Like Tom B, I've been thinking about the Real a lot recently. Tonight, I was thinking of a conversation I had with him the other day about poetry, in which I said that nice lines were nice and everything, but if that's all they were, if they just made you go "aahhh, that's a nice line" then they were fairly useless, because, after reading the Brecht chapter of Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism, I now view that line-making somewhat suspiciously.
As I understand him, Brecht was suspicious of nice lines because it dragged the reader (or the spectator in theatre) into a state of pleasure, encouraging them to both view art as a site for value exchange (you go to a play or read a book in order to "get something out of it") and to suspend their critical faculties. In becoming a product to give its user pleasure, art loses any ability to effect change.
Now, whenever I find myself liking a nice line, I remember Brecht. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of a nice line doing something else. It can be so nice that it goes beyond nice, far beyond it, into something beyond value judgements or questions of taste: the Real. Art is able -- though very, very rarely, see Badiou's chapter on "The Real and Semblance" in The Century -- to access the Real, although only as a glimpse, as a quick-as-lightning flash that darts through the gaps in reality/ideology/culture. The Real is beyond what we know, it is just what simply is. (The Real was the topic for our theory reading group last week, and it was one of the best yet; the point was raised about how you take this theory - its language is so totalising one tends to forget it is a theory that can be accepted or not, just like any other).
It is this quick-as-lightning quality that has interest for precariousness. The Real appears unknowable, unpredictable, and undecipherable. It has no quality, no content, no shape; it does not relate to morals or belief systems. It is -- perhaps -- the ultimate precariousness. The section we read was from Catherine Belsey's book, Culture and the Real. On page 14 she says this: "the real is a question, not an answer". I am writing on the potential for the question to be a key form of precariousness. The Real may turn out to be important.
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
To agree in an uncharacteristically Dionysian manner:
ReplyDeletesurely the line that is nice is the pleasurable line, and pleasure is an excess/lack experience that belongs to the real (remember discussions about la petit mort / orgasm?).
This totalising aspect of the real: it seems to re-conceptualize (re-name) a series of effects that have been recognised since forever. Is it not really an admission that Plato's Book is empty of forms (or might as well be?) An in-pseudo-scientific-language explanation for the disconnect that results from our imperfect understanding of consciousness’s abstractions and inefficiencies?
Tom
yep, that's it - the pleasurable line. i'd forgotten the excess/lack experience thing, but that totally makes sense.
ReplyDeletei share your suspicions (not quite the right word?) on the theory - i suppose it is an attempt to "explain" that disconnect you talk about by theorising its "un-explain-able-ness". it's still unexplainable, but that's now been encompassed in a theory and therefore makes more sense, up to a point. that unexplained part of it is what you can talk about - "oh the real, that's that unexplainable thing isn't it?" "yes, that's it".
i had some problems with the naming of it, and in the belsey - i'm not sure if this carries through to other writing on it - the apparent lack of concern for the importance of the act of naming. i think she said at one point that "it's unknown, but nameable" or something, and that seems to me problematic. i think the act of naming has a whole host of actions underneath it, and it has a totalising effect, even without that intention, and if the point of the real is its unknowable-ness, then it's probably best not trying to name it. but then you face a more practical problem of how to talk about it. nevertheless, i think you can talk about something without naming it, without setting it in discourse so clearly.
i agree that it is an attempt to bridge the gap between our experience and our understanding of it, which reminds me of a question i was going to ask in the reading group but forgot - where does the Kantian sublime come in to all this?
I just don't trust it, the concept is satisfyingly plausible and complex (or just complex enough to blind us into credulity), a sinister combination.
ReplyDeleteThe more powerful the system of logic, the less powerful we feel. Its completely uncritical, but I don't want to have to believe in fairies or invisible full stops.
Dunno about Kant ("We call that sublime which is absolutely great", so thats alright then), but Heidegger is all on about the work of art emerging from the gap between the Earth and World. Perhaps we could talk about sublation/Aufheben when Hegel comes up, the real still seems beholden to dialectics (I am probably wildly incorrect).
Yes - this naming issue, it is difficult. I have a book in plan that has a subject which never appears - the idea would be that the substance would describe a distinct shape of a lack. This is my problem with the real: if we can describe what we know then there is a realm of 'known unknowns' (Donald Rumsfeld, critic par excellence of our age) which have a shape: 'here be dragons'.
But it twists and turns (or the people defending it do), it is a concept, a becoming, a God, unchangable, mutable, psychological, cultural, resisting, innate, present, absent, impossible, traumatic.
Is it not just a postmodern sop to the theocratic?