In Praise of Notes and Parenthetical Elements (A Reply to a Critic)

A gargoyle checking footnotes

 

 

A critic writes:

One of the most irritating things about your blog is the use of endnotes. 

      One might question whether such are really needed at all in what is essentially an informal and non-academic forum, but since you seem determined to provide additional information, thereby supplementing your main text, you might at least try to keep them as brief as possible and not attempt to write a post within a post; as you do, for example, in the note on Barbette in 'Carry On Cross-Dressing' (9 April 2022). 

      It's fine to mention that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were coached in the art of drag by Barbette, since you were discussing Some Like It Hot, but you needn't then discuss Jean Cocteau's relationship with the latter. This seems to suggest distraction on your part - as if you suddenly become bored with your own post and wish to head off in a new direction - and it's disconcerting too for readers to suddenly be taken off-topic. 

      If I were you, I would rework the format of your blog and consider eliminating notes altogether.

         

My reply: 

 

As a provocateur, it pleases me to think there are irritating aspects to Torpedo the Ark and that it doesn't simply soothe or pacify its audience. The pleasure of the text in its most radical sense - what Barthes terms jouissance - ultimately relies upon the reader's discomfort [1].      

As a post-Derridean, i.e., one who happily inhabits the margins of philosophy, I am favourably disposed towards footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical elements, and prioritise fragmented forms, literary digressions, and the seemingly trivial detail (in which the devil hides) over conceptual coherence, etc. [2]

 

I regard the notes, therefore, as more than merely supplementary - they are not just afterthoughts, or add-ons, which serve to complete or enhance the main text; the notes have interest and import in their own right and function more like gargoyles on the side of a cathedral, jeering at the idea of wholeness (as if any post could ever be the last word on anything) [3]. 

 

The endnotes, as a type of birdsong, provide a way out of even my own arguments. I want to digress (to step aside or walk away from the straight and narrow); I like to be distracted (to have my thoughts pulled in a different direction, my attention diverted). If you find this disconcerting, then that's good; see my remarks above about jouissance. 

 

And so, I won't be changing the format of posts on Torpedo the Ark; a blog which might even be characterised (à la Whitehead) as ultimately nothing but a footnote to Nietzsche.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990). And see my discussion of this work in Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: click here. 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, (The University of Chicago Press, 1982). 

      See also Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), particularly the reading of Rousseau, in which Derrida demonstrates how there is no transparently pure language awaiting corruption by an external supplement that is entirely alien to it. 

 

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-191. I discuss Lawrence's gargoyle philosophy in several posts, including 'Believe in the Ruins' (16 April 2019): click here. 

 

 

Further reading:  

 

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, (Harvard University Press, 1999). 

Chuck Zerby, The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes (Touchstone, 2003). 

 

See also Pat Thomson's post 'a little fluff on the footnote' (9 May 2016) on her blog, Patter, click here. 

On Holism and Anti-Holism

Holism / studiocarreras.com

Despite what some commentators suggest, I wouldn't describe myself as a reductionist.

But, as might be imagined, my love of cracks, gaps, fragments, ruins, ruptures, breakdowns, and all those things that belong to what might be termed a gargoyle aesthetic, means that I have little time for those monomaniacs who subscribe to holistic thinking and insist on a smutty state of Oneness in which all parts are reconciled and find their completion. 

Thus, it's mistaken to read the multiplicity of posts on this blog and then attempt to understand them as a Whole: the will to a system, says Nietzsche, betrays a lack of integrity.

Ultimately, I'm sympathetic to Blanchot's suggestion that we learn to think about the relationship between literary fragments in terms of sheer difference; as things that are related to one another only in that each of them is unique and without, as Deleuze and Guattari note, "having recourse either to any sort of original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about".

In a passage that captures perfectly the anti-holistic spirit of Torpedo the Ark as desiring-machine, the latter write:   

"We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull grey outlines of a dreary, colourless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately."

In addition to the artistic implications of this, a number of logical, ethical, and political consequences also follow; ones that, to me at least, appear far more attractive (and more radical) than those that follow on from holism which, unfortunately, is a concept invoked here, there, and everywhere within contemporary culture - even by people who should know better (i.e., people with the ability to be critically self-reflective).

We hear about holistic models of everything; healthcare, education, science, spirituality, etc. Even politicians talk about the need for joined up government. Again, to quote Nietzsche: I mistrust all systematisers - but today it's become impossible to ignore them.

These advocates of holistic thinking speak in fuzzy terms about inclusion, integration, and harmony. But such idealism builds churches and concentration camps; it erases real difference, fears otherness, and ultimately wants to subordinate the individual to a superior Whole (the Party, the State, Humanity). 

I find the thought of One Love, One World, One People, nauseating. If this makes me a reductionist, or a nihilist, then so be it ...

See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 42. 

Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris

croire aux ruines ...

I.

It's a shame that the fire at Notre-Dame only destroyed the roof and spire, leaving the towers and most of the building still standing. It would have been better for the people of France - better for all of us - if the whole thing had been razed to the ground.

I say this not as some kind of cultural barbarian or iconoclast, nor simply to be provocative; but, rather, as someone in agreement with D. H. Lawrence, who writes in one of his Etruscan sketches:

"We have reached the stage where we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is  better to keep life fluid and changing, than try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments. Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections."

Like Lawrence, I love to see small wooden temples, that are unimposing and evanescent as flowers. Buildings - particularly religious buildings - should aim to be modest and charming rather than grand and impressive, preserving the natural humour of life: "And that is a task surely more worthy, and even much more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul."   

Lawrence continues:

"Why has mankind such a craving to be imposed upon! Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness."

Even Notre-Dame, if we're honest, standing in Paris for centuries on end, had become a colossal dead weight - stuffed full of priceless treasures and cultural artefacts, but dead treasures and dead artefacts, belonging to another time, another people.

And one suspects that those who claim to revere the past and seek to preserve it - along with those billionaires and politicians who are now pledging obscene sums of cash to rebuild the cathedral (whilst continuing to ignore the deprivation in many parts of the city and its suburbs) - do so simply because they are unable ultimately to face up to the challenge of modernity to make it new.   

II.

Lawrence, of course, was ambiguous (at best) on the question of cathedrals - from Lincoln to Milan - long before his trip to see the Etruscan tombs in 1927.

In The Rainbow, for example, his novel of 1915, Lawrence stages an amusing conflict between Anna Brangwen and her husband Will, in which she destroys his passion for Lincoln Cathedral with her own gargoyle philosophy ...

Will is physically excited by the cathedral and willingly allows himself to be transported by it to another world. But to Anna, it's merely a thing of the past and she rather resented his ecstasy, wishing he might curb his enthusiasm.

Lawrence writes:

"The cathedral roused her too. But she would never consent to the knitting of all the leaping stone in a great roof that closed her in [...] it was the ultimate confine [...] She claimed the right to freedom above her, higher than the roof. [...]
      So that she caught at little things, which saved her from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite [...] the wicked, odd little faces carved in stone, and she stood before them arrested.
      These sly little faces peeped out of the grand tide of the cathedral like something that knew better. They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man's own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church."

Understandably, Will is unimpressed with such thinking and has little or no time for the carved faces; his wife was "spoiling his passionate intercourse with the cathedral" and this made him bitterly angry:

"Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter [...]
     His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions."

Anna's nihilism, however, inasmuch as it's a counter-idealism, is an active negation of the negative and of nothingness. Thus, despite Will's initial anger and despair, gradually he became more responsive to the call of the gargoyles than to the perfect surge of the cathedral itself, realising that outside the cathedral "were many flying spirits" that could never be contained within the holy gloom.

"He listened to the thrushes in the garden, and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions [...] and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.
      There was life outside the church. There was much that the church did not include. [...] He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs."

And so, my advice to the good people of Paris is this: either finish the job and demolish the rest of Notre-Dame, or leave it as a lovely ruin, roofless, and at the mercy of the elements.

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'Sketches of Etruscan Places', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 188-89, 190, 191. 

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