla ideals. Cardenal and Zurita´s approaches are both more intellectual and theological. I like the balance of four poets instead of three, two from the fifties and sixties, and two from a generation later. Castillo, however, is a poet whose work only seems to exist in anthology form. Castillo was murdered by Guatemalan death squads at a very young age, and as far as I know never published a collection himself. This presents an interesting problem. Any collections of his work that exist do so because of the interpretive and organizing work of those who put together poetry anthologies, usually anthologies of revolutionary or political poems. Thus the ideological orientation of the anthology editors and translators have a role in which poems get published and how they are organized (and received). This reminds me of how Pinochet´s dictatorship used to allow Victor Jara´s songs to be sold in anthological discs which excluded any political songs (Luchin yes, El aparecido no).

It seems like Otto Rene Castillo is a good poet to bring to light because of the scarcity of material by and about him. In spite of this scarcity his influence on Central American poetics is remarkable. This will be an interesting problem to work with.

Love Brainstorm

I haven’t posted much on my LA blog lately, but as my defense is tomorrow and I’m preparing my presentation for it I’ve gone back over some theory and I wrote a couple of brainstorms on love. A lot of it is poetically driven but I’ll tailor it later:

Love

Love is subjective: it involves emotions and feelings resonating within individuals. Love requires a “loving subject” and a “loved object”, correlaries of one another. The loving subject recognizes the presence of the other, the presence of the other as not the self, and is intrigued, experiences desire. Irigaray and the notion of love as submitting the other (the ”te” in “je t’aime” is a direct object not an indirect one) rather than travelling back and forth from subject to other and back again. The subject of love, the loving subject, is he or she who is the “I” of the love experience. All lovers are loving subjects and loved objects. Both simultaneously if they are lucky. The poet in-love, besides a loving subject is also a discursive subject. He is the romantic hero, the lyrical speaker, the I of the poem. He is the axis around which revolves the cycle. He orchestrates the loving affects of himself and the other (Deleuze and Guattari again Romanticism is the voice of the earth) He is in a position of power. Neruda’s “yo” is never the voice of the people, it is always the voice of “Neruda as the voice of the people”. Gioconda Belli on the other hand seems to have a more permeable “yo”. It is a “yo” that sees, touches, tastes and experiences the other joyfully while imposing very little on it.

Love is communitarian: Every love experience requires an “other” (Garcia article) even narcissism requires a mirrored reflection of the self upon which to project feelings. Love is an arrow nocked and pointing away from the self. The other is indispensible, even as she is sublimated into the emotional storm of the love experience. Love is the way in which the self opens to another and the way in which it establishes a territory (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘s description of the Sonata as a call and answer). Love involves the progressive construction of a territory, (the subject, couple, the family, the community, the nation. In heterosexual couples this can become a direct single-lineation. In other types of couplings this lineation can bypass the genetic element of family creation into community through other pathways. Catholicism tries to clean up the lines so that love becomes integrated at every level of the life-cycle, comb the lines straight and smooth like a little girl’s hair. All babies are born to parents who love each other and are born out of that love, they expand that love within the family outward to the community, then the nation, then the kingdom of God) Cardenal sees the revolutionary nation as love’s territory.

Loving the nation: What is the loved object in patriotism?. Is it a real object or an imaginary one (Anderson) is it an intangible object or a fluid one? Is the loved object always fluid in the mind of the loving subject? It varies as in marriage when one spouse surprises another by pulling out a sudden new or previously unknown element of her personality) the human being is itself a fluid thing, developing new characteristics in response to a fluid reality and dropping old ones like a snake sheds its skin. What does it mean to love one’s nation in this way? What does one specifically love about one’s nation?
Revolutionary discourse is informed at every level by love. But what is the loved object in revolutionary discourse? The revolution itself? Revolution is merely a transition not a fixed thing, though it may also be a territory. There are no permanent revolutions, a revolution involves a change from one system to another, from one form of government to another. The potential new nation that will be created? Revolution then would conceive itself as the courtship between the revolutionary and the new nation?
Love is discursive: Love is articulated in language through utterance, is injected into social discourse through the medium of poetry. Deleuze and the creation of a territory, the bird repeats its song to establish its territory. Love as an enormous discursive territory, Songbirds in isolation piece together their own songs from songs of others, so lovers (and poets) piece together a territory of discourse from fragments of social discourse (Barthes: “syntactic arias” Deleuze and Guattari’s construction of milieus from fragments of other milieus ). In the film “Il postino” Mario uses fragments of Pablo Neruda’s poetry to express his love to Beatriz. So do lovers speak to each other in the fragments they retrieve from love’s discursive territory, the only difference between Mario and other lovers is that Mario draws his fragments from one source (Neruda) while most lovers draw theirs from multiple deterritorialized sources. These arias not only shape the way in which loving subject and love object communicate with one another, they serve to shape the affect in the mind of the loving subject (Barthes again) (return to the subjective:….perhaps we might see this as a love-cycle: subject-community-discourse-subject)

Thoughts on love

While cleaning the stove I came up with some thoughts on love which I don’t know where to put in my proposal. So for now they are going up on the blog until I can figure out where to put them:

Love can be either erotic (self-centered) or Sacrificial (other centered). In the first the subject seeks to shape the other to his desire and bring her into himself, the first activity is a means by which he atttains the second. (Full union, and yet contradictorily a union in which the other, not the self is lost) Neruda is all over this. Gioconda Belli too, to a certain degree. In the second the subject seeks to become sublimated into the other, to be come integrated with the other by “losing himself” so that the other will become stronger. This is what Che Guevara refers to as his “Revolutionary love”. This seems to be what Neruda is looking for in “the heights of Macchu Picchu but attains the opposite”.

Finally love is also dialectical in that it is set up as an alternative space from which society is criticized. Love is the disinterested ideal relationship (something for nothing) which casts a shadow over the “interested” relations of society (something for something). Although this sounds like a modern phenomenon, (pitting love against the industrialized market economy) This is not a new idea. Judeo-Christian theology explores this idea constantly in the dichotomy of the bride-harlot. The “bride” represents the faithful who gives herself to the God who gives Himself to her in an act of mutual disinterest. The harlot is the idol-worshipper who turns to false gods for personal and political benefit. The bride and the harlot are pitted against each other constantly, the former of God, the latter of the World. All of Judeo Christian theology can be summed up in the book of Hosea in which God tries to turn the harlot into the bride and keeps getting left at the altar for someone with more money (so to speak).

Now where to put this…..

I Love Terry Eagleton…part deux

Terry Eagleton has once again saved my ample grad-student behind. This guy really merits at least a fan-club. After all, how many Christian Marxist literary critics are there?

In exploring the concept of political poetry, I keep running into the Latin American equivalent of the Brecht Lukacs debate over the nature and aesthetics of political art. Can an experimental art form such as avant-garde poetry be political? or does its experimental nature make it reactionary and accessible only to a restricted, highly educated elite group of homo-sapiens. Then of course there is Adorno, who seems to suggest that all poetry is political because it is through poetry that the alienated subject protests, directly or indirectly the condition of his alienation.

This is all well and good, but where does that leave the poets who actually choose to write about the social conditions they live in often at great personal risk? Aren’t they at least more political than those who write poems about swans and princesses? To say that all poems are political might be an afront to the swan-princess people who get annoyed about people forcing a reading into their poems that doesn’t exist. As it is irrational to say that poetry is not political at all because all poets are foofy dandies who sit and ponder the meaning of life while the rest of us are busy getting shot. Juan Gelman puts it thusly “ningun endecasilabo ha derribado a ningun dictador o burocrata”/ no endecasyllable has ever brought down a dictator or a bureaucrat.”

And then Terry Eagleton comes along with a revolutionary (pardon the pun) idea. Maybe poetry is political when it purposefully tries to be, and isn’t when it doesn’t. Common Sense, once again, not so common.

Insofar as “superstructural” is a functional term, we cannot simply read off, in the manner of a strong epistemological realism, what is superstructural and what is not. Something can be made superstructural, focused and defined as such by the contention of political forces; and to this extent my case gives some comfort to the pragmatists. But since I also want to maintain that the functional use of the term “superstructure” answers to some definite social reality, to that degree I want to preserve a certain realism. (475)

Eagleton’s idea combines the pragmatic view, i.e, political poetry is political when its written to criticize social conditions, with the realist view, political poetry is political when it discusses political realities. In other words, its aestheticism is not the defining factor, the defining factor is its raison d’etre, why was it written? to whom? what does it describe?

Go figure…

Break Time: ……Not impressed

As all my writing time is being taken up with my thesis proposal, I haven’t been on the blog much. Today as I was re-reading Che Guevara’s “Man and Socialism” I came back to this passage which I felt (emphasize felt) the need to comment on…off the record:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the great dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice. (352)

This quote is of course “the” Che quote. If you put “Che” and “revolution” and “love” into yon Google machine, this is the quote that gets spat out, usually stuffed in the middle of a worshipful essay or website or book—Paolo Freire, I’m looking in YOUR direction. In fact this was what gave me my thesis idea in the first place (that and Neruda’s “solitude and solidarity” quote from his Nobel lecture)

Now I’m not a Che hater, nor a Che lover. I was a Che lover briefly after seeing “The motorcycle diaries”, but I think what I was experiencing was more a reaction to Gael Garcia Bernal. That guy is so good looking it actually hurts to gaze upon him. (I know, to each his own, I also felt that way about Steve Perry of Journey). Actually, there’s no way you can’t not love Che in “The Motorcycle Diaries” where he is literally portrayed as a saint. It inspired me to come up with the term “Chagiography” . This quote, however, is actually quite disturbing when you read it carefully.

What Che is suggesting is that revolutionary love must become completely impersonal. There is something very wrong with this idea. “Impersonal love” or “the disassociated love of an ideal” doesn’t pass the first battery of tests. Love ceases to live as soon as you yank it out of the ground of the personal. Ideal love is not love, its a bad copy of love. Not only is it fuzzy and undefined, it leads to high ideals and colossal failures. Che for example was married twice and left both of his families in order to pursue his “Revolutionary” ideals. So while he was espousing self-sacrifice on a massive scale, he was unable to do so in one of the most important areas of his personal life. This was because he pushed love completely out of the realm of “personal affections”.

“Personal affections” are the beginning and end of love. One who claims to be a “lover of humanity” and yet is unable to help out on the micro-level by bringing food to the starving, by visiting a sick person, or take the kids for a walk to give the wife a break, loses the “lover of humanity” title. End of story. In the Christian view of things, this explains why Jesus didn’t just go around telling people “hey you, love each other ‘kay?” then went home, had Mary cook him a nice dinner and take a nap. He actually made love personal through these domestic acts, feeding people, cleaning them, talking to them, sitting with them. Jesus’ acts of love were both highly personal (addressed to individuals and their individual circumstances) and yet also public (meant to teach and instruct others about the love of God).

I know this has nothing to do with my thesis, and I think it qualifies as a rant, or at least a theology lesson. But its something I needed to get off my chest.

Back to work…

Whose Martí?

I’ve been a bit distant from the blog this week because I was working on putting the finishing touches on my article for publication, this was the article on Mysticism I presented in Montreal three weeks ago, if anyone wants to read it the Hispanic Baroque research group at McGill University has posted it on their website:Check it out, warning it is in Spanish

I’ve been preparing the longer version to send for publication but I am a little perfectionist and anxious about it, which is why I am still working on it. (I actually should have sent it off 10 days ago) but since I am not “officially” starting my thesis proposal until tomorrow, I could sweat about it a little more. Actually it is looking pretty good. I wrote this as a paper for a course last year but now it actually looks like a paper. We’ll see what the RCEH says.

I’ve started to do some research on José Martí, since he is going to be the key figure in my thesis (as the one who concretized the idea of disinterested love and social engagement as fundamental aspects of the Latin American writer). What is humorous about this, is out of the four books I’m reading on Martí, three of them are “affectively driven”, writing not to analyze Martí, but to praise and laud him. The most interesting part of this is that two of the three are written from opposite sides of the Cuban revolutionary divide. Eduardo Lolo’s book Después del rayo y del fuego written from an anticastrista perspective, claims that Martí’s dream of a Free Cuba was ultimately thwarted by the Castro and the Cuban Revolution, while El ideario literario y estético de José Martí by Hans-Otto Dill, claims Martí as one of Latin America’s first socialists:

Se puede decir que Martí ha sido un “Socialista utópico pero combativo” cuyos conceptos sociales radican en la tradición del socialismo anarquizante de España (33)

What’s surprising is the fervor with which Martí is claimed by both groups, by the former because of his support for Cuban democracy, by the latter because of his anxieties regarding the USA and the potential for it to become an imperial power. This is an excellent example of the affective schema of political ideology at work. Both positions are anachronistic. Martí’s support for democracy and his antiamericanism occurred in a specific historical context, namely a desire to see Cuba free from Spanish Colonial dominion and his fears that the United States, who had become a powerful industrialized country, would look to consolidate its power by annexing the southern nations. Yet for the anti-castristas, Martí, in spirit, is on their side in the fight against totalitarianism, while for the other side, Martí would praise the Cuban Revolution as the ultimate realization of his vision. Because he was pro-democracy in 1895, he would have to be in 1959, because he was anti-American in 1895, he would have to be in 1959. Never mind the fact that the goalposts have completely shifted (as happens with political ideology…American suffragettes at the turn of the century were completely against abortion, now it has become THE defining question of feminism, to be against it is to be a “misogynistic, evil, woman-oppressing, assbasket who doesn’t deserve to live”).

What political ideology seems to do is strip-mine history in order to derive the elements it needs to form its affective schema. Earlier I referred to how feeling creates spaces or holes in time, so that a person can occupy several time periods at once. Ideology sifts and separates historical matter into a binary structure of affective components (acceptance/rejection), obliterating the temporal distance between them and severing its synchronic connections, thus Marti becomes a de-facto supporter of Castro even though Communism wasn’t even a blip on the political radar screen at the time.

I really want to work this theory, but it may not be possible since I have nothing to back it up, its all conjecture and it seems to apply more to political ideology nowadays in North America, than to the political experience in Latin America during the Cold War.

The Althusserian Subject

Subjectivity takes on a whole new meaning when Althusser gets a hold of it. This is what happens when I assume something to be simple, some theorist comes along and makes it a lot more complicated.

Actually Althusser’s take on the subject of the subject works well with what I want to do, since he looks at the subject as defining itself in its interaction with ideology. Althusser differentiates between “individual” and “subject”, the latter being what occurs as the former is interpellated by ideology. The individual becomes a subject by acting and interacting within the ideology (such as in the action of shaking hands or saluting someone, or by standing and kneeling during mass at the appropriate times).

What Althusser doesn’t deal with much is how ideologies shape not only the actions and interactions of the subject but also his emotional responses and moral judgments: the flare of temper a women’s studies student experiences while driving past a pro-life rally, the elation experienced by American expats watching the election of Barack Obama, the way a scathing diatribe by Ann Coulter would be “woohooed” by the same person who would accuse Bill Maher of being an intolerant bigot for spouting a diatribe with a comparable offensive/polite ratio, in Latin America, why some people lept up and down with joy and broke out the bubbly when Pinochet died, (Ariel Dorfman jumped out of the shower and called all of his friends apparently) while others wept as though they had lost a member of their family. Why some Chileans have no problem saying with a straight face “Thank God Pinochet prevented a horrible dictatorship”.

Is it because, as Althusser suggests, that their particular ideology is woven into their own concept of themselves as subjects to such a degree that there is no “outside” of ideology? The only “outside” of ideology would seem to be “another” ideology. That ideology is the space in which subjects interact with one another and with the conditions of their existence. The problem with “another” ideology is that that ideology often provides the Other for an ideology to define itself (conservative defines itself by being “not liberal” or “anti-liberal” “atheist” defines itself by being “not-theist”) thus the subjects of ideology A, looking at the subjects of ideology B come to two conclusions, that ideology A is the true good and right ideology (hence not an ideology at all, but the Real) and subjects of ideology B are either delusional or morally suspect, because if they were not delusional, or if they were good people, they would be members of ideology A.

Thus an affective schema is created inside of an ideology which governs how its members relate to one another (as friends) and to outside members (as suspect). It’s a kind of affective shortcut, and I would like to say a false one, but that creates an unnecessary truth value. Maybe I could say its an affective schema which only applies inside the ideology but changes once the ideology changes.

Maybe…

Hold the phone….

Just as I’m about to leave a google brings me to this blog here

This guy, a PhD student from University of Waterloo is working on this same issue but as it relates to ideology and cognition rather than affect. He is using Turner and Fauconnier’s theory of Mental Spaces. I am going to read more about this and I will comment later.

Feeling and Time

Raymond Williams’ essay on the “structure of feeling” fixates on the idea of feeling as a fluid modality of embodied experience, primarily linked to the present. This is, in some ways, similar to Joseph Vendryes theory of affective language in which he characterizes the future tense as more affective than the past, due to the former’s being in the process of formation and open to the vagaries of subjective experience. While I don’t know if the notion of temporality will come up in my thesis, it has long been an interest of mine and it has been the subject of a chapter in my Masters’ thesis as well as two graduate essays, one on Borges and another on Ernesto Cardenal and liberation theology which is still in the works. In the paper I wrote on Isabel Allende I discussed the relationship between affect and time explaining affect as an element which collapses time into circular or monumental temporalities (Allende does this in order to collapse the relationship between cause and effect and link together all of the violent actions in the novel from the rape of Pancha Garcia to the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime. In her own way Allende seems to take the Latin American concept of alternative temporality to launch a critique of history from a moral position) It’s interesting however, that both Williams and Vendryes seem to perceive the past as being emptied of affect by virtue of being made objective (through writing) rather than lived in the moment. Julia Kristeva makes the interesting point in her essay “Women’s Time” that certain affective experiences such as trauma and hysteria are relived cyclically and monumentally, in other words the rupture created by the trauma creates a repetition in time in which the event is re-lived over and over again as “present”. In this sense, “ruptures” experienced in the past often leave behind an affective imprint can cause them to be re-awakened by an encounter with certain spaces (Kristeva explains that hysteria is often linked to place).

Strangely enough, I had an experience which confirmed this idea recently during my trip to Montreal. I lived in the city from 2002-2004, but I haven’t returned there since moving back to BC in 04 to do my Masters. During the 3 days I was there I found myself overwhelmed by memories of my time there, and at the same time these memories brought back not only mental images, but some very strong emotions. At one point it seemed to me that I was inhabiting two time-periods simultaneously. Walking along St. Denis, it was present myself of 31 years old, fairly stabilized by life experience, but it was also myself at the age of 24 haunted by keening insecurities and an inordinate share of self-absorbtion. Both of us were sharing the same space as if I were walking over myself, on my own footprints. It was a very Borgesian experience to say the least, (it reminded me of that poem of his where he returns to the neighbourhood of his childhood and it becomes a meditation on the cyclical nature of time), but the collapsing of time occurred not as a result of returning to a remembered space, but of inhabiting the affective imprint of that space which immediately made it “present” even as it was “past”. (much of the issues in my life that were at that time have long since been resolved and overcome).

Thus affect seems to create these subjective time-holes, which one might be prone to sinking through (after awhile I just couldn’t take it anymore, I was happy to go home) into which the past and present collapse into each other. Perhaps in a sense Williams isn’t wrong, then, since the imprints of feeling on the past bring it to the present. Still there is something interesting here.

Actually I could bring this into my thesis since Neruda’s experience of Macchu Pichu is precisely a collapsing of time (though it might be a contrived one since the Chilean poet doesn’t ACTUALLY embody the experience of the builders of the city, but rather he invents it (‘cuz you know the Incas were proto-socialist right???)

I love Terry Eagleton

And not just because of the way he nicely julienned Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” demonstrating that being a religious person doesn’t necessarily mean crouching in the dirt waiting for the rapture. (I really dislike Dawkins, not so much for his being a non-theist as for his being just a general asshole.) I love how he is able to distill the subtlety and complexity of social theory into a readable form without necessarily stripping away any of the subtlety of the arguments. His book “Ideology: An Introduction” is something of a lifesaver. There have been voluminous amounts of texts written about political ideology, including theories that suggest (as he indicates in the introduction) that we are now living in a “post-ideological” society. Eagleton separates the wheat from the chaff, in other words the feasible and logical theories with a grounding in epistemological reality from the bat-crazy ones which were probably written by either overzealous grad students trying to get grants or overzealous professors trying to get tenure.

I don’t know if I will end up using his book in my thesis directly. There are some problems with this text. In trying to argue for the ubiquitousness of ideology and the fact that people often perceive ideology as something external to their own beliefs, -he compares ideology to halitosis in that respect- he often shows himself somewhat blind to his own ideological leanings, which come across in his commentaries on certain religious groups or historical events. He IS a leftist thinker after all. Also he occasionally simplifies concepts a little too much and his analogies, while useful in laying out complex ideas get tiresome and repetitive after awhile. Still I think I will use this book as a reference guide. I find that Jameson and Althusser’s ideas on ideology relate more to the topic I want to discuss. Actually I find Althusser’s concept closest to my own understanding of the term.