My favourites from Flaubert's Dictionary of Platitutes - superbly translated and annotated (1954) by Edward J. Fluck ["pronounce 'fluke'; if in front of a literature class, snigger briefly and say 'it must have had it's advantages'".' GF]. If anyone would like to pick their own favourites, let's compare lists. (CS)
Absinthe - An extra-virulent poison: one glass, and you are dead. Journalists drink it while they write their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.
Apartment (Batchelor's) - Always in disorder, with feminine effects trailing here and there. Aroma of cigarettes. Extraordinary things are to be found in one.
Artists - Are all dilettantes. Praise their disinterest in money matters (obsolete idea). Express surprise over the fact that they dress like everybody else (obsolete idea). They make heaps of money, but throw it out the window. Often invited to dine in town. A woman artist is definitely a whore. What artists do can't be called work.
Baldness - Always precocious, is caused by loose living during one's youth or by entertaining lofty thoughts.
Chiaroscuro - One doesn't know what it is.
Cheese - Quote the aphorism of Brillat-Savarin: "A dessert without cheese is a beautiful woman with only one eye."
Classics (The) - One is supposed to be acquainted with them.
Clown - Has had dislocated limbs since childhood.
Coitus - Copulation - Words to be avoided: Say: "They had relations. . . "
Coffee - Imparts wit. Tasty only when it comes from Le Havre. At a formal dinner, should be taken standing. Sipping it unsweetened, very fashionable, suggests you have lived in the Orient.
Conservative - Pot-bellied politician. "You narrow-minded conservative!" - "Yes, sir, there must be people of limited vision to take care of the reckless."
Constipation - All men-of-letters are constipated. Influences political convictions.
Cossacks - Eat candles.
Crucifix - Most becoming in a bedchamber or on the scaffold.
Devotion - Complain about the lack of it in other people. "We are far inferior to dogs in this respect."
Dimples - One must always say to a pretty girl that she has Cupids lodged in her dimples.
Egg - Starting-point of a philosophical discussion on the genesis of beings.
Elephants - Are known for their good memory, and worship the sun.
Feudalism - Even though you have no clear ideas about this, thunder against it.
Fire - Purifies everything. As soon as you hear somebody shout, "Fire", first thing to do is to lose your head.
Functionary - Inspires respect, no matter what his function is.
Genius - No point in admiring it, it's a "neurosis".
Gibberish - The way foreigners talk. Always laugh at a foreigner who speaks French badly.
Gothic - Style of architecture bearing more on religion than other styles.
Guests - Examples to set before one's son.
Habit - Is second nature. Habits you indulge in at school are bad habits. If you got into the habit, you could play the violin like Paganini.
Halberd - On seeing a threatening cloud, don't fail to say: "It's going to rain halberds." In Switzerland, all men carry halberds.
Hare - Sleeps with its eyes open.
Harem - Always compare a rooster among his hens to a sultan in his harem. The dream of all schoolboys.
Hermaphrodite - Excites an unhealthy curiosity. Try to see one.
Homer - Never existed. Famous for his style of laughter.
Ideal - Perfectly useless.
Ideologists - All newpapermen are ideologists.
Idolators - Are cannibals.
Imbroglio - What all dramatic works amount to.
Inventors - All die in the poorhouse. Somebody else profits by their discovery, which is unfair.
Knife - Is Catalan when its blade is long. Is termed a dagger when it has been used to commit murder.
Koran - Book by Mohammed that is all about women.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Kraus, Kraus, Kraus: Pro Domo et Mundo
Chance Events, Chance Thoughts
I’d like to strictly distinguish my existence [Dasein] from their attendance [Dabeisein]. I live, they just turned up.
The little stations between the major stations are proud of the fact that express trains have to pass them by.
The type of mind that can say what everything is but not what anything seems to be.
Hatred has to make you productive. Or else it’s more sensible to find love in your heart.
The silly sausage who calls a pig a pig commits the supreme act of ingratitude.
Medical proverb: The fathers’ trousers, worn and done, are the neuroses of the son.
Scepticism has progressed from: Que sais-je? to: Do I know?
The modern father: My son’s doing the wrong thing. He’s a mystic.
There’s room enough in the tiniest hut, but not in the same city, for a couple who are blissfully in love.
I’m not in favour of women, just against men.
I once knew a Don Juan of chastity whose Leporello was not even capable of compiling a list of all the ice maidens in town.
A slap-stick threw a toothpick behind a curtain – there was a huge crash. Then he threw a needle – another huge crash. Then he threw a piece of paper – again, a huge crash. Next he took a feather, raised his hand and – yet again, a huge crash. But he hadn’t even thrown it – so he went Woot! and congratulated himself on having put one over the causal nexus. The essence of this kind of humour is the notion that the echo of human action is louder than its call and that one best demonstrates to echoes how impertinent they are by not answering them with any further call.
Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases.
The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance.
Pro Domo et Mundo
Woe betide the age in which art doesn’t make the earth less sure of itself, in which the artist rather than man faints before the abyss separating the two of them!
Art brings life into disorder. Time and again, what mankind’s poets do is re-establish chaos.
Culture comes to an end when the barbarians break free from its midst.
The modern demise of the world will come to pass when the machine enters the phase of perfection and human beings are proven broke and unfixable. The point at which the automobile will no longer succeed in bringing the driver into forwards motion.
Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over Nature.
When a culture senses that its end has come it calls in the priest.
If I’m supposed to believe in something that can’t be seen I’d sooner believe in miracles than in microscopic creepy crawlies.
The legalist declares the responsible party guilty as well as those who know no better.
The humanitarian declares the responsible party guilty and those that know no better innocent.
The anarchist declares both innocent.
The man of culture declares those who know no better guilty and those who did know better innocent.
That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premises. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life’s heart.
Injustice is necessary or else we would never have done.
My glosses need commentaries. Otherwise they’re too easily understood.
Is it my fault that M actually exists? Didn’t I make him up all the same? If he were a general object of mockery, I’d choose someone better. If he makes a claim for damages because he has been insulted by satire then he insults the satirist.
I’m not sure whether the philistine represents a sort of cosmic vacuum or whether he is simply the wall which is separated from the life of the spirit by Toricellian empty space. But whether he's vacuous or just limited, it's clear he's compelled to react to culture with enmity on principle. For what culture does is to make him conscious [gibt ihm ein Bewußtsein] without making him any the more existent [ohne ihm ein Sein zu geben], driving him to a desperation whose logical form is cogito ergo non sum. It would drive him to suicide were it not so cruel as to force him to prove his own non-existence while still alive. Whether it’s a painting being painted or a witticism being made, the philistine is fighting a battle for his very life when he shuts his eyes or stops up his ears.
Many a man I’ve had dealings with in this my many-sided life has something against me or knows something about me. They will all be able to prove something against me – even if it is only that I had dealings with them.
Do I advise you to kick out of home the error that you gave birth to and substitute it with a more veracious adoptee?
Ask your neighbour about what you yourself are already better informed about. His counsel will then be valuable.
What another doesn’t know I decide autocratically. But I’m glad to ask him about what I already know.
The weakling has doubts before the moment of decision, the strong man after it.
It’s no bad thing to think of most things as being of no significance, but of everything as significant.
Only in the ecstasy of linguistic conception do worlds come to be out of chaos.
By night, at my desk, pen in hand, in an advanced state of writerly ecstasy, I’d find the presence of a woman more disturbing than a Germanist interfering in the bedroom.
I don’t relish sticking my nose into my own private business.
I refer to the topic by talking about myself. They stick to the topic but refer to themselves.
I ask no one for a light. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt. Neither in life, love or literature. And yet I’m definitely a smoker.
When I demonstrate that the world has lost its way by pointing to symptoms of its decline, one of the lost ones always comes and asks me what the symptoms are supposed to do about themselves. They do what they do because they have to – they don't enjoy it. – Alas, I don’t enjoy it either, though I have to too.
The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up. [C.f. Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato]
Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause.
The external world is a tiresome side-effect of a sustained condition of uneasiness.
I’d like to strictly distinguish my existence [Dasein] from their attendance [Dabeisein]. I live, they just turned up.
The little stations between the major stations are proud of the fact that express trains have to pass them by.
The type of mind that can say what everything is but not what anything seems to be.
Hatred has to make you productive. Or else it’s more sensible to find love in your heart.
The silly sausage who calls a pig a pig commits the supreme act of ingratitude.
Medical proverb: The fathers’ trousers, worn and done, are the neuroses of the son.
Scepticism has progressed from: Que sais-je? to: Do I know?
The modern father: My son’s doing the wrong thing. He’s a mystic.
There’s room enough in the tiniest hut, but not in the same city, for a couple who are blissfully in love.
I’m not in favour of women, just against men.
I once knew a Don Juan of chastity whose Leporello was not even capable of compiling a list of all the ice maidens in town.
A slap-stick threw a toothpick behind a curtain – there was a huge crash. Then he threw a needle – another huge crash. Then he threw a piece of paper – again, a huge crash. Next he took a feather, raised his hand and – yet again, a huge crash. But he hadn’t even thrown it – so he went Woot! and congratulated himself on having put one over the causal nexus. The essence of this kind of humour is the notion that the echo of human action is louder than its call and that one best demonstrates to echoes how impertinent they are by not answering them with any further call.
Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases.
The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance.
Pro Domo et Mundo
Woe betide the age in which art doesn’t make the earth less sure of itself, in which the artist rather than man faints before the abyss separating the two of them!
Art brings life into disorder. Time and again, what mankind’s poets do is re-establish chaos.
Culture comes to an end when the barbarians break free from its midst.
The modern demise of the world will come to pass when the machine enters the phase of perfection and human beings are proven broke and unfixable. The point at which the automobile will no longer succeed in bringing the driver into forwards motion.
Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over Nature.
When a culture senses that its end has come it calls in the priest.
If I’m supposed to believe in something that can’t be seen I’d sooner believe in miracles than in microscopic creepy crawlies.
The legalist declares the responsible party guilty as well as those who know no better.
The humanitarian declares the responsible party guilty and those that know no better innocent.
The anarchist declares both innocent.
The man of culture declares those who know no better guilty and those who did know better innocent.
That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premises. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life’s heart.
Injustice is necessary or else we would never have done.
My glosses need commentaries. Otherwise they’re too easily understood.
Is it my fault that M actually exists? Didn’t I make him up all the same? If he were a general object of mockery, I’d choose someone better. If he makes a claim for damages because he has been insulted by satire then he insults the satirist.
I’m not sure whether the philistine represents a sort of cosmic vacuum or whether he is simply the wall which is separated from the life of the spirit by Toricellian empty space. But whether he's vacuous or just limited, it's clear he's compelled to react to culture with enmity on principle. For what culture does is to make him conscious [gibt ihm ein Bewußtsein] without making him any the more existent [ohne ihm ein Sein zu geben], driving him to a desperation whose logical form is cogito ergo non sum. It would drive him to suicide were it not so cruel as to force him to prove his own non-existence while still alive. Whether it’s a painting being painted or a witticism being made, the philistine is fighting a battle for his very life when he shuts his eyes or stops up his ears.
Many a man I’ve had dealings with in this my many-sided life has something against me or knows something about me. They will all be able to prove something against me – even if it is only that I had dealings with them.
Do I advise you to kick out of home the error that you gave birth to and substitute it with a more veracious adoptee?
Ask your neighbour about what you yourself are already better informed about. His counsel will then be valuable.
What another doesn’t know I decide autocratically. But I’m glad to ask him about what I already know.
The weakling has doubts before the moment of decision, the strong man after it.
It’s no bad thing to think of most things as being of no significance, but of everything as significant.
Only in the ecstasy of linguistic conception do worlds come to be out of chaos.
By night, at my desk, pen in hand, in an advanced state of writerly ecstasy, I’d find the presence of a woman more disturbing than a Germanist interfering in the bedroom.
I don’t relish sticking my nose into my own private business.
I refer to the topic by talking about myself. They stick to the topic but refer to themselves.
I ask no one for a light. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt. Neither in life, love or literature. And yet I’m definitely a smoker.
When I demonstrate that the world has lost its way by pointing to symptoms of its decline, one of the lost ones always comes and asks me what the symptoms are supposed to do about themselves. They do what they do because they have to – they don't enjoy it. – Alas, I don’t enjoy it either, though I have to too.
The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up. [C.f. Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato]
Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause.
The external world is a tiresome side-effect of a sustained condition of uneasiness.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Karl Kraus: Of The Artist
The signs of true artistry – to fashion for oneself a problem out of what is taken for granted and thereby solve the problems of others; to make good their ignorance with one’s own knowledge and doubt oneself down into the depths of hell; to put a question to a servant and give the answer to a master.
Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.
Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.
That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.
The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.
The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.
Language is the mother not the maid of thought.
A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.
How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.
There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.
In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.
Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.
If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.
Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.
The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.
Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.
The imitator is often better than the innovator.
The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.
Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.
A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?
Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.
I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.
They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.
Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.
Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.
Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.
That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.
The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.
The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.
Language is the mother not the maid of thought.
A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.
How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.
There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.
In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.
Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.
If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.
Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.
The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.
Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.
The imitator is often better than the innovator.
The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.
Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.
A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?
Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.
I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.
They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.
Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Karl Kraus: Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Others. . .
From: Pro Domo et Mundo
Of Society
I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.
Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.
One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.
They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.
There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.
The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.
I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.
There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.
The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!
I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls
The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.
The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.
In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.
The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.
Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.
I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.
Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.
Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.
They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.
Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.
The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.
What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.
Of Society
I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.
Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.
One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.
They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.
There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.
The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.
I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.
There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.
The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!
I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls
The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.
The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.
In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.
The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.
Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.
I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.
Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.
Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.
They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.
Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.
The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.
What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Russell Jacoby: The Last Intellectuals
Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) runs the argument that post-war America down to the late 1980's saw a notable decline in intellectual life, the near-total extinction of the figure of the public intellectual. "The disappearance of general intellectuals into professions" diagnosed in the book is, however, no one-dimensional decline and fall - it reflects a much wider fracturing of the public domain, though it also follows an institutional logic of its own; unique to the story for Jacoby is a loss of political and intellectual nerve on the part of a whole generation of writers, thinkers and scholars located in and around cities and university campuses.
The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.
From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)
***
Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.
The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.
In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.
"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .
The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.
The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.
"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "
Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.
The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.
From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)
***
Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.
The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.
In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.
"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .
The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.
The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.
"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "
Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 9 - Oscar Wilde
From: The Critic as Artist (1891)
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of life and literature. The difficulty the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style, a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters for the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doing of the habitual criminals of art.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, "What are you doing?" whereas "What are you thinking?" is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.
It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself. To us the heavenly city is colourless, and the enjoyment of God without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes "the spectator of all time and of all existence" is not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature is most divine.
Just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.
For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying out in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
It is to the soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the body. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but . . .it is one's business in such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences ones ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.
There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it show us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.
Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
The real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, "I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines," but realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has "nothing to say." But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he had no new message that the can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it a new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.
People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.
It is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grown less as the world advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.
England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous of books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.
In art there is so such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.
Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of life and literature. The difficulty the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style, a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters for the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doing of the habitual criminals of art.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and so completely are people dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal that they are always coming shamelessly up to one at Private Views and other places that are open to the general public, and saying in a loud stentorian voice, "What are you doing?" whereas "What are you thinking?" is the only question that any single civilised being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.
It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself. To us the heavenly city is colourless, and the enjoyment of God without meaning. Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes "the spectator of all time and of all existence" is not really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our nature is most divine.
Just as Nature is matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike.
For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions. There is more than one of her colonies that she might with advantage surrender for so fair a land. What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying out in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Action being limited would have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; and just as it is because he did nothing that he has been able to achieve everything, so it is because he never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his true nature and temperament far more completely than do those strange and exquisite sonnets even, in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
It is to the soul that Art speaks, and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind as well as of the body. One should, of course, have no prejudices; but . . .it is one's business in such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences ones ceases to be fair. It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.
There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it show us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not. But it should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles upon modern art.
Some limitation might well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatsoever.
The real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, "I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines," but realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has "nothing to say." But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he had no new message that the can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it a new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.
People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.
It is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grown less as the world advances. There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.
England has done one thing; it has invented and established Public Opinion, which is an attempt to organise the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.
It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence. Who that desires to retain any sense of form could struggle through the monstrous multitudinous of books that the world has produced, books in which thought stammers or ignorance brawls? The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism.
In art there is so such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Karl Kraus By Night
The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .
"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."
"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."
"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."
"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."
"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."
From: By Night (1919)
Eros
Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.
Art
That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.
I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.
There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.
A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.
He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.
Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.
Time
The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.
What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.
If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.
1915
The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.
Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.
Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.
By Night
Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.
The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.
Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.
“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.
(Trans. CS)
"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."
"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."
"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."
"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."
"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."
From: By Night (1919)
Eros
Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.
Art
That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.
I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.
There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.
A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.
He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.
Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.
Time
The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.
What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.
If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.
1915
The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.
Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.
Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.
By Night
Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.
The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.
Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.
“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.
(Trans. CS)
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