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.

Ideology…Que es eso?

Ideology is a confusing subject. I find the more I read about it the less I understand about it. I’m trying to find a theorist who makes a connection between emotion and political ideology, but the closest I can come to is Althusser. Not only do these theorists not really explain ideology in a satisfying way, but their explorations of the topic become progressively more and more convoluted the further away they move from Marx’s conception of it. Raymond Williams, for example, spends more time arguing about what ideology isn’t than what it is. This feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The best I can come up with, is that the affective side of ideology is sublimated in what both Marx and Williams argue as its nature as “false consciousness”, it is one of the factors that leads to ideology becoming a distortion, in contrast to “true scientific knowledge”. I disagree with this opposition (So does Althusser) basically because ideology as “anything other than science” makes little sense. First of all, the scientific method is not immune from being co-opted into the service of a political ideology, we see this as the case with the Eugenics movement and Nazism, which used scientific discoveries in the field of genetics and evolution as part of the basis for a political movement. Secondly, the scientific method itself can also become an ideology, as evidenced by the writings of Richard Dawkins and other rationalists who insist that the scientific method be not merely a platform of inquiry, but an entire worldview defining and delineating everything from the physical world to social relations to psychology and the metaphysical. While I wouldn’t go so far as to consider atheism a religion, I would definitely argue that its current manifestation in Dawkins’, Hitchens et. al. is an ideology. While religions and ideologies are similar in that they contain normative precepts, narratives and myths, they are not the same.

Althusser’s concept of ideology is more complete than this “negative definition”, while the French philosopher agrees with Marx that ideologies are “imaginary” rather than “real”, his definition of Ideology is as a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence” Althusser also sees a constant interrelationship between the individual and ideology, the former often being defined by his interaction with the latter. The “individual” becomes a “subject” through his movements inside the ideology.

This may be why political ideology has such a close relationship to both affect and morality. More on this later.

Jose Marti and Literature in Modernity

Julio Ramos’ study of the relationship between literature and politics in 19th Century Latin America explores a few particular conditions which I would consider as precursors to the 20th Century revolutionary poet’s concern with revolution as a vehicle for the emotional union of the poetic subject and the alienated polis. In particular, Ramos’ exploration of the social and cultural role of letters before and during the modern period aligns well with some of the other research I’ve done thus far, particularly Adorno’s idea of the poet as reacting against the reification of society. In particular, Ramos’ suggests that the modernizing project and its push towards rationalization and positivism in Latin America at the turn of the century as responsible for creating a space for literature by, ironically, systematically excluding it from the fields of knowledge.

And through a reversal or negative of the “logical man” the emergence of a literary space is brought into being, in a dialectic that distances literature from an earlier system of letters, now dominated by the will to rationalize. It is thus possible to think of Marti’s first book of poetry, Ismaelillo, as a foundational text for literary modernization –not only for its attention to language, which entails the rewriting of notably traditional forms, but also because Ismaelillo’s poetic practice is produced from a discursive field that has been rendered discrete from the disciplinary discourses of rationalization. Ismaelillo presuposes an other knowledge –that of the child, that of the oneiric vision –as the locus of a specifically imaginary, tied to leisure which in this instance serves as a refuge from a “punishing” rationalization. From this place, at once created and excluded by rationalization the new literary subject speaks; s/he upholds informality, indiscipline and at times even transgression and madness as ideals. (45)

Ramos later goes on to explain that the poetic subject would find his own authority in upholding a view dialectically opposed to the doctrine of rationalization, launching his critique from the domain of the “spiritual”, “emotional” and “imaginary”. Ramos places Marti at the centre of this trend, and indeed, to discuss the political use of love, Marti is a logical starting point. Ismaelillo, the book which imagines the poet as set apart, both chosen and cast out, as well as Versos Sencillos, the book that responds to political events in Cuba and the USA by seeking the spiritual values of purity, sincerity and love, demonstrate the genesis of a dialogic condition in Latin American poetry in which the rational sphere of the political is criticized from the arational sphere it itself created by exclusion, and in which the arational discursive realm which poetry defends as its own autonomous platform is dependent on its conflict with the same modernizing process in order to justify its existence. We see this condition progressing into the realm of social protest poetry in the latter part of the 20th century. Ramos:

The literary critique of modernization would allow literature to widen its influence over public life, particularly after 1898 and the emergence of Latin Americanism. Precisely by means of its claim to autonomy from economic power, literature would become the fundamental vehicle for an anti-imperialist ideology, defining the Latin American “being/identity” through its opposition to the modernity of “them”: the United States or England.

The question arises then of whether social protest poetry after modernism differs from its Romantic counterpart not merely because of its aesthetics or ideology, but also because of the position from which it speaks? The Romantics spoke from the center of authority, using literature to consolidate the discourse of hegemonic forces, but after modernism, the poet became disconnected from the sphere of power and pushed to the margins. While both engage with political problems and solutions, one does it from the inside, while the other does it from the outside.

More on Political Ideology and Affect

While there has been research done on the psychoanalytic link to ideology (Marx’s own theories include such ideas as “false consciousness” and “fetishization”), but also by Althusser, Gramsci, Zizek and Jameson, as far as I know the link between affect and ideology is only now starting to become explored, this will be an important aspect of my thesis since part of my argument is that the medium of poetry refocuses the left’s discourse beyond the mere distribution of resources. Through poetry, Revolution is conceived as the means to attain a type of spiritual union and purity. The ultimate actualization of “love”.

It is thus important to look at the way modalities of affective experience and activity, (emotional responses) are “laid out” in particular political ideologies. In the previous post I mentioned that affective experiences are polarized along two lines in political ideologies that which is “acceptable” and “rejectable”. In the debate I was in, the person in question was a Conservative Catholic for whom abortion was simply the “sumum malum” of human activity. He was arguing against a moderate Catholic blogger who frequently compares the left’s willingness to justify abortion as a human right, with the right’s willingness to justify torture. For the left, torture and war crimes constitute the “sumum malum” of human activity. The way affect and its moral discourse is organized in both of these political ideologies, these “summum malum” provide orientation points for emotional responses. For a leftist, the absolute worst thing a person can do is dehumanize and abuse someone, for the rightist, the absolute worst thing a person can do is kill a baby in the womb. Thus feelings of horror, anger and rejection are pinned to these sumum malum, feelings of acceptance radiate outward from these suma mala to anything in opposition. Hence the truism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Followers of two different ideologies tend to look upon each other with more tolerance if the two have a similar “sumum malum”, even if most of the particular matter in their ideological systems are different or even in opposition (hence the strange bedfellowing between islamists and the militant left, both of which perceive US economic hegemony as a “sumum malum”)

The revolutionary poet experiences in a kind of Dantesque journey, a descent into the very core of the sumum malum and then an ascent to its opposite: Marti, Neruda and Vallejo, dredge the darkness of human corruption and inhumanity, a darkness which according to Jorge Ramos, is the creation of a rationalistic mercantile world, and one in which the poet is placed in square opposition. The ascent leads them to the spiritual ideals of love, purity, art and community.

I need to explore this theory more…