Excerpt From a Work In Progress
Well what does one do with this? On the one hand, James’s short story serves as a kind of realist object-lesson, or perhaps a lesson in objects, a lesson in which we’re meant to learn that some objects, no matter how beautiful, are not fit subjects for certain modes of representation, that representation of the “real” is the representation of the “appearance” of the real, that the mimetic pretensions embedded in the term “realism” are just that: pretensions. If we’re to learn these lessons – seeming inversions (or “perversions”) of Wallace Stevens’s “Let be be finale of seem” – then realism requires an abandonment of the notion of the real in favor of the representation of the “appearance” of the real. If we read “The Real Thing” as a lesson in realism, we learn that in the realist’s distinction between “reality” and “appearance,” “appearance” emerges as the favored term.
So long internet, I’m in the Times!
Jessica and I are featured in this week’s The Hunt, an apartment hunting column in the New York Times Real Estate section. Check out how desperately Tobey is trying to escape my icy grip.
Simon Critchley on Heidegger
Leather-panted philosopher and sometime Int’l Necronaut Simon Critchley is three parts into an eight-part blog series that attempts to explicate Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. So far, it’s as clear an description of Heidegger’s book as one could hope for, given the constraints Critchley’s set for himself. At least I think it’s clear – I’ve read the later essays collected in Poetry, Language, Thought, but never the magnum opus itself. One of the great difficulties of reading Heidegger is his notorious lexicon, the set of terms he coins and redefines in order to construct a first philosophy that does away with what he sees as the fundamental flaws of the Cartesian tradition.
Because this lexicon plays such an important role in Heidegger’s project, anyone attempting to explain Heidegger to anyone else ends up writing something that looks like an attempt to rewrite the dictionary rather than a clarifying gloss. This passage from Critchley’s latest post is representative:
The world is full of handy things that hang together as a whole and which are meaningful to me. In even more basic terms, the world is a whole load of stuff that is related together: my laptop sits on my desk, my spectacles sit on my nose, the desk sits on the floor, and I can look over to the window at the garden and hear the quiet hum of traffic and police sirens that make up life in this city. This is what Heidegger calls “environment” (Umwelt), where he is trying to describe the world that surrounds the human being and in which it is completely immersed for the most part.
So notice the paragraph begins with a seemingly obvious statement (the world is full of things) that reads a bit like a sentence from a Robbe-Grillet novel, after which we find out that said statement is actually the redefinition of a word we already know (“environment” in Critchley’s translation), but that now has a kind of philisophico-poetic glow to it. For people who try to explain Heidegger to the uninitiated (and, still being relatively uninitiated, I’ve read quite a few of them), the illumination of the lexicon is apparently a necessary first step because everyone does it (besides the hundreds of philosophers and critics who take on Heidegger, see also the “Hedeggerian Glossary” at the end of William Vollmann’s “Violet Hair” in The Rainbow Stories). The next step is to start stringing together this terminology, to explain the ways in which these newly redefined terms relate to each other.
Again, because I’ve never read Being and Time, I can’t tell you how accurate Critchley is in his descriptions of Heidegger’s redefinitions. His reconstruction of the ligature of Heidegger’s philosophy performs its work well, though, insofar as these posts have, so far, at least made me feel like I could open the book and begin reading it on solid ground. Which is not to say that I will any time soon.
Mea Culpa
Wow, that The Program Era post was really poorly (self)edited. I think I’ve fixed most of the most glaring errors. Yikes.
Twitter and the State of Music Criticism
This is video of my friend Chris Weingarten speaking some truth at the 140 Characters Conference. The rant format is still taboo at most academic conferences, which is unfortunate because Chris could really liven up the next MLA: “Shit Spirals in Henry James’s Late Novels.”
He’s in the process of tweet-reviewing 1000 records in one year at 1000TimesYes.
NOTE: For some reason, Wordpress doesn’t want me to embed the video. I’ll get it embedded as soon as I figure out what’s wrong.