I.
The everyday expression c'est n'importe quoi has its roots in Old French, evolving from the phrase il n'importe pas quoi.
In its original usage, it simply implied that what was being said didn't matter because it lacked substance or failed to add value to a conversation.
In its modern form, however, the phrase expresses a certain level of exasperation: today, if a French-speaking critic tells you c'est n'importe quoi with reference to your writing - as recently happened to me - they are essentially dismissing your work as utter nonsense.
In other words, when weaponised by a critic speaking with the arrogant authority of bourgeois common sense, the phrase becomes an intellectual and ideological insult. It is a dogmatic insistence on rhetorical clarity and logical coherence.
Not only are they dismissing your thinking as lacking rigueur, they are indicting you for something far more serious: absurdité. To them, your work doesn't warrant a formal refutation and you, as the Humpty Dumptyish writer of such random and relativistic rubbish, do not deserve their respect.
II.
At this point, I can only give a weary sigh, as I feel that I've responded to the same critic - whose name is legion - on this exact topic a thousand times before. However, let me put my Barthesian hat on one more time ...
When wielded by a hostile critic, the phrase c'est n'importe quoi is, first and foremost, a sign of panic when confronted by someone (like me) who prides themselves on being "a kind of Monsieur Teste in reverse" [1].
In other words, someone who doesn't care about logical consistency and happily mixes contradictory ideas without apology provided the result is pleasing for the more audacious reader who prefers the outside of meaning and believes they can have their cake and eat it.
For me, yelling c'est n'importe quoi! every time a post on Torpedo the Ark fails to conform to fixed rules and cultural prejudices is to retreat into the safe space of doxa and pre-packaged ideas.
I would hope that - at its best - TTA opens up a space for thinking that is hors-sens; a world where there are rattlesnakes and palm trees but no policemen, gatekeepers, or grammar nazis. Somewhere that encourages the reader to forge their own connections and not feel constrained (or even particularly convinced) by what I say.
I agree with Barthes that far too many writers and artists overload their work with metaphors and symbols and are obsessed with the production of meaning. And I agree that the best works are suspended in a state of neutralité that baffles the binary and is exempt from the fascist requirement to always make good sense or pass judgement.
If TTA can be said to have an ethical project, this is it.
III.
By suggesting that I have gone too far, my critic is attempting to police the boundary between philosophically interesting work (which still plays by certain rules) and sheer nonsense (which succumbs to pure whim).
They operate from within a classical hermeneutic framework: they accept that a text can have multiple meanings, but they rigidly insist that it must remain tied to truth at some level, and that I, as the author, must be held accountable to my intent.
I fear, therefore, that they will never learn to love a blog like Torpedo the Ark - one which has as its motto: Ce que l'on conçoit bien est mort [2].
Notes
[1] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1990), p. 3. In Paul Valéry's original conception (1896), Monsieur Teste is a man of pure intellect, logic, and internal consistency.
[2] This is a play on Nicolas Boileau's famous couplet from L'Art poétique (1674): "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement / Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément." Put simply in English prose this reads: What is well conceived can be expressed clearly and in simple terms.
I
ReplyDeleteHow sad that such a sharp and often impressively intelligent being as Dr Alexander is now reduced to 'putting on hats' belonging to this or that of his fetishised thinkers - and 'wearily' to boot - in a way that makes one think of Worzel Gummidge putting on his 'thinking head', rather than meeting the world as bravely and defencelessly bare-headed as the poet Hölderlin insisted any poetic soul must. At the same time, HE purports to lecture ME (and presumably others he deems ‘like me’) on supposedly surrendering to dogma and 'doxa'! You couldn't make it up - or if you did, you'd be told by any decent friend, in the words of Edwyn Collins, to rip it up and start again! What this means here, of course – however comically contradictory he becomes – is 'one rule for me and another rule (as long as it suits me) for you', i.e. a kind of microfascism of narcissistic exceptionalism, as flagged by TTA’s authoritarian prescription to its readers to read the work novelistically rather than do so from their own freely configured resources and responses. (One thinks here of that Gordon Ramsay ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ video on which Ramsay splutters with incredulity (‘What a load of bollocks! Next thing they’ll be telling me which direction to piss in because of the salmon in the river!’) at one restaurant’s attempt to coerce him into eating his multi-plated dessert in a prescribed order!)
Rather clearly, SA is hardly the libertarian prince he likes to paint himself as, unless your idea of such is Charles Manson - who also just wanted to be free to live out in the open air with his spiders and creepy-crawlies and never have to face up to anything he said or did. Such trifling matters as grammar, of course, are, according to SA, just for 'Nazis' - linguistics be damned! - even though his own writing is rigorously grammatical and, his wilful plagiarism aside, perversely and even quaintly scholarly, with his 'If I mays' and other pseudo-niceties. (Confused? Buckle up!)
His folksy binarism - a paranoiac attempt to differentiate 'friendly' and 'hostile' critics (evidently he has 'forgotten' his beloved Nietzsche's dictum to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, not to mention Barthes' neutralism) - meanwhile goes on being as exasperating as ever and makes one think of those puerile influencers and criminals who whine about 'haters' so that they don't have to face up to their own failings and evasions. This makes it clear that, precisely when he should apply his supposed commitment to Barthesian neutrality, he won’t – because he would then have to resist his own narcissistic protectionism, which clearly matters to him more. As for people 'believing' they can have their cake and eat it - whether in literature or in life, good luck with that (tellingly ontotheological) language! Perhaps I've one foot in the past (or grave) - if so, good - but it makes me think of people who sit in third-rate academic seminars and, perceiving a racial slight in their Black body, consider it true because they FEEL it to be so.
The presentation of a 'pride' in being M. Teste's antithesis (would this mean that he's literally talking bollocks?) exhibits a kind of posturing one struggles to even call sixth-form. If the writer had a modicum of self-awareness, he might consider that this egotism is exactly where his troubles start, blinding him as it does to his own actual absurdity - which, in fact, as was shown clearly in recent weeks, shows how puffed-up and persecutory he can when his masks slip, as evidenced by his repeated demands that an 'Anonymous' commentator surrdender their 'cloak of anonymity' and even stooping to telling them that they were 'recognised' and known etc. People tend to reveal themselves most truthfully and tellingly when they're under stress and pressure, and this illustration, for us, was textbook. What price Foucault, Barthes, and all the 'death of the author' salesmanship you could shake a s(ch)tick at when you're being called out on your own evasiveness and flakiness?
PS You're welcome!
II
ReplyDeleteThe above somewhat ad hominem observations aside, though they obviously cannot be brushed aside, need not wholly obscure SA's one or two noteworthy philosophical pointers - even if we agree with Nietzsche that the philosopher and his thinker cannot (and should not) be separated. We are certainly interested to think about Barthes' discussions in this arena, taking off from his in 'Mythologies' of the permeability of myth to multiple signifiers. His work on ‘The Neutral’ we also find instructive in regard to the refusal of black and white thinking – a lens which TTA fruitfully and effectively applied to a recent post on Ed Sheeran, yet just as readily dispenses with when its amour-propre is threatened. Unfortunately for Dr Alexander, however, by the time we get to Barthes' 'Critique et Vérité' in 1966, the latter’s statement about the impossibility of saying 'n'importe quoi' is stated with crystalline clarity (or at least as close as Barthes ever gets to it).
'The critic cannot say just anything. Yet what constrains what he says is not a moral fear of “delirium”; first, because he leaves to others the unworthy task of drawing an unequivocal distinction between reason and unreason, in the very century in which that division is being called into question; second, because the right to “rave” has been won by literature since at least Lautréamont, and criticism could very well itself lapse into delirium for poetic reasons, provided it declared as much; and finally, because today’s ravings are sometimes tomorrow’s truths. Would not Taine have seemed “delirious” to Boileau, Georges Blin to Brunetière? No: if the critic is obliged to say something (and not “n'importe quoi”), it is because he attributes a signifying function to language (both the author’s and his own) and consequently because the anamorphosis he imposes on the work (and from which no one in the world has the power to escape) is guided by the formal constraints of meaning. One cannot produce meaning just any old way (if you doubt it, try). The critic’s judgement [sanction], then, does not concern the meaning of the work, but the meaning of what he says about it.’ (Critique et Vérité (Editions du Seuil, 1966, translation mine)
Barthes’ decisive final sentence - and in particular his use of the word 'sanction' - is fatal for any discourse's puerile and puer-like fantasy of ‘having done with judgment’ (while, in this case, and as we've noted, arrogating to itself the freedom to judge its perceived 'hostile' critics with a hypersensitive bitterness). The word ‘sanction’ here means something like ‘criterion of judgement’ or the standard by which the critic is judged. Barthes is not, clearly, insisting that criticism must recover the one ‘true’ meaning of a work. However, the critic's own discourse must itself be meaningful and susceptible to interpretation - or, in other words, any author and text must be contestable and readable against themselves precisely for language and discourse to be kept in play - where 'in play' means, as it did for Wittgenstein and as it must, 'within parameters'. (Anyone who's tried playing football without pitch markings knows it only makes for harum-scarum chaos and an ultimately stupid and boring kind of pseudo-game.) Barthes’ reference to the critic's ‘anamorphosis’ of a literary work – their necessary distortion or transformation of it – is, to be clear, ‘surveillée’ — controlled, observed, or regulated. Anything, to put it simply, does NOT go!
III
ReplyDeleteIn summary, SA does not merely publish contradictions and leave them unexplained. He supplies, in our view, an anxiously policed theoretical account of what they (in his broad-brush view) signify: resistance to bourgeois common sense, liberation from dogma, an ethical refusal of coercive judgement, in which his texts predictably attract ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. He and his blog purport to reject judgment while indulging in vociferous judgments of their own perceived ‘outside’, while many of his posts spit bile and exaggerated, nuance-busting contempt at the many, many things and people he dislikes. He wants his own work to be exempt from conventional requirements of coherence while describing his critics as dogmatic. He also wants readers to be unconstrained by what he says yet is at pains to supply a notably definite account of how they should understand his enterprise. While much of this is exasperating, it is, we suppose, psychologically if not necessarily logically contradictory. The difficulty – and we would call it a tragic flaw – is that Alexander does not really entertain the possibility that his critics might have identified any genuine weaknesses in the work. The Barthesian question, to sum up, is not whether he must obey conventional rules. It is whether his departures from those rules achieve anything – let alone the worthiness of his work being ‘loved’ (who’d have thought it from a former punk?) that he evidently craves.
The reference to Paul Valéry's ‘Monsieur Teste in reverse’ is of course very revealing. Alexander presents himself as a writer who privileges sensibility over logical consistency and who is willing to entertain incompatible ideas if they produce an aesthetically rewarding experience. This is, perhaps, a legitimate literary disposition, but it does not establish that logical consistency is merely a bourgeois prejudice. Sensibility can disclose something that logical analysis misses; it can also produce impressions that dissolve under scrutiny. Neither faculty is inherently superior in every context. The interesting question is whether Alexander's contradictions generate a productive tension or merely announce his freedom from the obligation to resolve them.
Ce que l'on conçoit bien est mort (‘What is well conceived is dead’) may be a neat inversion of Boileau's famous couplet about the clarity of well-conceived thought, but we would far rather align ourselves with Yeats’ desire to ‘sing whatever is well made’ (and that hence, like a great song, never get old or stale). A thought can be lucid without being reductive; a text can be obscure without being intellectually adventurous; a mask can dance and be tedious. His attitude to readers vis-a vis TTA appears to be, in the meantime, 'Honi soit qui mal y pense'.