5

March 1, 2010

What Religion and everyone else needs to learn from the internet

Found a great essay last night, a review of a recent book by Frances Ferguson,  a professor of English at Hopkins.

COLBEY EMMERSON REID York College of Pennsylvania

WHAT PORNOGRAPHY CAN TEACH RELIGION

A review of Frances Ferguson’s Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.181 pp. $18 paper. ISBN 0-226-24321-4.

"MOST THEORIES OF PORNOGRAPHY ARE PLAGUED by a noble stupidity that can’t see what it most wants.1 The harder theorists of pornography think, the more they miss the point— the point almost always being that pornography only exists in the absence of thought. As the source of an anti- Cartesian pleasure interrupted by neither studium nor punctum, nothing—not “education,” not “discovery” (28)—ought to “prick” or “bruise” (26) the smooth progress of sexual delight.2 Theories of pornography, nevertheless, regardless of whether they derive from postmodernism, feminism, or religion, insist upon treating pornography metaphysically, aiming to identify “what pornography is” (35) in order to decide whether they are “for” or “against” that thing.3 Yet surely metaphysics is what a form dedicated to perspicuous visibility is supposed to elude. It is therefore no small irony that what may well be the first scholarly account of pornography loyal to the spirit of pornography comes in the deceptively sexless packaging of a book about utilitarianism, a philosophical position best, if somewhat mistakenly, known for deriving the moral calculus that traded the pleasure of the individual for the greatest good of the greatest number."

©2005 Colbey Emmerson Reid. All rights reserved. Reid, Colbey Emmerson. “What Pornography Can Teach Religion.” Journal for Cultural and Religious

Theory vol. 6 no. 2 (Spring 2005): 109-116. PURL: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.2/reid.pdf

Ferguson sees pornography as a literary form--an action “irresolvable into principles” & hence against and free from the charges leveled by social and moral and religious constructions against it---in other words the case of Madame Bovary models how to understand pornography.   She gives the most interesting take on Sade that I have ever seen----but then I have not studied much about Sade, so my ignorance is vast; nevertheless, enjoy this passage:

"Ferguson demonstrates that pornography was conceived as a mode of critical response to new laws and traditions tending to diminish the material importance of individuals and their acts. Thus while Justine serves to critique the deindividualizing effects of tort law Eugenie assaults the inauguration of national debts, deeming them the sign of the “inevitable inequality of the modern state, whose contract is most binding precisely because it applies only to those who could not, by definition, have had any part in its formulation” (94). In general, Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir “insists that intergenerational inheritance... inaugurates political culture as the essentially metaphysical, and as the diametrical opposite to a pornography that knows how to keep its place” (95). Ferguson uses Sade to explain how pornography represents a critique not of particular values, but the notion of value altogether, outlining instead pornography as way of looking without values—as, indeed, a form dedicated to the conscientious expulsion of metaphysical values in favor of extreme visibility."

So Sade is against both torts and tort reform, against national debts and state bailouts of banks. !  Who knew?

Ferguson, says Reid, uses Bentham against Foucault and ideology.  “Pornography is Ferguson’s answer to what she deems the ultimately anti-democratic practice in criticism of “making claims on behalf of what isn’t there” (127), part of the history of empiricism’s response to metaphysics by determining the value of persons only within localized and endlessly shifting contexts.”

Exactly what pornography can teach religion is left a bit more implicit in Reid’s essay than I would have wished.   It seems to be that religion, like Bentham’s utilitarianism, tries to protect the individual value of the human soul against all the social forces that try to destroy it.

“The obliteration of the soul has to do, Ferguson believes, with the degree to which our society has departed from the Benthamite view of individuals as “educable and malleable” (154), a departure characterized by a gravely mistaken tendency “to see values as capable of being maintained without the conditions in which they could be facts” (156). Insofar as Ferguson’s depiction of pornography is “for” or “against” anything, it favors the proliferation of circumstances in which an individual can be reevaluated from the vantages of endlessly variable groups.”

March 2 

TurboLife

Sex and Taxes

Sex and Death

Death and Taxes

---  or  --

TurboLife

14-37

Sex and Taxes

40-63

Sex and Death

67-88+

Death and Taxes

March 5           Stendahl  The Red and the Black

Finally finished it Wednesday around 3pm.  The ending shocked me, in spite of everything---the slow, careful build-up, the complexity of characters, the intricacies of style, tone and thought.  So I am, still, an American and not French, and never will be---even though we've had almost two hundred years to catch up with Stendhal.  The book is still so up-to-date, even edgy.  Maybe even especially "edgy."  By today's shallow standards, no more and no less shallow than those of Julien Sorel's day.  I took nearly two years to read it.  Not sure why.  In hindsight I could claim I wanted to savor every petite morsel.  That might have been it.  You can open it anywhere and any paragraph on the page will be an exquisite construction, a detail of sublime importance to the whole.  All the way through I kept mumbling to myself that I wish I had read the book when I was about fourteen---it might have saved me lots of grief.  But probably not.  When you are Julien's age you can't see what a book like this shows us, no matter what.  I read Proust first, so perhaps he encouraged me to read Stenhal as slowly as possible.  Now in the pantheon I have only to read Balzac and Flaubert.  Somehow I have no plans to read Balzac, nor Hugo.  Flaubert.  Can I believe that I have never---at least not to my recollection--read Madame Bovary? I did watch the whole of a television movie production, probably a Masterpiece Theater event some years ago.  Will I go on to read The Charterhouse of Parma?  That is not certain.  As great as The Red and the Black truly is, I don't feel moved to keep going until I've read every published word of Stendhal or anything like that.  I didn't get drunk on him, as I have been trying to do with Thomas Bernhard, and maybe a bit more, with Beckett, and Javier Marías or, maybe, Bolaño.  Might be the slant of contemporaneity involved.  Greediness for one's own time to be voiced in ways that resonate and reassure, confirm ourselves in our own opinions and perceptions.  Interesting, though, that I did finish this great novel in the same weeks as I read for the first time the great novel by Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. I could not avoid comparing them and finding in each of them the scope and brilliance that sums up an age, that gives us the glimpse into the inner workings of the soul that we want so desperately and so often assume really can't be done.

On, now, to the stack of books.  Pessoa's Book of Disquiet is the one I most want to find and start over again.  But of course I can't locate it after looking all over the house earlier today.  Guess I will sink back into Bernhard's Gargoyles and finish that tonight.

March 5

" Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust."

Prince Sarau's son, writing, in Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles (131)

Should he appear on Oprah?

"Julien’s confessor, even being the devout Jansenist he was, could not help being the screen for a Jesuit scheme, and, without knowing it, becoming the Jesuits’ instrument.

. . . . he needed to make as a big a show as possible about having reformed his sinful soul.

. . . . .

“Your awakening will find an echo in their hearts and will make a profound impression.  You can be of major importance to religion, and the trifling reasoning of the Jesuits, in similar situations, does not give me pause.  Even in this special case, which has escaped their rapacity, they would still act destructively.  They should not be allowed to . . . .  The tears that your awakening will cause to flow will wipe out the corrosive effect of ten editions of Voltaire’s impious works.”

“And what will I have left,” Julien responded coldly, “if I turn, contemptuously, against myself?  I have been ambitious, but I have no intention of calling that blameworthy.  I was simply following the conventions of my time.  Now I live from day to day.  But as people here see these things, I would be making myself seriously miserable were I to surrender to such cowardice . . . .”

The Red and the Black (482-483)

March 13  Second time Stoner

the morning after, I'm even more certain that I did read Stoner once before---my guess is back in the 80s before I had really read much Beckett.  And maybe when one is in one's own 40s you really can't see what Williams has done through imagination quite as well as when you are, at last, over fifty-five.

March 13   the university = asylum

Early in the novel Stoner, a graduate student named David Masters, drinking with his two friends Finch and Stoner, gives a schematic description of the nature of the University.  Some see it, he says,

as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive.  The True, the Good, the Beautiful.  They’re just around the corner, in the next corridor; they’re in the next book, the one you haven’t read, or in the next stack, the one you haven’t got to.  But you’ll get to it someday.  And when you do---when you do---

. . . . .

To you, the institution is an instrument of good---to the world at large, of course, and just incidentally to yourself.   You see it as a kind of sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter; and you’re the kindly old doctor who benignly pats their heads and pockets their fees.

. . . .

But you’re both wrong. . . It is an asylum or---what do they call them now?---a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent.

. . . .

[Finch, you’re the incompetent; not very bright] But you’re bright enough---and just bright enough---to realize what would happen to you in the world.  You’re cut out for failure and you know it. . . . In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure.  So you are chosen, elected; providence, whose sense of humor has always amused me, has snatched you from the jaws of the world and placed you safely here, among your brothers.’

. . . .

Oh, no.  You too [Stoner] are among the infirm---you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. . . . You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. . . . . Because you you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.  The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn.  You couldn’t face them, and you couldn’t fight them; because you’re too weak, and you’re too strong.  And you have no place to go in the world.’

. . . .

‘I’m one of you.  Worse, in fact.  I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it; it’s a disease for which there is no cure.  So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm.’

--Williams, Stoner (30-31)

March 15, 2010   Everything is Mystification

Finished Gargoyles.  9:35 pm  Monday night.  LOVE the way it ends----the prince is talking about how his son will destroy him.  His son is off in England studying and he knows that he will eventually return to Hochgobernitz, the family castle, on the top floors of which the Prince has been living alone now for some years.

In England he has become accustomed to such short sentences, a way of  talking that is painful, killing.  I have raised him to be my destroyer, I think. And this man dares to write me in his last letter that I am a dilettante, that I failed to shape my life into an art.  Whenever I ought to have drawn him closer to myself, he writes.  I have pushed him away of my own accord.  But all education is always utterly wrong,” the prince said.  “My son’s actions have always been opposed to me.  The one and only thing we have in common is our fondness for the newspapers.  Oh yes,” the prince said, “would you mind getting me a copy of the Times of September seventh and bringing it the next time you come up . . . ? “

(208)

Let’s see.  Ferguson says, citing Kermode, that novels end “in the announcement of evaluation.”  So the hilarious and wicked genius of Bernhard’s ending to this strange and unlovely novel is in having the Prince impute to his son’s subversive education in England the notion that his son there has learned to use ‘short sentences, a way of talking that is painful, killing.”  And to prove that he has called his father a dilettante.  As if that were the ultimate strike.  We have listened to the Prince ranting away in operatic fashion for about a hundred pages using very long sentences.

March 15

Charles Lambert on his blogspot This-Space says "...Yes, it's hard to read more than a few pages of Bernhard without being moved to laughter by the sheer splenetic vigour of the writing."

March 24  Bolaño  "Chilean Nocturne"

Fits in very well, though, with the mood of Roberto Bolaño’s late novella By Night in Chile which I finished last night.  In Spanish it is Nocturno de Chile---Chilean Nocturne---a much more meditative and musical title, more apt, sadder, sweeter, an elegaic tone.  Which fits the effect of the book, a long rambling final meditation by a dying priest who had an intersection with Pinochet and who reflects over the long arc of his life as he remembers the famous coup against Allende and the life in Chile after all of that.  You could try to pin various political positions onto the narrator but I think that is beside the point.  Now as he dies he is concerned with the long view regarding history and with the very short view of his own sense that his life is ending.  I suppose in Chile they can sense millions of resonances throughout the text that escape my radar, nuances about Chilean experience and identity, inside jokes, insider trades, self-reflective explorations of all sorts.  But the book also works at a "global" level well enough, much more haunting and powerful than I had at first thought it would be.  This is largely because Bolaño works the narrative into the high plain of lyrical narrative, floating us into that mental space, that chamber of the soul, in which all "dark nights," all nocturnes, echo, find their location, resonate.

The final line of the story places it squarely back into Beckett's world---but before that Bolaño seems to allow his priest the consolations of philosophy, the pleasures of reading the ancient Greeks while Pinochet is wrecking Chile, travels to Europe to visit the historic churches, and, finally, a minor life of a would-be poet, a life among the literary aspirants in the cultural life of Chile.  It's all very comfortingly horrifying or horrifyingly comforting, as the narrative purrs along as effortlessly as any fugue by Bernhard or Sebald.

March 26, 2010     How to Survive a World War

Edmund White has a long review essay on John Cheever in the NYRB---I got it from HuffPo --

Here's the detail from the life I love best----could anyone invent this?

quote

In 1942 he enlisted in the army and tested low-normal on the government IQ test. In 1942 he published his first short-story collection, "The Way Some People Live," which wasn't very good but may have saved his life since it impressed a major in the army who was also an MGM executive. He withdrew Cheever from his unit, which suffered terrible casualties in Europe in the last months of the war. Cheever was transferred as a writer to the former Paramount studios in Astoria, Queens.

On Today's Walk in Wal-Mart

the real news of the day is that while we were at Wally’s this morning, Virginia walking with the cart and me browsing I looked at a copy of a Brain magazine---and one article says what we’ve known for years---anti-depressant medications do not work, do not work any better than placebos.  This is research from a scientist or a psychologist, forget which, doesn’t matter, in Hull, UK. He says what really works is mild exercise and perhaps---depending---talking with various people, maybe a therapist, maybe not.  Again--new science shows.  And again---we’ve known this since way back, since the first book---was it “Prozac Nation”? argued the contrary, told tales of miracles and wonders.  Second big news article in this brain magazine was about the brain of older people---we are hard-wired it says to get happier, to forget the terrible memories and focus on the positive.

If only, I thought, we could have convinced Beckett to write More as he got older instead of Less.  Then his late works would be more full of this fuller optimism and happiness.  But maybe that is in fact the key to his late work---it  becomes harder and harder to figure out because in his bliss he is simply becoming more and more radiantly positive and happy.  Who needs to explain all this over and over again to your reading or theater-going audience when they tend to me sour middle-agers and you are now more and more happily ancient?  It does indeed fit my grandmother who died at one-month shy of 104 and my Dad still alive at 94.  His mind is sharp and his attitude amazing.  And his mother, Ella Drake Garlitz, the last time I talked with her, over the phone, maybe six months before she died, said in response to my question How are you doing? “Better.”  Oh, what was wrong I asked?  Nothing.  Things just get better and better.  She laughed.  She still had a highball every evening before dinner, stayed in her room and didn’t want anything to do with anyone else in the nursing home---they were all off their rockers she said---and she played her bridge games and was probably right.  She was lucid too until the end.  So I am hoping indeed to have her genes and my Dad’s.  And maybe I should be writing lots and lots more to make up for what Beckett failed to get down on paper for us all.

March 28   Two Movies

Matt Damon in "The Informant" directed by Steven Soderbergh.  Ehh.  Damon gives a good performance of a strange and ultimately sad fellow, a biochemist? who blows the whistle on his own coporation's corruptions---global price fixing and kickbacks---but in the process reveals himself to be a compulsive liar, maybe bi-polar, maybe not, who mucks up everyone's case, including the FBI's.

After finishing it---and even while in the middle of it---I kept saying to myself---who in Hollywood or wherever pushed this project through to production and why on earth?  It is billed as a "dark comedy" but it just doesn't make much of an interesting story finally just a sad one and not sad enough to be interesting or worth telling.  Damon soldiers through it with a good deal of good spirit than anyone else in the project.   That's about it.

Few days later I have had second thoughts and realized that I missed a big and obvious thing here---that the whistleblower---the informant/attacker gets so riled at the flaws of those he works for--the authorities--yet manages to keep in an entirely separate--and sealed--container, his own flaws and failings--some of which--the central ones---are mirror images of the flaws he has whistleblown about.  Why did I miss that?

Thought about it in terms of Christopher Hitchens.  He is on Slate now going after the pope about the abuse scandal in the church---something Hitchens loves to do with great great zeal.  But in his own forthcoming memoir he confesses to his boyhood schooldays adventures in crossing over the gay/straight line(s).  Not the same thing as the abuse scandals in the church.  But maybe not far enough away for everyone to be comfortable.  In this sense:  under further interrogation and revelation, will Hitchens have anything more to say about these things?  Some commentators are already saying---oh for god's sake why do we need a memoir now from this famously bad boy bad boy public scold and greatly umbraged (always) moralist?

"Broken Embraces" by Pedro Almodovar.  Here a Master at work, throwing pearls to all of his adorers and the cognoscenti.  Maybe not the greatest movie of his career but with lots of hallmarks and much better than many others and most importantly a joy to watch from beginning to end.  Intelligent and soapy, fluffy and deadly serious, kitsch and pop and serious stuff.  Wonderful.

March 29, 2010  Maybe but maybe not and there may be no other way to find out

Bernhard is so intoxicating that I want to try writing in his manner just as a short course in creative writing, the sort of course in writing I had never had the chance to take in my college years and the sort of course, however long, would be worth it, not the sort of workshop courses now available and now passing as creative writing courses, all of them too short and too shallow, and not at all like the course that imitating Bernhard would provide in the long run.

Dave has been in Cuba playing with some masters there, a few weeks ago