Angels

I don't believe in God but I do believe in angels.

One great inspiration is Rilke's Duino Elegies. But as I started to write, I found that the copy I used to have has gone. It was a nice book. It was very thin, a littlePengun Modern European Poets, but it belonged to Charles Lambert, a wonderful gay poet I went to college with, now a tranlsator, whose sister I once lodged with in a little, very smelly council flat in London. Don't get me wrong, very clean,. but she had a tomcat which she refused to spay, and which wouldn't venture outdoors because the rest of the estate cats were twice its size and armed to the teeth. So she used to bathe in a very strongly scented bath oil that permeated the place permanenetly with a mixture of tomcat and pinefresh chemicals. It was their parents' copy of the book, and had been rescued from a devsatsting fire. Almost everything they owned had gone up in smoke (though their father, who was dramatically affected with Altzheimer's, never realised, and would constantly look for things that had gone in the flames). Only the books, which had been squeezed tight in their shelves, so tightly they wouldn't burn, had made it. This copy was smoke blackened, with water stains throughout at the edges of pages. But it made it. Alson thinks our friend Dymphna probably took it back to England, because we had a great maudlin evening once here at home, she and I, talking about just this issue of angels.

At the time I was writing what is now a chapter of a book, a chapter devoted to Sam Peckinpah. You probably know that Peckinpah is famously a very violent director of very violent films, a tortured man who claimed all sorts of histories in the Old California which he had never known, and who said the only technologies worth having were a six gun and a movie camera. In one of his films, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bob Dylan plays a minor role and also sings one of my favourite songs on the soundtrack. The chapter began writing itself some years ago when I was asked to contribute something to a conference on Bob Dylan in memory of Bob Shelton. Bob was one of Dylan's biographers, a larger than life character who, for reasons I never understood, quit his seminal role in the East Village scene to live in Brighton. His bio is a lovely book, full of personal memories of the folk club scene in New York back in the early sixties, a secene which, to my amazement, included as prominent figures and pals of Dylan's, the Clancy Brothers, a rather stage Irish group specialising in Irish songs that my Dad always loved. We had two of their LPs in the house as I was growing up. I know, even now, every word of every song, not just because of the records, but because Dad useed to sing them, in the car as often as not, along with his own repertoire of traditional ballads and music hall songs. And I had the fondest memories of Bob, massive, generous man that he was, singing Dylan songs in the flat of an old girlfriend in Bloomsbury, and arguing over the relationships between the Grateful Dead and holocaust denial or something equally bizarre with a book seller who, at the time, was hot on the trail of an Audubon.

Audubon was an artist who painted the most exquisite images of North American birds, and printed them in a huge and exquisite book.There are nine copies in existence, three in Russia, and it is the most expensive book in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records. Alan, the bookselller, had found a dealer who knew someone in Petersburg with an avenue to someone who might be willing to establish a consortium and sell one of the three Russian copies of the book. I have to say, Bob and I both thought the whole deal stank, and that it was likely to lead Alan into some seriously bad company. But this was in the days before the internet, and Alan was confident it would all happen. Of course it didn't. And then poor old Bob upped and died. I still have a couple of his articles, one on Roots, the other on the Grateful Dead, in a German journal of American Studies called Stars und Träume, Stars and Dreams. It was that phrase, and the strange set of consequences linking the East Village circa 1962, my old dead dad, Russia in the moment immediately before the collapse of socialism, the task I'd set myself of talking about Peckinpah's movie at a Dylan conference in Liverpool in 1999 and Audubon's exquisite birds. Wings.

Rilke's angel is a messenger. The power and awe the angel inspires derives from two aspects - that the angel is not, and is more than, human, and that the angel communicates between two worlds, two incommensurable orders of being.

The co-presence of different worlds is mysterious. But there are analogies with human experience. The French psychoanalyst Lacan has, as the title of one of his seminars, the phrase 'être-ange', literally 'being angel', a phrase that, when spoken, sounds like 'étrange', stange. One translation refers to 'the angel of the odd', doubling Lacan's angel with the famous one by Paul Klee so memorably described by Walter Benjamin as being driven backwards out of paradise by a storm called progress.

In the end, all I managed to say was that Dylan (described in one of Allen Ginsberg's poems as angelic) has two roles, on the soundtrack and as a character, that almost never touch, except at one odd incidental moment when the lyric and the action match. I wanted to say that here two worlds intercepted. And that in a certain sense, their interchange was at once angelic - a dialogue of incommensurable universes, different dimensions – and mundane.

Because at the heart of my ideas and my idea of myself is a belief in beauty. Rilke's angel is, on the other hand, a figure of the sublime. The difference, for me, is between what is communicable - beauty - and what is beyond speech and understanding, and therefore beyond humanity, beyond change, and beyond history: the sublime. I am on the side of beauty, the changeable, the common, the sharable, beauty for which human beings have to take responsibility. I think I'm on the side of the angels, but maybe the angels are on no side at all, but in the interstices between what's understood and what isn't. My angels are not the voices of an eternal verity. They are the voices of what doesn't exist yet.

My angels come, not from eternity, not from what exists before all time, but from what does not exist at all, from the future. To that extent, my job, as a thinker, writer, teacher, and across all my life, is to bring angels into existence.

Bound for Glory

Crisis in the meaning of meaning

Meaning was the once-natural sequence of being, knowing, interpreting, judging, willing and acting . It is this sequence which no longer operates as it did in earlier times.

The nature of being is de-natured when things are no longer simply themselves but monetary values, signs, status symbols.

Knowing is no longer definite but probabilistic.

Interpretation depends on knowledge, but when knowledge is subsumed into data, it is no longer known but, like data, processed.

True judgement occurs when I take responsibility for my action but that responsibility is removed when my every action has been modelled for its statistical likelihood.

Willing requires individual agency, but that agency dissolves in the mass-modelling of scenarios and the management of lifestyles.

Action is in crisis as a result of the sheer scale of the tasks facing us in a globalised network. And probability and complexity disrupt the foresight on which we can plan the effects of acting.

The immersive spectacle of the early 21st century is a response to these changes. So too is the development of the lo-res solution, in which the illusion of individuality and individual agency is imposed through the isolation of the individualised interface in order to produce a normative and mass replication of noise. Like Reality TV, whose selection of idiosyncratic and eccentric contestants is there to demonstrate that after all we are all individuals, mobile media divide in the interests of maintaining the fictive individual as the basic unit of consumption and social aggregation. Slack-jawed submission to blockbuster effects from Las Vegas to the Sydney Olympics substitutes for having a place in a world. Our fragile, ephemeral communities of contact lists are meant to substitute for the complex networks of kinship and locality that we have lost.

It is ironic that in this new age of biopolitics, we no longer hear the hundred-year old discourse about the crowd, and that, at the moment at which meaning evaporates, we devote ourselves to . . . psychology!

Grundwerk

Kant divides philosophy into logic, physics and ethics. Logic is today a mathematical science, and either incorprates or is incorporated by math. Physics and ethics are the empirical sciences, distinguished from logic which can never be dependent on the empirically given, since it's task is to describe the laws of reason. Physics extrapolates the laws of nature from the manifold flux of real events and processes which dictate to it the content it has to address. Ethics is eqally empirical, dealing with what ought to occur and, in Kant's opinion, therefore dealing with freedom.

While contemporary theory and philosophy have a problem with the idea of freedom, the term serves as well as any other to distinguish the activities of the human sciences, that swathe of academic disciplines that amalgamates the arts, humanities and social sciences. When we deal with human activity, if Kant is right, we deal with ethical issues. All rational creatures, he says, must abide by such simple, logically compelling rules as 'Thou shalt not lie'. And yet, at every turn, the world lies – for the Platonist and the Marxist, the Nietzshean and the postcolonial scholar alike. Not only does nature lie through camouflage and stealth; society embraces it. To the extent that society affords its citizens freedom, it lies when it gives them rules. To the extent that it does not, it lies when it pormises to. Kant's truth is founded in dissimulation.

ens quo maius cogitari nequit

" . . so that an angel can proportionate this power to a greater or smaller part of corporeal substance; for if there was no body at all, this power of God or of an angel would not correspond to any extension whatsoever" *

I place this here as a memento: the founder of modern science was still capable of arguing how many angels might dance on the head of a pin.

*Descartes' second letter to Henry More, cited in Koyré, Closed World, 191.

"History was our strong hypothesis"

"History was our strong hypothesis, the hypothesis of maximum intensty" (Baudrillard 2005: 128). History has become an alibi, an explanation for a present which refuses to yield. It has become a synonym for virtue, but a virtue capable of the most refined as well as the most egregious vice. History now names the reasons why perpetual violence, without hope of victory, is not only acceptable but good, indeed The Good, for the USA, for Israel, for every fundamentalist sect from Belfast to bali. History has become the name of its own end, for the lack, loss, foreclosure of the future.

Against Baudrillard, to argue that it is not the end of history but the end of the future that is achieved in Integral Reality, the froth on the daydream of change as 'minimum intensity' (ibid) caught in the feedback loop between happening and information about what happens.

Firstness is not innocence – when it poses as a goal. Secondness is not violence done to innocence when it shakes apart the endless shimmer of perception to release the difference. Identity thinking is not the only way to appropriate the manifold for thought or action. But reducing every perception back to the status of the merely perceived is the politics prior to the commodification of information, the general equivalence. Critical to the possibility of action, and therefore of event, is the tactical task of remaking perception, specifically as regards secondness. Unless there is a better way, ation will not be possible at all; only, as JB has it, terror.

Colour has never been free

When colour management takes over, it is not as if it replaces some imagined freedom of colour. Colour has never been free. The difference lies in the manner of its administration – from a semantic to a mathematical formation. The movement includes a false dawn of freedom at the moment of coal-based aniline dyes: the Impressionists as poster boys. That freedom collapses in the 'little chemists', Grémillon's taunt at the pointillistes, and even more so (genuine) risk of meaninglessness in the fauves and the expressionsts. Art historians have merely recognised, in their adulation of the colourists, the anarchy of colour, in Mattisse or in die Brücke, in whichm at their nadir, the whole language of colour risks collapse. This disaster is articulated by malevich under the sign of the transcendental; another proof that the sublime and despair are next door neighbours.