Rigour

Well, let me stipulate to the court that all you say (with the exceptions I want to discuss) I agree with. So, before I get to my questions, let me expand on this question of art and rigor. I think this topic is crucially important for a world that is civilized, whatever we might think that is exactly. The rigor of true art, the demand that the reader or audience follow along, engage, creates what is close (so I think) to a psychoanalytic transference. At least in some way its related. It also disrupts our deeply conditioned view of reality. A Bresson, and say, a Fassbinder, are doing quite different things, and yet they are also doing something identical. Fassbinder’s vision was not predicated on the disciplined mise en scene of a Bresson or Dreyer, but he, like Pasolini perhaps, found a kind of perfection in another form of discipline. In a sense Fassbinder wanted to shatter the very idea of discipline. I guess I would disagree that Melville, or even Dreyer or Bresson are inverted Marxists. Dreyer in fact posits a world of social imbalance and prejudice, of willfull blindness — think Joan of Arc — and then looks for redemption of a sort, a very limited sort, in suffering….in an awareness of one’s suffering and mortality. The cruelty of man is bottomless he seems to say. The only answer is to create the possibilities for redemption. How did Dreyer see the creation of this cruelty? Of social dysfunction? I’m not sure he really addressed it, except insofar as society inherently tends to bring out what is worst in human beings. Marx saw this in economic terms, but remember Marx was also a great lover of art and culture. If one interprets a Bresson as an advocate for martyrdom, then one might argue he was anti-Marxist, but I don’t read him that way. A Dreyer found suffering in society, in how men lived with each other. He seemed deeply ambivalent about religion, actually. The Melville film I think is remarkable. Its also a very timely film given the questions of occupation and the routine barbarity of the occupier. It is certainly a film that addresses these issues of violence and resistance. Something of a masterpiece I think.

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- Marcuse said, we have no idea what a world without repression would look like. This brings me to the next, and my biggest, question. That is, compassion and non-violence are absolutely the ideal we strive for. But compassion for the man with his boot on your neck will not take the boot off your neck. One can feel compassion, and often one does, but one must still struggle against that boot. Now, this often creates another form of imbalance, I have to agree. I often think of the French/Algerian war in this context. Would the French have left without the brutal resistance of the FLN? This was a party deeply puritanical and repressed, and yet such a party seems, perhaps, necessary to drive the colonizer out. Was the result better? Well, yes, although it was very very far from ideal. The recent demonizing of Muslim culture is brought to mind here. The idea that things such as veils (or niquib) are inherently repressive is up for debate. One wonders if Paris Hilton is exactly free, for example? I think its tricky to talk about this contradiction, but one cant pass over it. All society is based on repression, and it takes various forms. Some are more insidious than others. In my current state of mind I find western Capitalism by far the most repressive and destructive. One of Marx’s insights was that man didn’t start from a clean historical slate. One is born into a specific historical situation with a limited number of choices. Now, I feel an awful lot of philosophy today tends to forget this. First one must eat. I’ve been reading a lot of early Vedic thinking lately, and there one sees the beginning of philosophy, and like the Pre-Socratics, the thrust is about stripping away the idea of a fixed reality. The idea of being (Being) as a state without qualities; which of course is a linguistic contradiction, because to *be* means exactly that something (or one) has qualities. ..but in both the Indian and Greek thinking of antiquity, one finds the primal contemplation of that which is *beyond* or *past* our daily, apparently, concrete reality.

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“Just as, my boy, by one clod of clay all that is made of clay becomes known, the modifications being only a name arising from speech, while the truth is that it is just clay”.

Sanaktumara

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I bring this up because it somehow suggests a bit of what we are discussing. Why do adults lose the wonder that children feel at the world? How is it that man has become so reduced spiritually that all he does is eat poison and feel the dulling effects of electronic media and endless alienated labor? Is it something in the very aggression of the sperm as it penetrates the egg? Is it just the trauma of separation from the mother at birth? Probably all of this, and then the isolation of our atomized and fragmentary culture that provides almost no comfort from these trials. And so art is an expression of these dilemmas, and vitally important in that sense. However, there is a social demand here, an imperative (it is, in the end, just clay). The *just clay* part is real, too. And that means, we have to eat. That means the oppressor, in concrete terms must be dealt with. I feel this gets bypassed when discussions of spirituality take place. One must have the luxury of time and food and shelter in which to find a path. I think Dreyer and Bresson and Fassbinder, and Bernhard and Handke, and any number of others have attempted to come to terms with aggression. To somehow reconcile the reality of violence and aggression, as a given, as existing, and still work at a release from it. Work at a dialectical solution, and perhaps this is where a good deal of religious thought comes from; searching for grace amid the repression, amid the endless propensities for various form of destruction. This is why I found No Country for Old Men such a profound book. What is our own complicity in things? In violence? My sense of late about the world, I have to admit, is that just about everyone I know is aggressive and angry, and those that are not are passive/aggressive. Everyone feels defensive and hurt, and alone. The goal I suspect is finding *alone* an ok place to be, and finally that discovery allows one to maybe not be totally alone. We have forgotton something essential about *Being*, and perhaps art is meant to remind us, if only for a brief and fleeting moment.

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This is a big topic and much more can be, and no doubt will be, said about it here. A final observation though, and that is that the US is *still* am Imperialist country. The Negri (and others) idea of a post Imperialist empire seems wrong. The multi and pan national corporations are still in the service of Nationalism. Its changing its terms all the time, to be sure, but basic critiques of Imperialism (Lenin, Luxembourg, etc) still apply I believe. I want to come back to this, too, at a later date. But I dont really see that Nationalism has left us at all.

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As for Democrats. The Democrats, none of them (maybe Kucinich) has any intention of bringing troops home. I understand people want a release from the vileness of Bush and Cheney, but (and I think this is a crucial but) they get only a pretend release with a Hillary or an Edwards or a Obama. What will change? Will the ultra militarism stop? Will the defense budget get cut? Will we leave those *permanent* bases that dot the globe? Will the death penalty be abolished? Will we get health care? Will public education be funded instead of mercenaries?? And speaking of mercs, I leave off with this…..

- another footnote on Blackwater.

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau10112007.html

John Steppling

ps

I’m happy we have for the moment a photo of my favorite human, perhaps, and that is Emiliano Zapata. Eduardo Galiano called him “the purest of revolutionaries”, and so he was.