In order to become a Social-Democrat, a workingman must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord, of the priest, of the high state official and of the peasant, of the student and of the tramp; he must know their strong and weak sides; he must understand all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real ‘nature’; he must understand what interests certain institutions and certain laws reflect and how they reflect them. This ‘clear picture’ cannot be obtained from books. It must be obtained from living examples and from exposures, following hot after their occurrence, of what goes on around us at a given moment, of what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each on in his own way, of the meaning of such and such events, of such and such statistics, of such and such court sentences, etc., etc., etc. These universal political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.
How should one read the last sentence in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise? I believe that Amory and Fitzgerald mean what Amory says, that Amory knows himself and that Fitzgerald believes Amory does, too. While it is perfectly reasonable to see that line as a final instance of irony, especially given that Amory changes his interests, goals, and allegiances throughout the novel (why, after all, should the reader believe Amory now?), that contestable closing (or commencement?) doesn’t mean that Amory knows what he will do or who he will become. Rather, the line suggests that Amory now understands his own character, limits and all. The reader may not believe Amory here, but the young Fitzgerald does.
Preliminary thoughts on Dolar’s and Zizek’s presentations:
There’s something old about the new counterfactual logic driving some psychology and philosophy. Zizek et al. suggest a retroactive (re)writing of the normative (backward causation) while not actually changing the Real in a material sense. Clearly framed in QM rhetorics–possible worlds, superposition–counterfactuals still ground meaning in temporality, a past to present trajectory of mimesis that bears the normative. One should instead look to the present for meaning, to the inferences drawn via reciprocal relations between rational subjects. These language-games would collapse the Real/mimesis problem so that the issue is no longer whether or not the Real or its mimetic (or signification) changes (after all, isn’t this privileging of temporality just another case of “Beetle in the Box” inaccessibility?), but rather a pragmatic functionalism, where meaning (the normative) is at the point of reciprocity and inference.
Even those assessment theorists who critique positivist leanings still approach meaning (e.g., aesthetic activity and ethics; “logical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabularies”) in positivist terms. Meaning and judgment are pragmatic, social phenomena bound by historical context and material relations. Robert Brandom’s analytic pragmatism and its metavocabulary (the meaning-use relations {MUR’s} that yield practice-vocabulary sufficiency {PV} and vocabulary-practice sufficiency {VP}) is our best bet for understanding and achieving meaningful assessment, i.e., approaching a text via pragmatic-material “reasonableness” rather than Cartesian “certainty” (Toulmin).
Per Brandom:
Practice-Vocabulary Sufficiency: “what one must do in order to count as saying what the vocabulary lets practitioners express”
Vocabulary-Practice Sufficiency: what one must “say what it is one must do to count as engaging in those practices or exercising those abilities, and so to deploy a vocabulary to say something” (Between Saying and Doing 2008)
States have not rescued a functional structure of real economy financing, but rather a mechanism for domination and exploitation specific to modern-day capitalism. And, in a cynical turn, the costs of reestablishing this relation of exploitation and domination will have to be paid for by its victims.
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
“What is the play, and what is my part? [ … ] Pay attention and you will see how genius creates a legend."
“While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.”
It seems that many are looking for final answers to Birdman, particularly the film’s ending. Some believe that Iñárritu et al. don’t care. Given the film’s nod to Borges, ostensible neverending long take, and continual mirroring the ending could be seen as the collapse of reality and representation which would deny final interpretation (i.e., beyond this one). Birdman resists interpretation all along, beginning with the Susan Sontag “quote” in Riggan’s mirror: “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.” Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation,” calls for the (re)privileging of sensory experience over objective, intellectual certainty when confronting art, the latter demanded by art’s commodification. Birdman’s strategy is to deny such certainty by, ironically enough, giving viewers a privileged position immediately alongside its characters right as its narrative unfolds. This real-time sensory experience forbids absolute knowledge of events since these events are often outright absurd—this is Birdman’s singular achievement. Neither its characters nor its viewers can ever know Birdman’s reality.
There is, however, real critique in the film’s resistance to interpretation through its embrace of absurdity if only because there is real anguish and (inter)personal suffering. Many critics overlook or dismiss these depictions as superficial or comic relief. But Riggan attempts suicide at least three times, once with a failed ocean drowning prevented by a population of jellyfish. Riggan is clearly depressed, his daughter a recovering addict, and the majority of relations broken or dysfunctional. The film seems to suggest that Birdman’s hypermediated, hyper-performative world-stage of “reality” culture, simulacra, aesthetic reproduction, social networking, accountability, and continual review—our world-stage—is to blame.
Postmodernism is indeed the culture of late capitalism, but is Birdman part of the problem or the cure? I suppose that question must be answered with another: Can absurdity be radical?
I see in Sam’s (Stone) final expression the film’s final politics: Life may be filled with absurdity, but life itself is not absurd. Rather life is the product of very real material and social relations. Neither Birdman nor Nazi Death Camps just happen as each are produced by their specific historical context and a vast totality of social relations. If Riggan’s final flight and Sam’s last expression are only another instance of the film’s many absurdities, say, to draw out the lesson that there onlyis absurdity, then Birdman merely realizes the limits to postmodernism as a radical project. That is to say, the film itself would be complicit with those status-quo politics that obscure the real cause of all of the above. In other words, if only absurdity then the film itself prevents true radical thought by mistaking effect (and affect) for cause. But Birdman is much more than that. It is not only the year’s best film but the most significant film to emerge in quite some time. Sam’s final expression is Birdman’s refusal of late capitalism’s scripted and commodified existence, an authentic response to the culture that imprisons us all. One wonders if this prison includes the very sensory experience that Sontag demands, the politics of affect that Birdman so brilliantly reveals to its audience and maybe to one of its characters.
This reflection on Birdman continues with my earlier one, found here.
STEVEN WEXLER 