Why Vote?

Ideally, the ideas we need would materialize within a political discourse and mechanism designed to skim the very best ideas from the top.  Those ideas would then go into practice and we would all be the better for it, having expressed our collective will and having taken a type of collective action together.  To renege on participating in the ritual of voting, then – in such a “frictionless” world – would be to renege on our collective duty.  Who could be against that?

But the assumption latent in this little narrative is that whatever collective action we take requires the ratifying act of voting to figure as truly being collective.  This is false assumption.

Those who continue to insist that everyone should vote (i.e. the voter enthusiasts) are similar to those philosophers or psychologists who insist that all inward maladies can be accounted for by outer (i.e. behavioural) criteria.  Prescriptions can only be written once we’ve nailed down the symptoms.

The assumption behind voting, then, is that the medicine we need already exits, and simply by paying attention, weighing the evidence, attending rallies, and casting a ballot, we can truly remedy our situation. What I mean is, voting is an act one can point to and say “I voted,” hence to feel like he or she is taking a political stand, participating in collective action, without asking if voting, as carried out presently, truly represents the will of the collective in the first place.

And if one asks this latter question honestly, it becomes painfully obvious that it does not.  What follows after that realization is far more terrifying because now what is required is the tough collective action of genuine negotiation and organization—not the simple and prescriptive participation in existing mechanisms of power, but the building of, and commitment to, one’s own.  Such is what the Occupiers are trying to do.  They are uninterested in voting because they know it is designed to limit collective political action; it is designed to fragment.

They vote, surely—but on their own terms.  However much the clunkiness of the “consensus” model is put on display at public assemblies, what is also in plain sight is democratic legitimacy and transparency.  We have none of that with “traditional” voting; people know, or feel, they are getting short changed.  That is a crisis of legitimacy that starts at the top as Russell Brand so brilliantly points out.  Only cowards plagued by fantasies of self-immolation try to tinker at the bottom—handing out the same prescriptions, hoping for different results, oft reiterated as the definition of insanity. Voters and voter enthusiasts must, in some order, attend a rally, watch the debates, weigh the evidence, cast a ballot.  After having squared away their democratic duty, they can go home.

Anti-voting recognizes that in a society of clearly discerned commercial transactions with a beginning and an end, voting lulls us into the belief that we have somehow attained, or achieved, the end of the democratic transaction in question.  Voting enthusiasts, of course, retort with some blasé riposte to the effect of “Democracy is a commitment,” “Voting is merely step one,” “Constant vigilance,” and other hackneyed bromides.   But to undertake and achieve true political change requires genuine collective mobilization.  Such mobilization is precisely what voting, in the manner it is largely carried out in the world’s “mature democracies,” is designed to stifle.  We cast our vote in the manner we swipe our credit cards.  We can vote for Apple or Microsoft.  Can we vote to eliminate smart phones ?  What are you, some sort of Communist agitator?

What anti-voting recognizes is that the system is designed precisely to conceal or cover up any answers that could truly benefit the public in the first place.  The system is not designed to help people, merely to siphon off resentments from time to time so that business can carry on as usual.  To vote is essentially to consent to such a system—to a system that actively oppresses and silences people all the while deluding its proponents with a sense collective freedom. Who could be in favour of that?

Advertisements

The fake crisis in Syria

I am going to make perhaps needless hay of the formal designation of an elementary logical precept.  Modus ponens establishes that:

If P, then Q.

So, assuming P, we have made the transition, by the very premise we have just established, to Q.

Of course, if one does not agree with Q, simply problematize P.  The Q in question here concerns the dubious moniker of “false-flag,” and because we have an assortment of Ps attesting to the veracity of Q, it is a wonder that so many in the mainstream intelligentsia have such difficulty asserting Q.

More specifically, Q is the proposition that the United States government could wilfully and deliberately inflict mass suffering on innocents to pursue a demented political agenda.  Note that I am not even saying that it would, or has—merely that it could.  Yet this slight shift in modal register is not enough for us to assume Q, even for those who should know by now that Q is real; yet most insist on debating the merits of P.

What are the merits of P?  P is fact, and yes, from P, one wants to believe that Q is not necessarily fact; but this is what modus ponens asks us to consider.  Put colloquially, if it looks like a duck and swims like a duck, then how long before we say it is a damn duck.

And what are some of these “facts”?

Iraq is the obvious “fact.”  The American war machine went into action in 2003 based on bogus intelligence concocted to serve a Defense department agenda known as the Project for the New American Century.  But lo, what has happened here?  Somehow, to appeal “merely” to Iraq is not enough of a P to assume Q!  In fact, asserting such a P too hastily brands you a crank, or a simpleton.

But PNAC has not been dissolved or put aside in any way.  David Cameron pleaded that we should not let the failure of Iraq paralyze us in face of this new threat; of course, his plea failed to win the hearts and minds of the British Parliament.  Yet the same plea is raised by commentators like Steven Clemons at The Atlantic.  If we are willing to entertain Cameron’s outburst as something other than frantic political apoplexy, that is, we might come up with a more subtle and candid rehashing of exactly the same argument.

This is what Clemons does.  He argues, in effect, that we mustn’t let the simplicity of Iraq situation determine or erase the new complexities, threats, challenges we now face with Syria.  But this is simply Cameron’s stupidity in sheep clothing.  More specifically, the responsible, liberal intelligentsia hit job sounds like this:

in the run-up to the Iraq War … which I also opposed on a variety of grounds, you had an administration at that time, under Bush and Cheney, that didn’t care about evidence whatsoever, because they just wanted to go to war. They just wanted to settle old scores with Saddam Hussein, and, to a certain degree, they opened up much of the nightmare that we’ve seen in the Middle East. This is an administration, under Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama, his chief of staff Denis McDonough, who have been working hard not to get more deeply engaged, to try to not have the third major military intervention there.

And that is what I find unusual and, frankly, more compelling about this, and I find many of my friends on the progressive side that are worried about another intervention, and I see the neoconservatives applauding an intervention because they hope that there is a slippery slope into a much fuller engagement that’s about regime change, about boots on the ground, and about a deeper engagement of the United States in this mess, which I oppose.

So, I believe—and it could be a complete mess—that it is important for the international community in matters of weapons of mass destruction to respond, to try and secure those weapons, or hold those who use them accountable, and to use—and to make that effort one that’s distinct from other political skirmishes and realities. I believe—and it may be too fine a needle to thread—that there’s a way to get from the attack, that I think is impending and that I think will happen, towards some form of peace process that is inclusive of all parties …

Perhaps that’s a naive view, but this is an administration that, frankly, I find does not want to go to war, and that’s why I think that the evidence that they are trying to bring to bear and the actions they’re considering are quite different than what happened in Iraq. And I suppose I’m admitting that I’m supportive of this action. And it is awkward to support it, because I know that it could have profound unintended and unexpected consequences, but I do believe that the president is on the right track in this particular case.

How cool, wonderful, thoughtful and insightful that all sounds!  The standard operating procedure for the propaganda machine is thus: shame those who react with indignation (particularly those who mention “Iraq”) by offering up cool and sympathetic platitudes.  Then go on to take what is essentially a black and white issue (which Iraq, the author concedes, certainly was) and make a plea, in this case, for a “saner” evaluation based on “evidence” and “truth” and “logic” and “rationale” (as opposed to immature indignation).

The propaganda machine is only too happy to promote quacks like Clemons because he is doing precisely what good propaganda does—which is not berate its audience, but merely distract it.  Total conversion is never the goal—merely some confusion.  If I can get you to ask what the proper response should be, I have already convinced you that something should indeed be done.  This is equivalent to saying there was some merit to invading Iraq, despite the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever—which is why I say that to debate what a “proper” response should be to the “crisis-in-Syria” is already to drink the poison.  You have only been prompted to ask such a question because of a pre-existing imperial agenda.  Whatever answer you come up with, you have done the Empire’s bidding by asking your question in a “legitimate” and public forum.  Power is satisfied and your moral conscience has been given a workout.  Bombs away!

Moreover, language has been so co-opted by the vast propaganda apparatus that even to humbly express solidarity with, or concern over the plight and suffering of, the Syrian people has itself become a speech act in service of power.

Notable figures whom I admire, but whom have, nonetheless, drank the poison in this way, include Vijay Prashad, who has relied on heartfelt narratives to write about Syria; and Russell Brand, whose appeal to humanitarian concerns over political ones, however admirable, is precisely what those in power would have him reiterate at every stop of his Messiah Complex World Tour.

So what should those who are truly sympathetic and concerned over the plight of the Syrian people do?  For one thing, they should avoid discussion of both the suffering of the Syrians (as though this is any sort of legitimate casus belli for (humanitarian) intervention in what would then be the very arbitrary case of Syria) and the “legal” merits of what an “appropriate” international response should be.

Rather, look squarely at what everyone is all too willing to deny—that this is not a Syrian crisis; this is a crisis of legitimacy, i.e. our own crisis, one of being beholden to a supposedly “representative” sovereign that will not hesitate to use a false-flag event to pursue its own vicious foreign policy goals knowing that we are either powerless or unwilling to debate the obvious.  That we in the West are largely beholden to a government that will not hesitate to slaughter innocents in order to pursue its own foreign policy agenda is quite a bracing conclusion to accept.  But this is no longer the stuff of Hollywood conspiracy theories; it is very real.

To those on the left who hesitate to use the term “false-flag,” as though your journalistic integrity depends on reporting “facts” only, hence requires not raising the pitch of our discourse beyond some rational unfolding and exchange of principles, I can only say that you are playing precisely the tune power would have you play.  You are exporting the crisis elsewhere by refusing to face, squarely, the crisis here.  The power of language is deteriorating in your very hands, and the people’s resistance is actively dulled by your meticulousness, because only the mobilized outrage over such lack of legitimacy can usher in the sort of political engagement and change you are naively hoping an appeal to the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria will ignite.

The crisis is not a humanitarian one; pretending so is to further dodge the issue.  The crisis is one of legitimacy because under no possible circumstance are the actions of those set to use force on the Syrians at all representative of the people’s will.  In such times, journalistic integrity means having the guts to avoid a “rational” weighing of facts and evidence to instead make the bold assertions necessary—to address the rotting core of imperialism rather than the merits or demerits of its outward show.  And that means facing the fact that those in power are presently discussing and planning ways to carry out more false-flag operations than we can possibly bear.

And unless we are willing to discuss that, language, subsequent to each of these stagings, will grow exponentially more meaningless.  It has already been inflated so far past anything recognizably real (however well meaning the discussion) that its continual utterance seems to guarantee only increased cynicism, which in turn leads to greater and greater acts of depravity, callousness, or just plain indifference.

For example, nine percent of the American population supports an attack on Syria; but it does not follow that ninety-one percent then opposes an attack on Syria.  Rather, ninety-one percent simply does not care.  When the bombs finally drop, do not expect any sort of prolonged and concerted outrage on their part.  The majority of Americans will find themselves as apathetic to military action in the aftermath of a strike as during the lead-up.  Why?  Because there has been a grotesque inability for language to address the most pressing issue at hand.  Americans know what their government is capable of.  A false-flag operation carried out on foreign soil necessitates, and does not preclude, false-flag operations at home.  And until that reality is attended to, discussing legal fakeries, or humanitarian mumbo-jumbo, is just pundit-activist masturbation.

Reading Seal’s music II

I may have figured out what is going on in “Dreaming in Metaphors,” with a hint of irony too because what Seal is talking about in this track is indeed something that is lost. I’ve mentioned the track in a previous post, commenting on its overlap with themes explored in another track, “Crazy,” where I take Seal to be expressing, with angst, an incredulity at people’s inability to want to save their fellow human beings, before, that is, it is too late.

This incredulity I take to register a skepticism, the Cavellian sort, which denotes a mystification not necessarily at another’s existence, but at our own need for intimacy versus another’s seeming lack of such a need. The idea of dreaming in metaphors certainly extends a motif of incredulousness at the callousness of others—not a callousness toward others but perhaps a callousness towards oneself and one’s needs, which means that the subjective expression of a need for intimacy, rendered in “Dreaming in Metaphors” as a need for wholeness, is one that ought to be shared. If it is not, the fault perhaps is in ourselves and not heaven.

To ask why we dream in metaphors is to ask, in one sense, why it is that language functions in anything other than a constative register. The logical positivists had little patience for metaphors and would probably ask, like Seal does, why we ought to dream in them anyhow. So this plea of ‘why?’ is essentially a plea for language, a language with a consistent, even a clear and distinct, meaning. But language is hardly ever clear and distinct; only (certain) ideas are. So the plea obviously expresses an exasperation with or in the expression of ideas.

I hear exasperation when Seal claims that (or asks if?) “life will always stay the same,” followed by “life will ease your pain.” He wants to find someone “peaceful and nonjudgmental”—fair enough, but in order for this person to hold him back. So what he is asking for is for someone to curb his desire, which means a return to some state or stage when desire was satiated fully. The obvious stage is childhood; so is Seal asking for a lover or a mother?

He is asking to be made “whole” (“with life”) which means, to some degree, asking for it to stay the same, as though flux reduces wholeness. But later in the track, he tells us about those having lost faith “in seeking God” who then turn to the needle—an invocation of drugs of course, as catalyst to achieving the sort of wholeness lacking in a world without God. When Seal asks “Tell me what’s going on with your life,” he is addressing his interlocutor with a mix of compassion, disappointment and reproof because certainly whatever wholeness we want should not come via, or be abetted by, drugs.

Yet the infantilism sometimes assumed with a desire for wholeness, as though a fractured life constitutes a “grown-up” existence, is not reiterated here. Nor do I think that Seal equates drug use (necessarily) with infantilism. What he does consider childish, perhaps, is the desire for instant gratification; so a desire for wholeness should not be expected instantly. But then, it seems Seal is reproving others for their desperateness, and this is not something I’m willing to believe Seal is capable of.

So is it silly or childish to want wholeness in the first place or is merely the use of drugs to achieve such wholeness what is worthy of reprove? I’ll answer each question in kind. To the first, the idea that a return to wholeness is indicative of a desire to return to childhood means that whatever we take wholeness to be or mean, it necessarily stands at a retroactive remove from where we are. That is, a move towards wholeness is necessarily a move backwards. There is no progressive movement towards wholeness. Should there be? Seal answers this question, to my mind, in another track, “Don’t Cry”:

When we were young
And truth was paramount
We were older then
And we lived a life without any doubt

If truth is only paramount – meaning truth is all, i.e., all the time, not something to be strived for – when “we were young,” then so too is there no progressive movement toward truth. Indeed, the increasing fragmentation of experience and senses as we grow older means that it is the process of flux that infantilizes us and we are actually older (say, wiser) when we are young, afforded a life, that is, without any doubt. Can we possibly say, for example, that armed with this truth we are somehow more vulnerable?

We say so, obviously, in hindsight and in some attempt at redeeming the passage we have suffered. But it is part of the inadequacy of this account of passage that I hear Seal expressing when he asks why we dream in metaphors—why, say, we are forced to “argue” out meaning (invoking the dialectic) if peace, a peace we’ve already known, “is our one salvation” anyhow. Is Seal expressing tragedy? In a Cavellian sense he is, because to register skepticism (in philosophy) is to register tragedy (in literature). The idea that progress cannot save us, despite even happy turnouts, is expressed nicely here by Eagleton, who also invokes the tragic:

Marxism is not generally seen as a tragic vision of the world. Its final Act—communism—appears too upbeat for that. But not to appreciate its tragic strain is to miss much of its complex depth. The Marxist narrative is not tragic in the sense of ending badly. But a narrative does not have to end badly to be tragic.

Even if men and women find some fulfilment in the end, it is tragic that their ancestors had to be hauled through hell in order for them to do so. And there will be many who fall by the wayside, unfulfilled and unremembered. Short of some literal resurrection, we can never make recompense to those vanquished millions. Marx’s theory of history is tragic in just this respect.

Why must we go through the hells we go through to achieve the successes we do?

Secondly, is Seal reproving drug users for their desire for immediate access to wholeness, or truth, suggesting they ought to suffer, say, the burdens of passage and put more faith in the dialectical discovery procedure, hence renounce drugs? But it is precisely that discovery procedure that puts human beings at risk –and all for the sake of “discovering” something which, at one point they had but have now lost. Why is this the case? Here again Seal can only turn to incredulity.

When he asks, then, in somewhat reproving tone, “What’s going on with your life? Has it stayed the same?” part of his own disgust comes from the fact that he cannot answer, definitively, that it has all turned out badly (because of drugs), or, conversely, that it would have turned out much better had you only renounced drugs. Drugs may be bad; but is a commitment to the dialectic any better? The overlap in lyric here, between “Has it stayed the same?” (inquisitive) and “Life will always stay the same” (definitive) means that Seal is certain of one thing: the conditions of the world make it impossible to know what is more treacherous, drugs or the dialectic. These conditions the universe repeats.

Hence Seal can only reiterate the same sort of desperation that caused those to “turn to the needle” in the first place

Why do we dream in metaphors?
Try to hold onto something we couldn’t understand?

concluding with the reminder that the salvation we seek is now “lost” implying that we indeed once had it. What sort of cruel cosmic joke or trick is it to initiate the dialectic discovery procedure not for something unrealized, but something wanting, i.e., something we have felt to have existed before? How to reclaim it if, lacking language or expression, we find that the very possibilities we were privy to when we were younger are destined to be lost or made unrealizable to a (false) dialectic?

That is, if all dialectics are false – because in their very dynamism they miss or misconstrue what is permanent, static – why should we commit to one to reclaim what we believe to be permanent or static about the universe? Are we more vulnerable when we have the truth but cannot express it, or when we express it inadequately, making a false claim to strength and knowledge, denying a world we have felt to exist in favour of one that others insist does?

So the dialectical discovery procedure in fact details something of compromise not with the world, but with language, what we use to describe the world, which itself comes to makeup the world. It may be our lot, over the course of our lives, to attempt to transcend these compromises, but what’s the use when, in the end, even if we do, we may not be spared from tragedy?

L.B.J.

The liberal eulogizer is standing by, to tell us about tomorrow; he bleeds when it is expedient. The only cheerfulness uncorrupted by cynicism is today without a body. The blows it had sustained did nothing to its spirit. But where is the spirit now?

It has passed, across generations, over blunted acres, across the millet, making myths of toil and cooperation.  It has settled near some grand pré.  All that remains elsewhere is toil.

The Trotsky: a claim to community

A distinction between an earlier and later Charles Taylor might split between Charles Taylor the political activist versus Charles Taylor the intellectual.[1] Certainly the nature of the writing going on in a political tract like The Pattern of Politics (1970) is at removes from intellectual forays into the malaise of modernity or to the crisis of the self and identify. I won’t attempt to square what an earlier Taylor says with a later Taylor.

But Taylor’s politics were local enough in the 1960s to make a book he wrote during that time pertinent to what I want to say about The Trotsky, a film shot entirely in Montreal and engaged in its own way with “radical” Canadian politics. I do not seek to apply a Taylorian reading to the film than to suggest that the film itself is a reading of this particular political text of Taylor’s—that the movie ingests and thereby depicts some of its most pertinent lessons.

So even if a later Taylor does not square with an earlier Taylor, what The Trotsky attempts is to make something like the politics of polarization matter once again, which is to say it attempts to reclaim some of the lessons put forward in The Pattern of Politics. One could also say this film attempts to reclaim the dialectic, in particular the notion which holds conflict between clearly opposing viewpoints as the lynchpin of social change. How the film reinterprets the dialectic will be considered here.

The premise of the film, that a Montreal teenager, Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel), believes himself to be the living embodiment of Leon Trotsky reincarnated suggests it is not beyond the pale to think about things like having another’s soul occupy one’s body, and from there, to consider whether the ontological reality of film facilitates a discussion of reincarnation (another’s soul trapped in a body eerily present to us) or rather, something like the reverse (a different body occupying another’s soul).

I raise these examples in consideration of the ontological differences between what Cavell calls, simply, the “actor” (stage actor) and the “performer” (screen actor).

The [stage] actor’s role is his subject for study, and there is no end to it. But the screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study, and a study not his own. (That is what the content of a photograph is—its subject.) On a screen the study is projected; on a stage the actor is the projector. An exemplary stage performance is one which, for a time, most fully creates a character. After Paul Scofield’s performance in King Lear, we know who King Lear is, we have seen him in the flesh.

An exemplary screen performance is one in which, at a time, a star is born. After The Maltese Falcon, we know a new star, only distantly a person. “Bogart” means “the figure created in a given set of films.” His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name “Bogart” would not mean what it does. (28)

If it’s true that an actor on screen, when he plays a character, imbues that character with something of his persona, so that there is no Rambo, say, without Sylvester Stallone, and, subsequently, no role for Sylvester Stallone to play without invoking or imbibing a bit of Rambo in it, then the creation of a film star means the creation of a persona, which functions something like a sign, with its own cluster of clues and associations.

The individuality of the screen actor is either lost or heightened, depending on how you view things. Lost in that there is no appearance or presence the actor can (now or ever) have without calling to mind the medium he works in. Heightened in that something of what he is is (fundamentally) more open to the senses; the screen actor is more transparent to us, which, also, can be a way of cloaking things. But sometimes, once we appear on screen, just as once we utter language, we are committed persons.

(To rehash ground already travailed by Cavell, let me say that theatre actor, say, Ian McKellen, does not transfigure who we understand Richard III to be. McKellen interprets the character; another could interpret differently, but we imagine the character, Richard III, to be a stable entity. But the screen actor does not interpret his role. He inhabits it so there is no role without the actor. Conventionally speaking, one does not “interpret” Rambo.)

It is not unwise to suppose that a film director is aware of his inheritance in the actors and actresses he has sovereignty over, particularly Jacob Tierney, a man well versed in the histrionics of what we might nowadays call 1960s (Canadian) “counterculture,” auteuring a film explicitly aimed at the youth of Canada.

Whether or not Pierre Trudeau is a galvanizing figure for today’s youth or not, those who are curious to know him are likely to know him through Colm Fiore. I don’t mean that Fiore’s persona trumps Trudeau’s. Indeed, Fiore interprets Trudeau the way a stage actor interprets a character; he does not invent him; others will come along with different interpretations. But for a generation at least (or for a generation of Canadian youth interested in 1960s Canadian counterculture), and perhaps simply by appearing to us as Trudeau on screen, Fiore’s persona will invoke or be caught up with Trudeau (though not vice versa). Fiore is, in a sense, a reincarnation of Trudeau.

In casting Fiore as a rather ineffective (mostly comedic) villain in The Trotsky, I believe Jacob Tierney is offering a critique of Trudeau in this film, so a critique of the Liberal brand of consensus-politics that undercuts the rough and tumble world of adversarial intellectual pursuit—known (and derided) most famously as that darling artifice beloved (not solely) by Marxists: the dialectic. I am not exactly saying that this movie redeems the intellectual worth of this historical trope (which has largely gone out of favour). Perhaps it begs the (philosophical) question of where exactly its worth (if any) lies: in the affirmative declaration of philosophical strength or the passive acceptance of forces (precisely) out of our control. I will come back to this.

We can begin, in good form, by looking more closely at the character played by Colm Fiore, who I believe acts as an inheritance for Jacob Tierney, bringing with him a cultural currency that could be put to good use considering the manner of film Tierney is making. The question then is, does Tierney, in fact, put this inheritance to good (or any) use? Is he aware that he has cast a version of Trudeau in his film?

Appealing to “vulgar” intentionality stifles aesthetic criticism so even if you (or Tierney) answers no, I am going to argue that Tierney, at the very least, forces us to consider what type of leader Trudeau is and then, not by presenting Colm Fiore in this film as a version of what Charles Taylor calls Trudeau in his book (i.e., the NYL, or “New Young Leader”), but by presenting another version of the NYL in Leon Bronstein—say a polar opposite version to Trudeau, one who is more genuinely what we expect an NYL to be, beyond the (mere) image.

First, here is Charles Taylor’s critique of Trudeaumania:

The vast literature of Trudeaumania is mainly concerned with the surface changes which are easily accomplished and easily identified. It focuses almost narcissistically on the dramatic shifts in image which accompany the rise of a new star … One of the main roles of this new leader is to represent or “personify” something. Trudeau stands for all the changes of contemporary Canada represented by a certain group of people: the young, successful innovators of the post-war era …

Diefenbaker provides the archetype in many people’s minds of the old-style politician who is attuned to yesterday’s issues and uses a rhetoric which has no meaning to the urban young. But Diefenbaker is only one kind of old-style political figure. There is another type of politician who is also thought to be obsolete. This is the wheeler-dealer … the consensus-maker who operates, by means of ambiguous statements and compromises to avoid offending the largest number of people possible. Politicians like [the consensus maker] are thought to specialize in the skilled parliamentary answer, which, while seeming to address itself to the question, really says nothing. Their past-mastery of the policy of minimum action somehow answers the cry for movement but actually leaves as much as possible undisturbed. Lately, these political arts have fallen almost entirely into disrepute. The young believe this way of operating is a formula for lack of action.

Against this the NYL – the New Young Leader – is said to be attuned and responsive to the issues which preoccupy young urban dwellers. He is said to have the courage to dispense with the double-talk and circumlocution of the Old Guard who, as Harbron says, “couch every public statement and every private thought in cautious verbiage.”

All this may have little relation to reality, but it is the myth rather than the reality of the NYL that we are examining here; and this myth firmly rests on the consensus view of politics. Those who promote the NYL make up the highly successful new élite. Harbron’s “lawyers, professors, businessmen, some of Ottawa’s junior bureaucrats” are not at all at odds with the structure of our society. What they look for in the NYL is the crystallization and expression of a consensus.

This is why his goals must remain without real content. He expresses “changes,” “innovation at our highest political level,” everything except a clear program of reform, which he contemptuously dismisses as “old fashion promises.” But this is more than mere equivocation, because the role of the leader is to remain flexible and pragmatic, to respond to the problems as they arise. To do this, the embodiment of the supposed new technological élite must be an exponent of the main thesis of consensus politics: that politics is the domain of problems and solutions, and not of the confrontation of fundamental opinions. He must embody the end of ideology.

What is wrong with the old wheeler-dealer is not that he creates a consensus with his careful schemes and hedgings, but rather that he is an ineffective agent of it. He is “hung up” on the consensus-making problems of yesteryear, so that he can neither see clearly the problems of today nor grasp the imaginative solutions which are needed. He suffers from taboos and inhibitions which may have been politic in the past but which have become obstacles today. He is, therefore, carefully soothing the susceptibilities of an aging and declining constituency instead of appealing to a new and growing one.

At the same time, if the NYL is courageous in eschewing the language of equivocation, he speaks out not to break the consensus but to present more effectively the goals that are hidden in the gobbledygook of the traditional politician or bureaucrat. In short, the NYL is supposed to be discovering and articulating the demands of the society. He “personifies all the exciting changes in our society.” But does he?

From the standpoint of a politics of polarization, this kind of reasoning is utter nonsense. What is totally missing in the argument is any inkling that there are important and fundamental structural conflicts in our society which make any claim to consensus specious. It is impossible for one person to represent the demands of the whole. (6-8)

Now obviously Colm Fiore’s character (Henry Berkhoff) in The Trotsky is not a version of the NYL, not meant to be nor to recall the image of Pierre Trudeau (Colm Fiore’s persona aside). What Henry Berkhoff is meant to convey is certainly something of the “old-style political figure,” if not exactly a “wheeler-dealer,” then certainly someone who is out of touch with the youth, employing old style remedies to curb (what he perceives to be) age-old problems.

He sics his “demonic concubine” Ms. Davis on students on day one of classes; her old school British-marm-accent is over the top and complements the rather arbitrary and quaint charges she levels at students. Muddy shoes and no-shirt-tuck seem to be offenses taken from a bygone era. Harping on piercings is a bit more fitting, if somewhat clichéd. But if clichés involve a lack of imagination, then clichéd speech and acts are in order here because what Tierney is trying to get across is precisely the blandness of bureaucracy, the lack of confrontation.

Henry Berkhoff doesn’t have a vision of what he wants his school to be. Instead, he operates (as he sees it) in a vacuum between boredom and apathy. The reason he denies that the problem with youth today could be one of boredom (favouring instead the interpretation of apathy) is because if this were so, the onus would be on him to conjure up or conceive of a vision that would pull students out of boredom. Whereas the “fight” against apathy is not a fight at all, not confrontational. Nothing is at stake.

Berkhoff is able to implement a supposed program of discipline and punishment not by virtue of his (or Ms. Davis’s) iron will but because, for students, there is no alternative. Leon refers to them both as “fascists,” which may simply allude to the fact that all Berkhoff does is offer up the same prescriptive dogma from a time gone by. He is more a disciplinary relic than an adversarial man. He himself does not inspire conflict, the sort required for real change to happen. Only Leon Bronstein does this.

Listen to Berkhoff’s hackneyed phrasings as he admonishes Leon for his display of solidarity with Skip:

This has been a troubled arts school for many years now. Pot, sex, graffiti, piercings. You see what I’m getting at? I am here to discipline the students, usher in a new era of responsibility and obligation to this place. Now you can certainly make that harder for me. Heck, you already have. But you won’t stop me. So the choice is yours. You can spend your final year of high school in a war you can’t win against a man who’s lived far longer and knows far more than you. Or you can just float by and wreak havoc next year on someone’s poor unsuspecting university. What’s it going to be?

To which Leon replies: “I think the choice is obvious.” If this sounds confrontational, it is because Leon has made confrontation his prerogative. Berkhoff is happy to let things just “float by.” According to Taylor, it is not by virtue of (differing) philosophies that we distinguish the old-style wheeler dealer from the NYL, but by virtue of effectiveness. That is, the NYL is simply the better consensus maker, more in tune with the “correct” forces in society to be placated. Placation, however, like the old-style politician, is still his prerogative. So Colm Fiore in this movie is not Pierre Trudeau personified (i.e. “persona”-fied), but something like Pierre Trudeau exposed. That is, both Trudeau and Berkhoff came into power on the promise of radical change; both offer up instead “the same old shit.”[2]

So in what way is Leon Bronstein a more genuine NYL? In one sense he isn’t an NYL at all. Taylor uses the term pejoratively; part of what makes a NYL is precisely his disingenuousness. A “genuine” NYL is a contradiction in terms, one that couches political measures or manoeuvres designed to maintain the status quo in the guise of supposedly radical change.

But no one in this film is offering radical change except Leon Bronstein, and he certainly does not couch his feelings. (Berkhoff is not a radical, hence no need for couching.) As far as the political landscape depicted in the film goes, the liberal consensus-maker is squeezed out. If the film is indeed a critique of so-called “consensus-politics,” it is so by virtue of omission because no character in the film actually embodies the ethos of the liberal politician. The value of such omission is that is allows polarization to happen, to have the stakes presented (clearly) as well as the possibility of choice.

How to make the case then that the film offers a critique of a character it does not even depict? One way might be to say that the liberal consensus model of politics, however effective (or ineffective), is certainly not the stuff of drama—that conflict (necessarily) is. Posing the question this way is an indirect way of critiquing the liberal brand of consensus politics, particularly if one expects the stuff of politics to be dramatic—that is, to involve real stakes. So why should conflict work so well on film but not in life?[3]

There are obvious psychological reasons, like the fact that when watching film, we are absent from the conflict whereas in life, the possibility of being harmed – physically, psychically – is prevalent. But effective consensus politics is more than simply a means of papering over the treacheries of real life. The need to believe is pertinent—that is, must be exploited by the liberal politician. This is what Taylor reminds us the “cult of the NYL” taps in to—the people’s “yearning to be in contact with something meaningful” (112), and then, their desire to participate in the structures surrounding this so-called “significant reality,” principally through the act of voting (113).

Here are two ways Leon Bronstein breaks with the traditional model of the NYL. First, Leon himself does not seek out connection with a significant reality. He already knows he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. The movie does not depict him claiming, or even doubting/disinheriting this inheritance, but merely the consequences of his knowing. This is a significant departure from the traditional model of the NYL who himself does not believe in anything. He may mediate a connection to some higher reality, but he takes no trouble to articulate what this reality consists of; whereas Leon Bronstein’s point of departure is precisely his belief.

Nor is it is not true that Leon wins others to his cause. In fact, the film’s final conversion of Leon’s fellow school mates is not initiated by Leon, but by Tony, his chief lieutenant. Attempting to convince a sceptical gathering of fellow students that it is in their best interest to express solidarity with Leon, Tony does not berate them with dogma; he merely forces them to face the abyss and then to choose. If Leon and Tony eventually inspire others to believe in the meaningfulness of another reality, it is not because they has given them the tenets of Marxism to behold, but because the students become convinced of the value (either banally or profoundly) of a voice—symbolized in this film with the achievement of a Union, i.e., a political mechanism that allows students to have a say in the day-to-day running of affairs that should concern them. So only someone clear in his/her own convictions (Tony too is admirably clear in his desire simply to prove Berkhoff wrong) can pave the way for conviction in others—not conviction to take up another’s cause, but to participate and to speak out for oneself.

Second, I take it of utmost significance that the film does not portray the act of voting and is selective in its commentary on what sorts of rebellion are in order, which is to present other means of claiming oneself and one’s community. The film does depict the signing of a petition, which proves ineffective; also, a school walk-out, equivalent perhaps to a strike, which also peters out.

Is Tierney commenting on the effectiveness of petitions and strikes by showing us their futility in this film? Does this mean we should forgo petitions and strikes to achieve the change we want? This film is saying that rebellion, or acts of rebellion, can also be standardized, can become clichéd, hence rendered ineffective. Simply to take up a ready-made remedy is not an effective means for change; what is required is the conviction behind the remedy so that standing up in acts of defiance is not a political act with any meaning unless accompanied by convictions. And the best way to prove one’s convictions, to avoid the blasé rebellion that comes with staged political acts would be to take up more arresting measures, as though there is no reason to be taken seriously otherwise, which means we have no voice otherwise. This is dangerous territory, particularly when one begins taking hostages (i.e., breaking the law) in the name of one’s convictions.[4]

The dramatic hostage-taking of Berkhoff, accompanied by frenzied text-messaging to get students to rally in solidarity with Bronstein’s crazy act of defiance – and then, in spur-of-the-moment fashion – not only says something about the value of improvisation but also, about the types of rebellion that are, perhaps not in order, but (now?) necessary.

I turn now to a consideration of the dialectic, and how I take this film to inherit and transfigure what is meant by the term. Leon provides a brief aside (to Alexandra) on how he views the “Great Dialectic,” or “the Grand Narrative,”[5] before going on to paraphrase Eagleton’s distinction between moral and moralistic thinking.[6]

The dialectic must “breathe” in the new century, he says, “by allowing for things which Karl Marx, frankly, had no opinion on.” This is less a disinheritance of Marxism than a reminder that Marx cannot save us, that the rational application or understanding of his theories is not now what is lacking. Indeed, rather than provide heavy handed pedagogic interpretation of how Leon understands the functioning of the dialectic, the film, marvellously, depicts it—that is, allows us to see it, in the form of cue cards pinned up on Leon’s wall.

THE “GRAND NARRATIVE” OF LEON’S LIFE APPEARS TO US SANS HUMAINS.

THE CAMERA BEGINS ITS VERTICAL PAN.

THE DIALECTIC PASSES …

… BEFORE OUR EYES.

The content of the cards is less the remarkable feature than the fact that Leon Bronstein has the gumption, or feels required to, detail and display his convictions if not for all to see then, at the very least, for himself. How are we to interpret this display?

One way would be to say that just because everything is all clear in the mind of Leon Bronstein, it is merely a matter of convenience or formality for him to make his inner thoughts and aspirations outer, that without the cue cards Leon would be no less confident of the trajectory of his life. But another interpretation would be that the cards act as cover for the possibility that he is still capable of losing his way or his thread, so despite giving himself over to the “Grand Narrative,” some type of existential dread compels him to compose reminders and to detail checkpoints. Do these cards act as a symbol of his faith or his lack of faith? Are we to believe, as Leon seems to, that his fate is hermetically sealed, or is there room, indeed, for improvisation (even too much improvisation)?

There is certainly ample evidence that Leon feels the dialectic of his life could go awry, most notably the two dream sequences—the first in which he is cut loose by his mother and father, the second, by his ostensible surrogates, Frank McGovern (his mentor/attorney) and Alexandra, his desired object of affection. That Leon appears unchanged, as a baby, in both, suggests that he feels no less vulnerable with his new found family than his old one.

The fear is of betrayal certainly, but what Leon fears is that he has not the will nor ability nor voice to transform his new found family, that they will, instead, regress to reoccupy tired moralistic roles and positions of a time gone by. In such a case, having failed in his mission to convert them, Leon will most definitely feel cut loose, as though he is the weak link in the chain of events that is supposed to happen (which then, of course, doesn’t—all thanks to him). These dream sequences remind us that Leon is a free individual.

Yet this sense of simultaneous belief and non-belief is one source of anguish and frustration with the dialectic for some because being certain of the ends but wary of the means ought to put the ends in question to begin with. The dogmatic refusal to do so is what others find frustrating.[7]

This is what Alexandra feels when she levels her brutal charge against Leon, that he feels things because he thinks he’s supposed to. But it is also true that Leon manages to seduce her by feeling precisely the way he does and certainly not by manipulating Alexandra, but by being about as open and honest about his intentions as anyone possibly could be.

Alexandra is not worried that she is being taken for a ride but that Leon is taking himself for a ride, playing out a mere fantasy in which she happens to be entwined. But to claim one’s desire is necessarily to act out a sort of fantasy, and a union of souls is a union of fantasies, hence a discovery of fantasies—an other’s and one’s own.

How or what mediates these fantasies is always difficult to know beforehand. It would be far more sinister if Leon held his beliefs close to his chest, or was simply unaware of them, instead playing out the game of seduction in more conventional fashion without first being honest with himself.

But this arguably describes the dialectic of most romantic pursuits. What is exceptional about Leon is that he has already discovered his fantasy; he is begging Alexandra to consider what hers is and whether it is compatible with his. What he offers her is the power to choose (too directly some might say), but in the end, in this case anyhow, it works (not for Leon and Alexandra, I mean, but for us).

So what (exactly) is our source of attraction to the Trotsky? Is it because he has all the answers? Hardly. Even Leon has the temerity to doubt his own conclusions. Is it because he doubts? The most immediate reason to me is because he dares to infuse the otherwise rational functioning of the dialectic with romance, which may make him less authoritative in some people’s eyes, but certainly more human in our eyes. That is, he demands that the dialectic act first and foremost in accordance with, or in response to, his feeling and intuition. This infusion of romance is key to this film’s interpretation of the dialectic, particularly in lieu of the following commentary on Hegel by Professor Dart:

Hegel highlighted that the Enlightenment tradition was superior to the Classical tradition, but the Enlightenment had a tendency to fragment in three directions. There was the rationalist wing of the Enlightenment that turned to science, reason and the empirical way as the yellow brick road into the future. There were the romantics that dared to differ with the rationalists, and the romantics held high the way of poetry, the arts and intuition.

Then, there were the humanists. It was the humanists that attempted to see the best in the romantics and rationalists yet question their limited approaches to knowing and being. It was the humanists within the Enlightenment that attempted to synthesize the best of the rationalist and romantic traditions and raise both to a higher level through such a synthesis.

This bit of prose captures nicely the interpretive tripartite I have been setting up, if we take Leon as stand-in for the “romantic,” Berkhoff, the old-style politician, as stand-in for the “rationalist” in his pursuit of pragmatic, though unimaginative, solutions. And because we noted earlier that the film manages to squeeze out the Liberal consensus-maker, it seems, then, that the film has abandoned some measure of its possible humanity, or what Dart takes the humanist function to be—precisely the negation or subduing of conflict, and then (according to Dart) in the name of facilitating the unfolding of the dialectic, i.e., by letting forces clash (thesis vs. antithesis) and finding a third way (synthesis).[8]

Yet this third way consensus making must choose the manner in which the unfolding must take place and for someone armed only with a rational understanding of how the dialect functions, it is easy to see, right off the bat, where the asymmetry lies. But how to articulate (or formulate, say in non-rationalist manner), how the romantic aspect of the dialectic functions?

It seems clear to me that one can only bring one’s convictions, can only perform this aspect of the unfolding, and here is from where Leon’s charm is primarily derived. As mentioned earlier, Leon Bronstein is something like what a NYL is supposed to be, and this because he is armed only with his convictions, has not surrendered to the dialectic but claims it as his own. He isn’t taking charge of history. He is allowing another more significant reality to work its way through him and so is participating in that reality, not by virtue of rational weighing of costs and benefits, but through sheer belief, the stuff that stirs passions. The NYL is obviously supposed to do this, but under the auspices of technocratic wisdom. Leon Bronstein has abandoned the technocratic, rationalistic portion of the dialectic and made the romantic side his raison d’etre.

In concluding, I’ll begin with some words from Jacob Klapwijk’s careful survey of the dialectic in the twentieth century, Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in Dutch in 1976 but only recently appearing in English (2010). Klapwijk unapologetically defines the “dialectic as an expression of belief” (91) and notes how Horkheimer and Adorno “claim that ‘freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’” (qtd. in Klapwijk, 91) without recourse to “rational justification” (91)—that is, as an axiomatic starting point.

Klapwijk deals intimately with the internal contradictions of the rationalist approach where a rational understanding of the historical process of unfolding is supposed to liberate us, but instead, traps us, because a world left to its own rational process of unfolding leaves little room for its subjective interpretation. He elaborates further:

We have seen that the word ‘dialectics’ has many [often contradictory] meanings. There is no reason to reject the notion of dialectic in itself. But we are forced to conclude that within the Hegelian and Marxist traditions the word has grown into a hidden faith regarding the inevitable course of history. History is characterized as developing via oppositions and at this moment necessarily leading to an ominous reversal of [the promise of] reason.
Some readers may perhaps feel that this is the point at which to break off the discussion with these “dogmatic Marxists.”

But, for one thing, there is the question of whether a philosophical discussion ought to ever reach that point. And, apart from that, we should ask whether the desire to cut the discussion off does not equally betray a dogmatic prejudice, a belief in the so-called self-sufficiency of reason and in the closed logical nature of scientific debate. Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish Neo-Marxist … has disputed this self-sufficient status of reason. He once remarked that scientific reason is constantly turning into a myth within Marxism, the myth of “immaculate reason” and “scientific ideology.” This is indeed a glimmer of new light within Marxist circles. The only question is whether philosophy outside Marxist circles is also willing to criticize this pretended self-sufficiency.

Thus I do not think the Frankfurt School philosophers should be reproached for the fact that their critical theory depends on an attitude of faith and ultimate commitment. The reproach is that their theory has not been sufficiently critical to acknowledge this pre-theoretical starting point. Thus theoretical reason pretends to be a force all its own, and faith in the dialectic becomes a self-evident dogma, although it is ignored.

And in fact, strange though it may sound, this hidden dogma begins to show mythical traits, just like Kolakowski noticed. For if myth, in the original sense of the word, is a belief in the mysterious forces of nature that are imbued with an immanent spirit, where does that leave the modern belief in the hidden advance towards an automated world driven along by “the immanent logic of history”? (94-95)

It is more than coincidence that Taylor labels the cult of Trudeaumania “mythic” (8). Considered against the above, the belief in liberal consensus-politics betrays a mythic devotion to technocratic wisdom—taken in positive light, perhaps, by those outside of Marxist circles, and in a negative light by those within them. Both deny the role of faith in their respective accounts for the dialectic however. The only “third way” that remains is a return to belief.

“Every human being,” Klapwijk says, “is obliged to face a choice—one that impinges prior to any philosophical reflection—namely the unavoidable need to choose between what I would like to call a mythical faith and a personal faith” (96). He notes also that “there is reason to be fearful,” but “also reason to be confident” (97). The mythical faith is the blind adherence to the rational unfolding of history. A personal faith requires a belief that the betterment of human beings is possible through the dialectic, even if the means of achieving this are beyond rational calculation or articulation.

What The Trotsky shows is that Canada is not a nation (like America) to be discovered, but a nation to be claimed—not by looking to a shared past to find clues to guarantee our survival, but by pursuing common goals and interests in the present, hence to share in an imagined future together. This is also the philosophical undercurrent of Taylor’s The Pattern of Politics, which expresses this internal dialectical tension of Canada:

The mere belated acceptance of difference is not enough to provide the real basis of unity in this country. It will remove some of the sources of friction, but it will not create a strong sense of common fate and common belonging – in other words, an identity that will also unite Canadians. Divided as we are by language, culture, tradition, provenance, and history, we can only be brought together by common purposes; our unity must be a projective one, based on a significant common future rather than a shared past …

The seeming paradox of our situation is that really meaningful unity can only be attained by another kind of division. But this is no real paradox. People of different regions, backgrounds, languages, and cultures can only come together around some common project; and if this is meaningful, and not some magic consensus-dream in which everyone can project what he wants, then it is bound to inconvenience somebody and thus raise opposition. The great transcontinental railroads were, in their day, great bones of contention. (131, 34)

If it is our lot as Canadians to express ourselves in common purpose, what we require is a common voice and the political apparatus to achieve this. Furthermore, we require the faith and courage necessary to withstand not only the myriad number of clashes and confrontations, but the subsequent burden of choice, which means we will, sometimes, choose incorrectly. Logic or planning or what have you might fail us; but we cannot waver in our belief.

Some will say that this film is too light to command the sort of seriousness I am demanding of it here. But it is precisely the lightness of the film that makes its message effective. That is, there is no redeeming the more humane qualities of the dialectic through seriousness, lest the author or auteur in question be labelled an ideological firebrand by (liberal) intellectuals. One way to cut through the sort of cynical critical hit-jobs in making a case (once again) for the value of the dialectic, to make a claim for seriousness, is precisely by denying a claim to seriousness, by appealing, say, to the whims and imagination of youth.

The film is as serious or as light as those viewing the film are willing to make it. Should we be taking a film like The Trotsky seriously? The film has its convictions to be sure; part of what makes the film appealing is its ability to state them. How else (nowadays) to issue the sort of clarion call left-leaning critics have been issuing as early as the 1940s (Horkheimer and Adorno) or, in Canada, the 1970s (Charles Taylor)?

Comedy might be one way. Seriousness is no longer given; it too has to be claimed. Part of what this film demands is participation—a claim to community. The Trotsky is as likely to fall by the wayside as it is to spark a revolution. If it has (up to this point) fallen by the wayside, can a critical effort such as this one add anything at all to the film’s promise?

Notes

---

[1] This is the tack taken by Ronald Beiner in his critique of Taylor. Though he does not explicitly use the terms “earlier” or “later,” he does make a useful distinction: “Taylor himself counts as a social critic only when he writes a book like The Pattern of Politics, not one like the Sources of the Self.” Beiner says Taylor, in Sources of the Self, abandons a stance of “wide justification” in his refusal to justify his belief in the dialectic, thus (merely) providing a “deep[er] description” of its unfolding. What allows Taylor to be a more effective social critic in The Pattern of Politics, Beiner notes, is his direct engagement with “fellow citizens within the horizon of the concerns shared by [his] specific national community.” While Beiner takes Sources of the Self to task for posing as philosophical thought without engaging in social criticism, he does not discuss whether The Pattern of Politics should be read as serious philosophy, as an example of the “wide justification” he desires. See Beiner 453.

[2] This is obviously an interpretation, Taylor’s to be precise, for certainly the film does not attempt to salvage or smear the legacy of Trudeau. Famous Canadian Hegelian David MacGregor offers a rival interpretation. Commenting on The Pattern of Politics, he says “Charles Taylor dismissed "Trudeaumania" as an American copycat operation, more form than substance. Trudeau would never “rattle the teacups" of the establishment, the philosopher claimed. Twenty years later Taylor would accept the invitation of the Business Council for National Issues to trash ‘Meech rejectors’ and other wayward souls while Trudeau’s principled opposition to the Meech-Charlottetown garroting of Canada would upset the teacups of bankers and corporate leaders across the country.” Yet the tension noted by MacGregor’s is still between image and substance, merely with the roles reversed. What The Trotsky does ask us to consider is this duality—between image and substance. See MacGregor.

[3] It would not be crazy to suppose that the trajectory of the movie should work towards curing Bronstein of his ailment, so that the movie’s climax should revolve around his conversion back to reality, to a world where answers are not so easily forthcoming and where the simple pragmatism of the Berkhoff’s of the generally characterizises the lay of the land. This film makes a case for what Raoul Eshelman calls “performatism,” for performing one’s conviction—here in order to achieve not personal but political ends. Eshelman claims that the “performative” work of art claims its founding principles or narrative slant right off the bat; the unfolding of the narrative work merely documents the consequences of these choices. Certainly Leon Bronstein’s belief provides the ontological apparatus for the internal logic of this film to unfold. See Eshelman.

[4] Here I am heartened by a segment of Cavell’s reading of Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The simultaneous comic value and horror of Deeds’s willingness to punch the lights out of others prompts the following timely reflection, words pertinent also, I would say, to the simultaneous comic value and horror we feel when Leon takes his principal hostage: “Exercising the right to speak not only takes precedence over social power, it takes precedence over any particular form of accomplishment; no amount of contribution is more valuable to the formation and preservation of community than the willingness to contribute and the occasion to be heard…it leaves your voice your own and allows your opinion to matter to others only because it matters to you. It is not a voice that will be heard by villains. This means that to discover our community a few will have to be punched out, made speechless in their effort to usurp or devalue the speech of others—one interpretation of Deeds’s repeated violence, punching men in the jaw. It is a fantasy of a reasonably well ordered participatory democracy. It has its dangers; democracy has; speech has.” See Cavell, Cities 207.

[5] The “Grand Narrative,” then, as an account, simply, of how things came to be. The idea behind studying the dialectic, of course, is that with enough patience and endurance, one can begin to uncover or unearth the “logic” of the times gone by (geist), hence decode how it is that the dialectic is set to unfold in future.

[6] Eagleton’s distinction is between rigid, implacable dogma (moralism) and the sort of morality that comes via a layered and subtle engagement with “an intricately woven texture of nuances, qualities and fine gradations.” See Eagleton 144.

[7] A prominent critic in this vein is Karl Popper, whose Poverty of Historicism (1957) takes dead aim at Marxists, in particular their insistence that “all history is the history of class struggle.” Posed as a hypothesis, Popper notes, the idea is compelling. But ultimately, as theory, the premise is untestable. Though in the book he opts for a political agenda of “piecemeal social engineering,” he still advocates the “necessity of adopting a point of view” though always with a mind to its potential falsification. See Popper 58, 140.

[8] This terminology may be a bit purple or imprecise. I use it figuratively.

Works Cited

Beiner, Ronald. "Hermeneutical Generosity and Social Criticism." Critical Review 9.4 (1995. Print): 447-64.

Cavell, Stanley. Cities of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Belknap Press, 2004. Print.

—. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971. Print.

Dart, Ron. "Charles Taylor And The Hegelian Eden Tree: Canadian Philosophy And Compradorism." Web. 1 May 2007. Vive le Canada. 2 August 2011 <http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/235045487-charles-taylor-and-the-hegelian-eden-tree–canadian-philosophy-and-compradorism&gt;.

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Print.

Eshelman, Raoul. Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2008. Print.

Klapwijk, Jacob. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Critical Theory and the Messianic Light. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2010. Print.

MacGregor, David. "Canada’s Hegel." February 1994. Literary Review of Canada. Web. 28 July 2011 <http://reviewcanada.ca/essays/2001/02/01/canada-s-hegel/&gt;.

Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. 1957. London: Routeledge Classics, 2002. Print.

Taylor, Charles. The Pattern of Politics. Montreal: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1970. Print.

 

Some Cavellian lessons: A response to ‘Little Did I Know’

The genre of the memoir is interesting not because of what the author is required or expected to say, but in discovering what the author chooses to say, and then the manner and authority in which he/she manages to say it. I can’t be the first to feel that Stanley Cavell’s recollections of conversations past (in particular his intellectual ones about philosophy) sound a bit too polished, as though complex ideas were on the tip of tongues and uttered with great efficiency and precision. Here is an example, an exchange of his with Thomas Kuhn:

In an early formative conversation between us I told him that his considering instruction in a field as part of the, I might have called it, essence of the field, part of its defining structure (roughly what Wittgenstein called grammar), along with his insistence on the nature of agreement within a field as playing a similarly defining role within it, were ideas to be found in Austin and in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and this conjunction of his work and theirs helped me see the depth of the ideas on both tracks …

In the conversation I have in mind now Kuhn, perhaps after a department meeting, accompanied me home for a drink, and talking past midnight Tom was becoming agitated in a way I had not seen. He suddenly lurched forward in his chair with a somewhat tortured look that I had begun to be familiar with. “I know Wittgenstein used the idea of ‘paradigm.’ But I do not see its implications in his work. How do I answer the objection that this destroys the truth of science? I deplore the idea. Yet if instruction and agreement are the essence of the matter, then Hitler could instruct me that a theory is true and get me to agree.”

My reply I cast as follows, using words I remember using then. “No he could not; he could not educate you in, convince you of, show you, its truth. Hitler could declare a theory to be true, as an edict. He could effectively threaten to kill you if you refuse to, or fail to, believe it. But all that means is that he is going to kill you; or perhaps kill you if you do not convince him, show him, that you accept and will follow the edict. I don’t say this is clear. But it is something I cannot doubt is worth doing whatever work it will take to make clear.” Tom’s response was startling. He arose almost violently form his chair, began pacing in front of the fireplace, saying something like, “Yah. Yah.” What causes conviction? What, perhaps rather, may undo an unnoticed conviction? (354-55)

Of course, it could be that conversations actually do happen this way at Harvard, that this is what a certain breed of conversation is supposed to sound like. If Stanley Cavell (or Thomas Kuhn for that matter) cannot embody or perform this manner of conversation, then who else could?

I don’t mean the exchanges sound scripted; but surely Cavell is writing ahead of himself, as all good writing must do (433). So his recollections of conversation capture an accuracy of a different sort. Not “verbatim” (though Cavell, in several forceful assertions (not unwarranted) insists on something like a recall of “exact words” (395)), but an attempt to express, in full, the anxieties, fears, frustrations, reliefs, breakthroughs, and joys that surround the utterance of words and then, not by moving forever in circles (as prose has the luxury to do, as Cavell’s prose does when not recounting speech) in order to capture this or that emotion, until the full gamut of expression has indeed been, however cumbersomely, expressed.

Rather, the straight linear exchanges (I gather) are, for lack of a better word, embellished. But how can the flight of an arrow – say an arrow of an utterance, moving at a certain speed – be embellished at all? Arrows, like speech, make from the shaft, pass by the ear quickly, so the trick is to move one’s ear closer to the sound of the trajectory slicing through the air, i.e., closer to the sound of the words. Because Cavell has the luxury of thinking on paper (i.e., writing), he may have more time indeed to circle around the words he recalls—but not all that much, as he is, nevertheless, recalling speech, complete with quotation marks, and he cannot put words in people’s mouths.

He can, however, try to bring out (on the page that is) what it was exactly that he perceived in the exchange (like a conversion, or a “conviction.”). So Cavell is trying to make the words sound (on the page) the way they sounded (to Cavell) as he lived through them—something like performing them. This has more to do with accuracy, not less.

But if not verbatim, how can we trust him? The easy answer is that it is not likely that anyone else would claim to know what verbatim is, the conversations here being as private as they are. Cavell is free to claim or arrogate not only his own voice but also his interlocutor’s. This is his particular claim to community (his own) and the reason I trust him is because he has achieved a certain standing in my moral imagination. I cannot say why I trust him anymore than I can convince you that his is a voice worth trusting. I could say something like, “What reason has he to lie?” But no one is accusing him of lying. The charge is (or could be), simply, that no one speaks that way. Cavell is remembering conversation as (written) texts.

But how else, other than getting up on stage and mimicking or acting out the exchange, is Cavell to recall the experience? Words on a page are his chosen medium, and his “embellishments” I see less as a contrivance than a full on authoritative claiming of the speech or the exchange that either caused his own, or his observation of another’s, (mini) paradigm shift. The onus is on Cavell to relay this.

Even if Kuhn remembers not a bit of the conversation, or, more scandalously, remembers something of the words spoken but none of the sentiment, Cavell is perfectly within his right to not only mark the exchange, but mark it as capital-T-true. Such claimings, such achievements, are the stuff on which lives ought to be made. Otherwise, recall and memory become merely the stuff on which dreams are made.

I am increasingly aware that memories of my life are so often unforgettably no longer mine, not mine alone, so I have repeatedly to concern myself with considerations of propriety beyond those that are functions merely of my awkward self-revelations. (518)

This particular revelation, made near the end of the book, shows us that Cavell is aware of possible mismatches between testimonies of events; but I am more heartened by this passage than dismayed by it not because it counters the notion that Cavell is indeed (again, merely for lack of a better word) “embellishing,” but because it shows that whatever embellishing Cavell does is carried out under the greatest respect for other voices.

Arrogation is not done lightly, so the force with which, say, certain conversations are put forward is done after careful pedagogical consideration. Cavell goes on:

What concerns me more is what, after a while, happens to memory, that it becomes as routine as perception, conventional, unquestioned, serving merely to recall, not to reconsider. (518)

Indeed, this sort of recall (i.e., recall as convention) is the type some of us (too many of us) come to expect when we read, if not memoirs, then certainly testimonies, first-hand accounts, histories, as though disinterested accuracy of fact ought to trump experience.

But what makes a memoir successful, on the other hand, is the author’s ability to claim one’s experience – not too brazenly, obviously; but it seems more likely (these days) that good memoirs are less likely to be written because people are too afraid to take responsibility for their own recollections, content merely to recall a string of facts or a chronological list, as if by convention. These facts and lists, that is, ought to tell the whole story. (This is the historicist’s folly.) Indeed, why embellish at all when writing something called a memoir?

This takes me to a bit on reading that Cavell brings up—as though one could read either to accumulate facts and events or, more valorously, to discover oneself and then relay these discoveries. This discussion, on the “two myths of reading” (where one reads everything, on the one hand embodied by Heidegger, and, on the other, where one reads nothing, embodied by Wittgenstein) comes at the end of another Cavellian conversation (this time with Rogers Albritton):

I once asked Rogers … to read the first, recently published, response to the first pair of papers I had put in print and hoped to take into the future (the opening pair of Must We Mean What We Say?), an unmitigatedly vicious attack, including the summary evaluation that the work my writing represented was, I believe I still remember the phrase exactly, “deleterious to the future of philosophy.”

I was unable on my own to put aside the pain of this attack. Rogers took the documents away with him, my papers and the response they had elicited, and, returning with them the following midnight bearing one of his by then familiar frowns of exasperation, but modified with a direct displeasure unfamiliar to my experience of him, he threw the documents on a chair and said with a vehemence I think I will never again see the equal of in him: “Well of course the response doesn’t touch you. But it is you I do not understand. How could you possibly have left yourself vulnerable to such ill will?”

The gratifying liberation of his challenge produced a certain corresponding challenge in return from me. “I see no alternative. And you of all people cannot expect any assertion to make itself invulnerable. So in my state of perfect gratitude to you I have to warn you of something. If I can find a way to write philosophy that I can believe in day after day I am going to go on doing it. The alternative I can see is to cultivate a private sense of the public world’s intellectual vulgarity. However essential that may be it is not enough for me.”

Naturally I am alternately attracted to both myths or practices of reading—to have read everything or read nothing—but naturally also most drawn to a view of reading, no doubt illusory, that seeks to capture the wish for breadth in the one myth and for fastidiousness in the other, as for example in Thoreau’s determination to test all intellectual importunateness. On the opening page of Walden he accuses most authors of displaying an egotism without revealing the state or the stage of the self responsible for it.

In the chapter entitled “Reading,” his test for whether to read what comes your way is not so much to judge the worth of the text but to judge the quality of your reading. If you know how to read “with valour and magnanimity,” then a fragment of newspaper found on the floor of the woods will do you good, expand the world. If you will not know how to read, how to give the best of yourself, Homer will not save you. You might as well, Thoreau clearly enough implies, use Homer’s pages for the hygienic purpose for which newsprint may be used after a meal in the woods. (491-92)

One could think of a memoir (that is a successful memoir) as a collection of cogitos, myriad ways of saying “I am,” and “I exist.” The question then becomes, why aren’t more people willing to make or utter or say such things, to be honest with experience rather than fact?

My answer would be a fear of being struck down, so that just as one brings a certain amount of stability to bear upon one’s view of the world, one suddenly finds that it is (indeed) open to (re)interpretation, reconsideration. Rogers’ question is pertinent: Why indeed would anyone make oneself so vulnerable to the ill will of others? One way to play up one’s strength in face of possible ill will is to read more, to bank on another’s authority instead of one’s own, so as to deflect criticisms and reconsiderations rather than embrace them.

Another strategy is indeed to “circle” around a singular moment of experience (not unlike picking up a scrap of newspaper) and demand from it the world. Both are feats of memory. The first might be something like conventional memory, the second, affective memory. Employing the latter simply makes one more vulnerable, hence gathers its particular strength or influence not from, say, verification in the field, but from one’s éclat or authority—and there is no prescriptive way to cultivate this.

So such a strategy, of claiming words for oneself, is often set aside, especially when one is subject to a “marketplace” of words and ideas and the time to capture another’s attention is short. Hence agreement and instruction go hand in hand. That is, to hope to instruct another (to influence another, and then, for what cause?) requires immediate agreement which means forgoing private matters and engaging right away with public ones, ones that will, so to speak, work. And who would commit to language that wouldn’t (or might not) work?

Instruction and agreement define a paradigm, which, it could be argued, destroys the truth of science, an idea deplorable to Kuhn because it takes away from science’s ability to discover not what is, but what can be right now. This is a compromise in knowledge, the sort we make in the moral realm every day of our lives.

Obviously science demands results; so does language. But when language reaches this level of convention (so that all authority is deferred to the marketplace or science or rationality) then what happens is that society suffers from a dearth of individuals and we are no longer responsible for the language we speak and its effects in the world. It is no longer worth asking (or thinking about) what our words actually mean (or do, say, in the long run).

If Cavell’s “embellishments” are precisely a fight against this sort of conventionality, how much authority are we willing to give him for doing so? The first step is to recognize not the daring of his feat, but the rarity of it and then to ask ourselves how sincere we take Cavell to be. Is he, indeed, reaching too far, putting words in people’s mouths unfairly,?  And even in response to those who howl he might be, what are we to answer? That Cavell’s interpretations are to be dismissed? So there is a responsibility for the reader as well in deciding how much of the world (a world that is, of individuals, of individuality) we are willing to kill off. The academy (a good portion of it) stands armed and ready to do so:

I decided that I must simply accept, what had been obvious enough before now, that my work creates infectious ill will among an imposing body of professional philosophers who know of it (among professional literary theorists ill will is more individual), while at the same time there is no (other?) profession that can simply be asked to welcome it. Even though I had fought this reaction in the cases of hostility against Austin and Wittgenstein, I somehow imagined—perhaps it can be seen as another phase or face of the petulance I am describing in myself—that I would be exempt from such treatment. (497)

The wager academics must make is not a new one, but one that goes back to ancient times:

If, on the road into existence, or, as in Plato’s Myth of Er, into rebirth, you could choose either to receive a high gift of creativity that would be insufficiently appreciated in your lifetime, or else receive a still notable but lesser gift that, however, would be more widely and fully appreciated (that is, will reach in your lifetime as high as it ever will), which would you pick? This will hardly serve as a test of immortality, but perhaps as a proof that we live transcendentally. (435)

So why write a memoir? For comfort? Yes. To bear witness? Yes. To assert not one’s dominance in the world but one’s understanding of it, so that to forgo dominance entails transcendence of the world?

But to do the opposite (to dominate others) is to transcend a moral habitat within the world, to claim it does not matter (we all know it does) and then not because one is evil, but because why risk being unintelligible to others, to be given instruction only to reply with disagreement? That is the easiest way to get flattened, hence the quickest way to want revenge on the world.

In order to avoid an all consuming revenge, it might simply be easier to understand the parameters within which it operates and exact it (in this lifetime) within good measure. So this is not a transcendence of the evil of the world but a compromise with it, a transcendence of the burden to act morally, to take responsibility for our words.

It is worth noting, then, the effort of someone who insists on transcending the world’s evil, who reaches out for (Emersonian) perfection—one who understands that in doing so, he will be subject to the world’s wrath yet is still willing to renounce his own vengeful desires to assert instead his intimacy with the world and others in it. This remarkable feature of Cavell’s thinking (avoiding, near flawlessly, rancour) is grounds to begin to think of Cavell as Saint-like—like Saint Stanley. Some will call this refusal of rancour, this need for comfort, self-indulgent. Cavell knows the charge well:

There came a time during the Vietnam War when I interrupted myself during a lecture, moved to say that could no more ignore that morning’s news, at least to notice it in common, than I would e able to withhold attentions to the cry of a child. At the same time I registered my sense that this very acknowledgement signaled the victory of violence over thinking.

Then sometimes thinking must turn to destroy its peace, to observe havoc, in order to attract its own protection. Having spent more than two years furthering this memoir (to give myself more peace than in any way other than exchanges with friends) in this time of what so many of my friends regard as the most unsparingly lugubriously impaired administration in American history, I ask for mercy on my soul. (478)

Cavell knows that thinking cannot protect the moral order; it merely thrives within it. As the world becomes increasingly violent, it is far likelier that we will hear fewer Cavell-like voices, that his lessons will ring increasingly hollow as thinking must now destroy its peace in order to create the conditions for moral questions and concerns to once again ring true.

Does this mean the world is no longer interested in claiming its own authority, writing its own memoirs? It means something like the world is no longer capable of asserting or demanding knowledge of itself, of asking why it is headed in one direction and not another.

Do we attack Cavell, then, for merely thinking, for freely allowing his desires to achieve something like full (or fuller) expression in a city of words where cogitos are taken up as an order of business—even as he pleads for (our) mercy? Marxists may call for his blood; Cavell shows them not rancour but love because for his sort of thinking to thrive, revolution may very well be in order.

Tragic Cinema: the Death of Subjectivities in JCVD

Placing the tragedy of King Lear at one end of a cultural narrative and JCVD (2009) at the other may seem audacious, even ridiculous. But the parallels between the two are related less to content than to form. That is, my claim here will be that both use their respective mediums (i.e., theatre, cinema) to depict tragedy, but that the latter’s medium can only transfigure what we take tragedy to be, hence inherits, in a way, tragedy from theatre.

And the conduit through which tragedy passes on to cinema is a technology, as cinema is encompassed by what Marshall McLuhan calls “typography.” That is, in placing King Lear at the beginning of a discussion of “typographic” man (or woman) and cinema at the other, McLuhan, at the very least, invites speculation that cinema can inherit something of whatever it is we take King Lear to be doing. After that, it is merely a matter of making the case that JCVD is the right piece of cinema to bring this intuition to bear, which then does become a matter, or consideration, of content.

A working “definition” of tragedy (which suits my purposes) can be taken from Eagleton:

[Modern] society is awash with admirable ideals, but structurally incapable of realizing them … . Since this stalled dialectic between an impotent idealism and a degraded actuality is inherent to the … social order, and incapable of being resolved by it, it might well be termed tragic. (208)

The formulation of the above definition that I will pursue is that society today is awash with answers but incapable of posing the (right) questions. This is a legacy of hyper-fragmentation, that takes us from a “modern” view of tragedy (above) to the “postmodern.”

Tragedy, that privileged preserve of gods and spiritual giants, has now been decisively democratized – which is to say, for the devotees of gods and giants, abolished … Tragedy, however, did not vanish because there were no more great men. It did not expire with the last absolutist monarch. On the contrary, since under democracy each one of us is to be incommensurably cherished, it has been multiplied far beyond antique imagining. (94)

This multiplication of tragedy leads to sensationalism, as though for something to register as tragic, it must first be sensationalized, which, in a way, denies it the status of tragedy. It isn’t that tragedy has disappeared in our age; we simply don’t perceive it anymore, hence are silenced in a way. This in itself is tragic. What lengths are we willing to go to, then, in attempting to register a tragic pathos? Does a direct-to-camera monologue suffice? 

I will have more to say about sensationalism. For now, I note that tragedy occurs when we find that our lives do not, somehow cannot, square with the very ideals we live our lives to achieve in the first place.  Again, we have our lives, our ideals, but are (structurally?) incapable of realizing them.  Whether and how things go wrong (and/or how things go right) we can only know in hindsight.  Cinema can remind us of this. 

In making my case for tragedy, I am not saying anything new about tragedy.  (I am certainly not out to formulate a “theory” or “definition” of tragedy.) What I am saying is that cinema, through its unique depiction of passage, is best suited, as an art form, to depict what Eagleton takes to be tragic today—i.e., our structural inability to achieve our ideals.  And a movie like JCVD stands on the vanguard of what we might consider to be tragic (popular) art in our time.

1. Il n’a jamais tapé sur les arabs/ He never hit Arabs

This is as good a reason as any to document the life of an action star, that of Jean Claude Van Damme, whom director Mabrouk el Mechri praises not by presenting an apriori vision of this action star’s assumed strength, but rather, the (his) aposteriori acquisition of knowledge through experience and suffering.

Moreover, it is highly doubtful that Jean Claude Van Damme, in life, plotted the trajectory of his career to ensure he never hit Arabs.  Yet here we are—or, rather, there he is, on screen before us, in the hands of a brilliant French-Tunisian director, starring in a film that bears his name. The curiously eponymous title, which uses the star’s stage, and not real, name risks this film’s claim to seriousness, as though the reference to JC implies the unfolding of a story of biblical proportions.

Yet the reference, in calling attention to the King of Kings, also suggests that JCVD appears before us a mere mortal King—not as ‘King of Kings,’ but as, say, King VD, or King Van Damme, a character who shares more in common with a tragic Shakespearean King than any sort of Biblical one, prophet or otherwise. That is, JCVD may have more to do with the King Lear narrative than any traditional Bible story. Have we moved beyond false claims to seriousness?

King Lear certainly has crosses to bear. The reason I think it worth mentioning this play alongside this movie is not because JCVD is a retelling or reimagining of the Lear tale (the way The Lion King is said to mirror the Hamlet tale) but, say, a reincarnation of Lear’s themes—mostly a thematization of a particular relationship to knowledge—say, our knowledge of the world. That is, in a world where answers are not so easily forthcoming, knowing the answers before hearing the question becomes much more urgent.

For Lear, this means staging the love test, appropriating the answers he wants in hopes of circumventing or dodging potential answers he cannot bear. For JCVD, this means philosophizing after the fact, expounding on “awareness,” so that if parallels exist between JCVD and King Lear, it is because each operates from opposite ends of the philosophical pole. King Lear fights uncertainty, or the unknown, before things go wrong; JCVD fights off the unknown only after things go right. Both flirt with madness.

Just as JCVD philosophizes in hindsight, we are likely to read King Lear in hindsight. I have mentioned elsewhere that the tragic resonances of King Lear are lost when we bring our knowledge of Lear’s “madness” or “guilt” to the play before actually reading (or seeing) the play.[1] Without prior knowledge of the basic artifices of the King Lear narrative (a luxury or benefit more likely to us today because of our ahistorical position to the play, so to indulge in the type of historicism so common nowadays is to further douse the impact of (its) tragedy), we would have every reason to suppose King Lear innocent until proven guilty.

Exactly when (or if?) we discover he is guilty (or mad), then, becomes a crucial turning point in the play. Playing again on opposites, JCVD takes pains to paint its hero as guilty until proven innocent. The theatrical trailer, for example (at least the one that appears as an extra on my DVD) suggests that the movie is about, or depicts, a JCVD driven (because of legal fees and scandal) to desperation, hence to hold up a bank. This is an example, albeit rare, of a trailer working in tandem with, and with an eye to, the particular aesthetic effects the movie seeks to carry out.[2]

We know for certain, when JCVD knocks at the rear entrance of the post office to a star struck security guard, that he is, in fact, innocent of the crime the first thirty-three minutes (roughly) suggest he is guilty of perpetrating, either alone or in collaboration with others. Can we forgive a director for deceiving us so? We may take issue with El Mechri’s selective directing, or we may say, more dangerously, and with the benefit of hindsight, something like: “Of course we were fooled by the narrative; that was the point!” But what was the point exactly? To fool the audience? What is the lesson or moral (if any) to be drawn from this particular staging and sequence of events?

We all know that our knowledge of the world is limited, never perfect, so that to make conclusions or inferences about the world as we go along, as it passes before our eyes, is not ideal but something like the best we can do under the circumstances. Hence we need not be scandalized at all by our initial presumption of JCVD’s guilt; in fact, it is the director’s responsibility, if he cares at all about objective truth/reportage, to show us both sides.

This El Mechri does beautifully, retelling the opening scenes in Schaerbeek (when Van Damme pulls up in front of the video store and poses for pictures with its proprietors before entering the post-office/bank) entirely, but from the other side of the camera axis line, a cinematographer’s faux pas because to do so is to ruin or break up narrative continuity, to disorient the audience.

Again we could reply: “Breaking up the continuity was the point!” But why? Because it was a cool thing to do? Or perhaps to reveal how easy it is to believe we have the whole story when we have only been shown half a story. But we only know we witnessed half the story once the other half is shown. Otherwise, the first half is itself the world, makes up all we know it to be. So the question in this story, like Lear, is when do we decide that JCVD is guilty because whenever that is, it is obviously much too early.

Moreover, once we are shown that he is, in fact, innocent, we are likely to forget 1) that moments earlier we were calling for his blood and 2) the particular events and sequence of events, or types of evidence shown that had us jumping the gun in the first place.

If hindsight has us claim JCVD’s innocence all along, in King Lear (in the opposite register), hindsight causes us to bluff Lear’s guilt or madness all along, as though we knew, from the outset, that something was amiss the moment Lear reveals his “darker purpose.”

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.
Give me the map there. Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom, and ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburdened crawl toward death. (1.1.34-39)

Lear’s “darker” purpose is to divide his kingdom among his three daughters “that future strife/ May be prevented now” (1.1.42-3). Yet the relevant entendre is noted by Marshall McLuhan.

When King Lear proposes “our darker purpose” as the subdivision of his kingdom, he is expressing a politically daring and avant-garde intent for the early seventeenth century … His “darker purpose” would have been recognized at once as left-wing Machiavellianism by an Elizabethan audience. … Whereas the role of the feudal monarch had been inclusive, the king actually including in himself all his subjects, the Renaissance prince tended to become an exclusive power centre surrounded by his individual subjects.

And the result of such centralism … was the habit of delegation of powers and the specializing of many functions in separate areas and individuals. In King Lear, as in other plays, Shakespeare shows an utter clairvoyance concerning the social and personal consequences of denudation and stripping of attributes and functions for the sake of speed, precision, and increased power. (11-12)

Machiavellianism here meaning the divorce from an archaic world of “roles” (14) to an increasingly modern one based on specialism. Such rapid fragmentation and division of powers does not lead to the fragmentation of sense perception (and the increased stress on visual (i.e., written) technology over aural (i.e., oral)). Rather, the technology of moveable type, which both centralizes power and disseminates specific roles through print, initiates this fragmentation of the senses. Technology, in McLuhan’s world, leads.[3]

We have reason to doubt King Lear’s motives right off the bat if we, like Elizabethan audiences, are up on our Machiavelli. But lacking this knowledge, how do we decide when Lear is not to be trusted, that revealing a “darker purpose” means anything other than revealing that which was simply unknown previously, hence darker? I am not going to speculate here when it is precisely that we ascertain Lear’s madness because whatever answer I come up with is always subject to interpretation.

Yet speculation is worthy here, particularly in light of McLuhan’s reading of the play which seems to place the tragedy of King Lear somewhat beyond our star, as if lacking the novelty and aversion to Machiavelli Elizabethan audiences were privy to, we now find ourselves estranged from the play, unable to perceive it the way we were/are supposed to, the way Shakespeare may have wanted us to. So why do we keep reading King Lear? Is Lear still tragic today? And what has any of this to do with JCVD, a movie which I claim sustains, for contemporary tastes, tragic impulses?

The reason I think McLuhan is relevant is because his book on The Gutenberg Galaxy, which presents an account of man on his way to becoming “typographic,” begins with a discussion of King Lear. Part of my objective in this paper will be to trace out some of McLuhan’s thinking and then to consider where he leaves us and why JCVD is as good a figure as any to stand at the opposite end of a Gutenberg galaxy that begins with Lear. 

McLuhan also invites a consideration of media, and he has some startling things to say about cinema. And though he never articulates the making of typographic man as having anything to do with, or encompassing, a tragic worldview, something of this sentiment makes up not only part of what I believe makes Lear tragic (today), but JCVD as well.

2. La réponse avant la question/ The answer before the question

At least three of the four title cards which appear in the film highlight awkward philosophical phrasings which we are to understand have been uttered at some point not by JCVD but by Jean Claude Van Damme in real life. In drawing attention once again to these remarks – which many in Belgium, if not Europe, are likely to feel are best put to rest – the film is asking us to take a second look now that the original sensation these phrasings caused (concomitant with Van Damme’s past drug use) has subsided.

Amazingly, the hostages in the bank have both the good fortune and the audacity to play a clip of some of Jean Claude’s real life philosophical transgressions in the presence of JCVD himself! When the little boy, after seeing the clip, puts the question, “C’est quoi ‘aware’?” he is hushed by his mother only to receive a reply in English from JCVD: “It’s okay.”

Despite the fact that such an answer may indeed be colloquial in French, that the response is in English suggests it is not with European or even Belgian audiences whom JCVD/Van Damme is seeking, in this film, to (re)gain standing. Rather, he is making his particular plea to America, or to his American fans. So American audiences are given certain answers about JCVD before the question is posed. What is the question exactly?

The little boy poses one, but none of us (North) Americans are in any position to answer because without the answers in advance, the question simply does not make sense. What do we know about what JCVD does or doesn’t know about being aware? This discussion was given heavy air time in Europe, not America.[4] If these sorts of transgressions have become household notorieties only in Europe, why would JCVD care to risk whatever standing he may have with an American audience? Europeans may know better than to ask; JCVD is saying, however, that it is still okay to ask.

If we were to ask ourselves this same question, could we come up with not necessarily a better, but any sort of answer? The question may prompt us to think of an answer. But what is the boy is asking exactly? Is he asking what being “aware” is? Or is he asking what JCVD means when he says “aware”? How we answer the question depends on how we interpret the question. Europeans might answer differently than Americans. For Europeans, the answers already exist. But for Americans, they may not, hence require more time and consideration before answering. JCVD still has standing in America and is still willing to pose the question (of “awareness”) there.

The only time we hear the philosophical phrase (“La reponse avant la question”) is during JCVD’s direct-to-camera soliloquy.

This movie is for me. There we are, you and me. Why did you do that? Or why did I do that? You made my dream come true. I asked you for it. I promised you something in return, and I haven’t delivered yet. You win, I lose.

Unless, the path you’ve set for me is full of hurdles, where the answer comes before the question. Yeah, I do that. Now I know why. It’s the cure, from what I’ve seen here. It all makes sense. It makes sense to those who understand.

JCVD’s astonishing reach out to his audience, executed under certain ontological presumptions, invites commentary from Stanley Cavell, who, writing on the ontology of film, discusses theatre’s relation to cinema:

The depth of the automatism of photography is to be read not alone in its mechanical production of an image of reality, but in its mechanical defeat of our presence to that reality. The audience in a theatre can be defined as those to whom the actors are present while they are not present to the actors. But movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent. (25-26)

When we watch King Lear, we understand him to be in our presence, or you could say, in our present, his drama unfolding before our eyes; we are not in his. Also, a King standing before your eyes can claim to be present. An image of a person or King who appears to us onscreen, however, has no presence. What we see is a moment in time already in the can, dead to us.

While we are absent to both the screen actor and the stage actor, we find ourselves at a further remove from the screen actor because neither is he in our present. Is JCVD, in pleading with us as he does across the medium of film, making a sort of ontological mistake, demanding too much of his medium?

But JCVD never says, or claims to be, in our presence; he says this movie is for him. This could mean that through this movie, he is trying to make sense of things, to put pieces of his life together. But this movie does not exactly depict moments of his (past) life; rather it depicts moments surrounding a single event: a bank heist.

To think of JCVD as a biopic, or even a sort of retrospective, is erroneous. JCVD is happening in the present—not in ours but in JCVD’s, so that he finds himself present to himself. He is in his own presence. And how this movie works as a reversal of Cavell’s claim, in its attempt to present JCVD as truly present to us, is by showing us a character, dead to us but alive to his own presence hence relaying that presence to us “as if by mirrors” (Bazin qtd. in Cavell 26).[5] This is how JCVD pulls off its wild attempt to cross genres, staking its claim as a piece of cinematic theatre.

So present to us, what can this mean? That we did indeed make him who he is today, that “we” made his dream come true? Yet our absence from JCVD has not been compromised, only rerouted. JCVD’s dream is obviously not to appear in this film, but to appear in movies in general, to have a movie career. But he is far less present to us in those movies than he is in this one. We certainly did not make his dream come true, unless his dream all along was to be consumed, to remain distant from his audience, from others. But why would anyone pursue a life of fame if their dream all along was to remain separate from others?[6]

If his dream all along was to discover some sort of intimacy with the world, and, upon discovering that such intimacy is not forthcoming (by appearing in movies), then the problem of intimacy becomes unsolvable for the time being—unless clearing the hurdles to achieve said intimacy represents some sort of spiritual test.

That is, if it no longer makes sense to pose questions about the possibility for intimacy with the world (after pursing a life of fame as a movie star), then the answer cannot simply be that such intimacy is impossible. That would be unbearable. Rather, extending the problem – by proposing answers that at least allow the question to make sense, that hold out hope that the question is ultimately answerable – may be the only solution.

How does one achieve said intimacy? By being “aware.”  We wouldn’t pose intimacy as a question otherwise. But as an answer, this merely begs the question: “what is ‘aware’?” So we have an answer before the question.  Subsequent questions no longer address the problem of intimacy and seek instead to expose the ridiculousness of the answer in a way that presupposes that no answer is possible; hence to ask the question (of intimacy) is itself ridiculous.

So indeed, it all makes sense to those who understand. Now he truly understands why he does that. If it is our lot to live without the intimacy of the world we desire, it only makes sense to extend the life of the question—not by asking the question and coming up with answers we cannot bear but by presupposing answers that show that the question is (still) relevant. This is a humanistic gesture.

Presuming that answers come before questions, so we would never risk asking questions we could not answer is implied in McLuhan’s famous motto that “the medium is the message,” taken to mean, of course, that what we talk about is not nearly as important as the conditions which mediate the way we talk, or the manner in which we go about posing questions, in the first place. So the answers we want are locked up in the means we use to communicate.

McLuhan is certainly not the first to put form ahead of content. Yet he is unique in posing “technology” or “media” (rather than language, religion, nation, class, commerce, or, more recently, gender, sexuality, or culture) as making up or mediating the sorts of answers we are likely to come up with.

But why choose “media” or “technology” to discuss tragedy in this paper? One answer would be that whatever it is we want to say about “tragedy,” we know or wish it to exist, or be taken up by, drama; and the medium which we nowadays employ (mostly) to depict drama is the cinema. Here is McLuhan on cinema:

The invention of typography, as such, is an example of the application of the knowledge of traditional crafts to a special visual problem … The mechanization of the scribal art was probably the first reduction of any handicraft to mechanical terms. That is, it was the first translation of movement into a series of static shots or frames.

Typography bears much resemblance to cinema, just as the reading of print puts the reader in the role of the movie projector. The reader moves the series of imprinted letters before him at a speed consistent with apprehending the motions of the author’s mind. (124-25)

If the making of typographic man began in the Renaissance just after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, and if King Lear documents some of the psychic travails that occur when we find ourselves removed from a tribal communal order (marked by permanence and static art) to one which depicts passage, as our thoughts begin to move in linear progression over pieces of moveable type—then a consideration of “media” is enough to account for a continuity between King Lear and cinema, to say the least.

And since both King Lear and cinema are in the business of staging drama, then both, at the very least, have the opportunity to stage or say something tragic. We are generally in agreement about plays like King Lear; but what about the cinema?

3. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day/ Le temps et les heures passent a travers la plus mauvaise journée.

The quotation taken from Macbeth (1.3.146) may boost my claim that it is profitable to read JCVD as a reincarnation of a tragic Shakespearean King, though it seems I have chosen the wrong one. But Macbeth is a King who has the audacity, or is afforded the opportunity, to ask questions before imagining what the answers might look like—a risk he is willing to take because he is in the presence of seers who can give him answers immediately.

Macbeth himself cannot infer the (or any) causal chain of events that would take him to the crown; hence he has no reason to covet it. Now obviously lots of people still covet lots of things despite being unable to imagine a specific chain of events leading to possession. But to lack such imagination is to deny desire a particular expression; imagining the means of obtaining possession is the first step to expressing desire. Macbeth is in the unique position of having his desires expressed for him. Nor does having the answers prove all that beneficial to him. What Macbeth shows is how we fumble with apriori knowledge or assumptions about ourselves, which might be to show how awkward we are, fatally so, with our desires.

Earlier I mentioned how JCVD takes care to extend the life of a question which is, for the time being, unanswerable. But what do we make of Jeff’s (his agent) much more crass expression of the same sort of faux-philosophy? JCVD, after pleading with him for a studio gig, drowns out his voice momentarily and then resumes the conversation with an interjection: “I lost my daughter.” Jeff doesn’t skip a beat, responding with, “You’re gonna get over that. Hey, remember Shakespeare. Time and the hour. Through the longest day. Everything passes. You gotta believe me here man. Life goes on. Especially in this town.”

If the question in this case can be formulated as something like, “why me?” – expressing helplessness – then what Jeff seeks to do is extend the life of the question because immediate answers are not available. JCVD does the same thing in coming up with answers that, unfortunately, end up presupposing the wrong question (“why me?” instead becomes “what is aware?”).

The difference between Jeff and JCVD’s responses is that Jeff’s response is a dismissal of the question while JCVD’s is an acknowledgment of its seriousness, however awkward the reply. That is, Jeff’s catchall phrases are used when there is nothing left to say; to utter them is to remove the weight of the present for the time being. It is, simultaneously, of no consolation whatsoever to say simply “life goes on,” in iambic pentameter or otherwise.

JCVD’s terse response is the only one warranted: “Stop it,” he says, forgoing conversation and even (this sort of) consolation. JCVD at least acknowledges the reality of the present by situating his answer in being, or awareness. Jeff forgoes an answer altogether, reminding his interlocutor to look past the failure of the present and instead to an uncertain future, which may yield better fortunes. So is the passage of time a blessing or a curse?

A brief consideration of time is pertinent here and the following discussion, taken from George Poulet’s remarkable studies on human time, gets at the heart of the dilemma, if less at a definitive answer. Commenting on human perception of time in the late-nineteenth century, Poulet first quotes nineteenth century French poet Maurice de Guérin:

“Nature admits me to the most remote of its divine abodes, the starting point of universal life; there I detect the cause of motion, and I hear in all its freshness the first chant of souls.”

Nineteenth-century time seems essentially a continuous motion which can only be understood in its trend away from its original cause: it is a becoming which is always future. Reality is no longer, as in the Aristotelian becoming, the thing completed, but the very genetic process by which cause engenders effect. I exist and I participate in the existence of things only insofar as I experience their generation. Speaking of this inner experience which allowed him to understand the personality of the people, Michelet writes: “I understood it. Why? Because I was able to follow it in its historical origins and watch it come out of the depths of time.” (Poulet’s emphasis, 32)

The introduction of causality into human affairs—that is, isolating causes from effects and tracing out the implications of both, is the sort of denudation McLuhan discusses in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Here Poulet, Guérin, and Jules Michelet document a way to eternity in isolating the first cause, as though once discovered, we will have all the apriori knowledge we need to reclaim being and duration from a process of change, flux and passage.

Understanding here, of nature’s causes, is liberating and celebrated as a significant spiritual achievement. Yet the backlash to this sort of “generative law,” expressed here as well by Jules Lequier, is also forthcoming:

In order to conceive [the generative law], the mind must exile itself from time to enter into a kind of negative eternity. From this point, it may again be possible for it to move onward once more into some sort of time, but this time is purely scientific, made of determinations and effects; it is not the time of the human being: “At one point in this vast world animated by a continual motion that is continually transformed, where from instant to instant nothing occurred expect that which had its origin in a former state of things, I saw myself, beyond my memories, in my origin: me, this new-born me, this strange me which began by being, I saw deposited unbeknownst to itself at a point in the universe: mysterious germ destined to become with the years what its nature and its complex environment required.”

In these words of Lequier, lived experience of cosmic duration ends up in the thought of an existence in which everything is dealt out in advance: a dead duration; a diagram of time. (33)

Being, housed in a first cause which can be known through scientific discovery or, less dramatically, through cause and effect, is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that our lives are suddenly ours to discover, with the means now to discover, or trace out, their causes. Yet a curse because the method of discovery itself is never in question; who can argue with causality?

All answers are forthcoming if we simply follow the process because “everything is dealt out in advance.” When we find that the answers we need are not available, when our lives don’t square with the narrative others insist is true, what is required is further supplication to form—to trace out our origins more carefully. Answers are not to be found in the present, but in the infinitely long and inexhaustible past.

Form then becomes time, or passage, which is said to heal all wounds. When JCVD suddenly realizes that life is not unfolding, has not unfolded, as he expected, the only answer Jeff can give is for him to allow life to keep unfolding, which isn’t exactly a pessimistic answer. But why should JCVD believe that passage of time will heal his particular wounds this time around? To do so would be a way of denying the world. It is, rather, passage he seeks to understand, as though this knowledge will save him.

He makes a plea for it: “What’s going on here?” He isn’t given a straight answer but is taken for a ride: “I’ve never done bad by you! I’ve always done the right thing by you.” Jeff expresses as much amazement and incredulousness at the present state of things as JCVD; he doesn’t know any better why or how things went wrong. It’s quite likely that Jeff has done everything by the book; but he has no appetite for philosophy. Rather than question first principles, initiate something of the examined life, he simply reiterates the answers: “You’re an international fuckin’ movie star … You work all the time. You’re well protected.” All of which is true. So what exactly is JCVD’s problem?

Two reasons to view this film with suspicion and to insist, further, that it does not warrant the type of seriousness I am claiming for it here are 1) Jean Claude Varenberg has had his time in the spotlight as Jean-Claude Van Damme. For the critic to applaud his crass attempt to cash in on his failure when indeed the fates have (finally) tossed failure his way after a life of so much sex and drugs would be to abandon the sort of critical seriousness required to stave off philosophical charlatans and opportunists. That is, Jean Claude Van Damme, having exhausted the currency of his persona, now comes before us as JCVD. Do we owe him any sympathy?

2) To indulge in actually granting JCVD the sympathy he is after is to immerse ourselves in critical shadenfreude, so that what we take to be aesthetic pleasure in watching the film is actually our critical faculties basking in the misfortune of another. Is a man who falls on hard times after taking for granted too easily the good only deserving of a) critical suspicion or b) critical patrimony?

One way to answer both criticisms would be to say, immediately, that it is not clear that JCVD is seeking to come to terms with his misfortune, but rather, his good fortune. His soliloquy goes on:

I saw people worse off than me. I went from poor to rich and thought, why aren’t we all like me? Why all the privileges? I’m just a regular guy. It makes me sick to see people who don’t have what I’ve got. Knowing that they have qualities, too. Much more than I do! It’s not my fault if I was cut out to be a star. I asked for it. I asked for it, really believed in it. When you’re thirteen, you believe in your dream. Well, it came true for me.

It seems likely that JCVD’s foray into philosophy, however strained, initially began when trying to come to terms not with any grave personal loss, but personal gain—or, rather, other people’s loss, those less deserving of such loss and more deserving of (his sort of) fame.

If this sounds Pollyannaish to some, or if some balk at the idea of apologizing for one’s success (because where would it end?) what such (critical) postures risk is a denial of the (contingencies of the) world in order to affirm an authority and understanding over it which may yet be undeserved. Is the sort of existence, one tied so intimately to contingency, worth affirming? Each individual must answer.

JCVD discovers an answer. Rather than go back and try to ascertain, for oneself, the first cause (risking ridicule either because 1) questioning first principles is something one just doesn’t do or 2) it is no longer reasonable to suppose that an articulation of first causes is enough to achieve the type of spiritual standing in the world Van Damme seeks), Van Damme chooses to remain silent. That is, when the reporter asks him near the end of the film, just after he has been convicted of extorting funds from the Belgian state, “Do you agree with the court’s verdict?” he refuses to answer.

JCVD AT HIS ZENITH

JCVD IS TEMPTED TO AFFIRM HIS FAME AND FORGO HIS EXISTENCE

JCVD REMAINS SILENT AND CLAIMS HIS EXISTENCE

JCVD shrugs off the question, affirming his existence through silence. He forgoes explaining his actions to a sensationalist press more interested in obtaining answers which presuppose that JCVD has fallen from grace. This obviously fits in with a stale narrative of spiritual collapse followed by rebirth (JCVD says: “The snake, Adam and Eve. I don’t buy it anymore”).

JCVD is “reborn” in a way, but the reason the media cannot make headway this time around is because JCVD can never hope to articulate the particular conditions of his new found consciousness.[7] The answers he has found would not make sense to them.

The first principle he has discovered is that there is no answer, certainly not to the meaningless questions the media continues to ask as cover for the meaningful questions they refuse to ask (for which there are not, or may not be, easy answers). If the climate is not suitable to say or voice what he now holds in his heart, to remain silent is both to extend the life of the particular question posed here and to acknowledge the question’s failure. Is this a sort of spiritual hedge?

The sheer beauty of JCVD’s descent down the staircase depicts the spiritual standing he has acquired. Appearing before us in the manner of an American movie star, his glamour is tainted by the sensationalist reminders that he is indeed heading off to prison. Yet JCVD has achieved the knowledge, if less the intimacy, of the world he craves. He has learned not to make himself known to the world, but to survive it for the time being—if not exactly by concealing himself, then by not exactly exposing himself (needlessly) either.

(One gets the feeling that he no longer requires jail time to, say, sort things out metaphysically, but to figure out how to teach others what he has learned. When we see him in prison, he has assumed the role of a teacher, of the martial arts—beginning, that is, where his education began.)

But what exactly are the moral implications of silence? I take it as crucial that JCVD finds a way to register his silence publicly, so that to remain silent without some manner of public engagement would be to invite silence as cover for moral cowardice. What does one need in order to register silence publicly? Obviously a certain standing or authority, the sort it may take a lifetime to achieve because no one can teach silence as any sort of moral stance, especially in a democracy.

The test then is to use standing to refuse or deny the need to be made or turned into a spectacle. This is a tacit admission that conditions at present are not favourable to speech, only to spectacle. Remaining silent is to extend the life of the question while rebuking the quality of the question. This clear moral stance is a reinterpretation of the “turn-the-other-cheek” motif hence a version of the good word, however silent. The temptation to presume we know the answers in advance – the “cure” to some, no doubt, for what they see – is ultimately an attempt to answer a question no longer profitable to pose.

4. Pierre qui tombe sur un œuf. Oeuf se casse/ Stone falls on egg. Egg breaks.

This final philosophical parable (at least one version of it) is uttered by the man in the leather jacket, the movie’s nihilistic arch villain, who presupposes an answer of death to all problems posed, philosophical or otherwise.

When the three thugs realize that no one on the outside knows they are holding JCVD as hostage on the inside, the thirty-year old (Jean François Wolff) suggests they use JCVD as ransom, to ask for something like a million dollars.[8] The man in the leather jacket quickly overturns this idea saying “So the hostages can go to the cops once we’re out?!”

Obviously the original plan was simply to rob the bank/post-office quick and dirty; hostages were never part of the equation. Once they become part of the equation, however, it remains to be seen what sort of solution could prevent the hostages from ever ratting out the lot of them, save for killing every one of them.

Later the man in the leather jacket insists that they start killing hostages in order to gain the “upper hand.” But seeing as exit under the conditions he has articulated is impossible (i.e., in wanting to prevent any of the hostages from ever speaking to anyone), what could possibly constitute an upper hand remains wholly unclear. This disturbing lack of faith in negotiation and dialogue, and the ease with which the man in the leather jacket is willing to massacre innocents (for apparently no good strategic reason) gives this film a particularly sinister feel.

To announce to the world that they have JCVD hostage seems the most expedient way out of this mess of contingencies. Yet after balking at the chance to escape, they then consider using JCVD as ransom for things they have difficulty formulating in the first place. We are never quite sure who is in charge. When they finally come up with their demands, they insist that JCVD be the one to voice them. It obviously helps that those on the outside believe JCVD is perpetrating the crime; the thugs may simply be improvising.

But their improvisation less reveals their cunning than their incompetence; what it shows is their willingness to forgo their own authority, as though only a man of JCVD’s stature could make demands in the first place.

Here I am reminded of an exchange between King Lear and Kent, when the latter, disguised as Caius, offers his supplication to Lear as a means of silencing himself:

LEAR: Dost thou know me, fellow?

KENT: No sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.

LEAR: What’s that?

KENT: Authority (1.4.24-27)

McLuhan reads both Kent and Cordelia as victims in a world where roles are undermined by specialists, so lacking roles, they suddenly find they lack the authority to act, hence the authority to speak. Cordelia’s remark to “love and be silent” foreshadows the particular authority and standing she is able to command in the reader’s mind as the play unfolds.

But in the immediate present, Cordelia clearly does not remain silent; her standing suffers for it. She is pressed to speak and pledges to love according to her bond, no more nor less. Her remarks are immediately sensationalized by the court. Kent comes to her defence; both are banished. Yet their silence has been registered in the public arena. It remains up to them to now figure out how, or if, to act, because if actions can sometimes speak louder than words, so too can silence speak louder than acts. The lesson, that is, is to love and be silent, not to act and be silent.

What does any of this have to do with JCVD? The inability for the petty thugs to make themselves known, or heard, in any way to the police they are negotiating with reduces their standing in the world. Their silence is an attempt to gain an authority without risking, or ever having risked, their own skins.

And why would they want to? One doesn’t have to look very far to see why. One merely has to look at JCVD—particularly the JCVD we are presented with in the film’s first thirty-three minutes, the one who is presumed guilty until proven innocent. And it doesn’t help merely to say that these particular individuals actually are guilty. The more pertinent question is to ask why they choose – or why, say, increasingly, men of a certain generation and temperament and locale – choose not to take such risks. Even JCVD can sympathize with this.

Film scholar Barna William Donovan gets at the heart of a male withdrawal from public life:

Men often do not like to publicly address their problems. Interestingly, on the one hand, they watch the morality plays of the action film because it gives voice and shape to their nebulous problem in the world today. Yet, on the other hand, the very language and value systems of these films reinforce the silent models of masculinity, all performed by action stars who wed their public personas to similar images of stoic, uncomplaining toughness. (5)

I will return to a consideration of gender. For now, let me say that a genre of movies which seeks to “voice” silence in this way – that is, in resorting to violence or swift justice or what have you – does indeed suggest that actions speak louder than words. I less cite this illuminating passage to suggest a propensity for males to remain silent breeds interest in action movies than to suggest, conversely, that violence is bred of silencing.

The sensationalizing of speech, of words, first leads to their failure, hence to the attraction of actions which are said to speak louder than words. When these actions prove inadequate, however, we are left feeling that we have created, or at least further reinforced, the conditions of our own silence. What other response is there than (further) silence? Further violence?

When we first hear JCVD at his child custody hearing, near the start of the film, his defence attorney is conspicuously absent. JCVD is forced to pipe up in his own defence. He interjects repeatedly, through a series of jump cuts, as the plaintiff’s attorney begins listing off movie titles which JCVD has starred in during his film career.

Eventually, JCVD relents, asking to use the restroom while the pile-on continues. Though the exchange ends comically, JCVD has been effectively silenced. And what is he silenced by? His actions, or, more specifically, his action movies. The DVDs pile up before the judge as some sort of index of (his) moral depravity, and from this, we (or the court, or both) are to assume that he is unfit to be a father.

The assumption would be that violence breeds violence, or that Van Damme has a history of violence. Is this a form of sensationalism or a reasonable inference? But another sort of suggestion – also scandalous, sensational – is the one made at the beginning of the film, referring to 9/11, where it is suggested that Osama bin Laden got the idea to hijack planes by watching a 1980s Chuck Norris action film (Delta Force, 1986). “Haven’t you ever had an idea just to realize you’ve seen it before?”

Which is to suggest, either reasonably or unreasonably, that America suffers from its own history of violence, of sensationalizing it, even though no one in the American mass media would care to sensationalize this sort of claim. Indulging or engorging in JCVD’s trials and tribulations, either fictional (in America) or non-fictional (in Europe), is the sort of violent bloodsport all of us play by proxy.

Perhaps this is, and has always been, the function of civil society, so that action movies (as the case has been made) actually purge us of our violent tendencies rather than exacerbate them. But the violence in question here is not the sort carried out on or against corporeal bodies, but the sort carried out on our psychic experience of the world where we understand that we cannot claim or make claim to certain words because we risk causing a sensation.

Why should things be sensationalized at all? Is it because otherwise we risk asking ourselves questions for which we do not have answers, or, worse, that the answers we come up with we would find unbearable, as though if we go back far enough along the causal chain of events, we will not find a first cause around which to organize being, but an endless regress exposing not only the meaninglessness of our failures, but of our successes as well?

What does a French-Arab video store owner know about why he consumes, or peddles (or both) American action films which portray Arabs unflatteringly? His answer – dismissive of the question, that “action films need bad guys” – is both an acknowledgement of a problem at hand and a simultaneous disowning or disavowal of the fact that he has thrived from peddling violence.

I don’t mean he needs to be held to account. I mean the question no longer makes sense, cannot be posed in any serious way because we have no answers, as though addressing the human propensity for violence, for the time being, has been put beyond the reach of language.

Let me here say a few words about mothers, and what I take this film to be saying about mothers. What is conspicuously absent from this film is a strong female lead or supporting role. We do, however, see JCVD’s mother; she pleads with her son not to separate a female hostage from her child. There is an ominous standoff between the man in the leather jacket and JCVD, concerning their relationships to their mothers and, finally, a fatal standoff between the man in the leather jacket and Arthur, the buffoonish security guard who ends up shooting the man in the leather jacket in the forehead after he makes a vulgar comment about his (Arthur’s) mother.

So despite the absence of women, mothers are very much present in this film—present that is, through their silence, as though our mothers or the memory of our mothers haunts this film. I don’t want to get into a gendered debate about tragedy because it is quite clear to me that taken in the male or female register, what is happening in this film, tragically, is the systematic silencing of both men and women.

You may say women are held silent from the outset of the film, while men are silenced as the film progresses, which says that the further pacification or feminization of men in (American) cinema has clipped now even its action stars, no longer able to act nor speak. So men too are forced to love and be silent, a stance less expressing female subjectivity than survival. This systematic loss of subjectivities is tragic.

Melanie Klein’s notion – that the infant secretly desires to return to his/her mother’s wombs – is inverted in this movie.[9] That is, the characters in this movie have already returned to the womb: they are inside the bank; what they desire is a way out, to be reborn.

Furthermore, if we think of the raising of the curtain as signalling a rebirth, the first hostage to be let out is not the son but the mother. The mother, subsequently, pleads to go back, as if to start over or again; what she pleads for is a second chance. The desire here (even if a “feminine” desire, males are no less likely to suffer it) is not to withdraw from the world but to give birth or have one’s birth again, divorced from a particular history, under safer passage, as if times are too treacherous now.

These sorts of re-imaginings – an emergence into the world to start over, having erased the indignities and humiliations of the past – is the sort suffered by JCVD in his imagined exit from the bank, raising his arms to the cheering throngs and pumping his fist in an act of triumph. Yet once the frames of reality begin passing before us again, we can only bear witness to the shame and humiliation of (re)birth, knowing that no one chooses when or what sort of world they are born into.

5. The invention of cinema

Presupposing the answers before the question is the sort of stance taken to ensure the question makes sense. It does not mean we have the answers, but insists the answers are before us, so all one has to do is merely pose a (logical) question and we then follow the steps to reach the intended effect. Otherwise, why pose the question at all?

Here is a final quotation from McLuhan, sketching out somewhat the topography of his Gutenberg galaxy. He is commenting on our discovery of the alphabet and why it is easy now to understand the ramifications of its invention. He begins by discussing not the “discoveries” made (about a given technology and the power it affords us) but the “method of discovery,” or the “method of invention” itself. Indeed, he notes that the “great discovery of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the method of discovery” (45).

The method of invention … is simply to begin with the solution of the problem or with the effect intended. Then one backtracks, step by step, to the point from which one must begin in order to reach the solution or effect. Such is the method of the detective story, the symbolist poem, and of modern science.

It is, however, the twentieth century step beyond this method of invention which is needed for understanding the origin and the action of such forms as the wheel or the alphabet. And that step is not the backtracking from product to starting point, but the following of process in isolation from product. To follow the contours of process as in psychoanalysis provides the only means of avoiding the product of process, namely neurosis or psychosis. (45)

So we have process and product, or, as I see it, questions and answers. To begin with the product we want and backtrack to find the questions suitable to ask is to make process subservient to human needs, desires and wants. We pose the answers, then look for the right sort of questions to ask and this is the method of discovery in the nineteenth century.

This is true discovery, when we start from nothing and find something. But what happens, inevitably, when we cannot get all the answers we want, when we cannot isolate and identify the causal chain of events that will lead to the product we desire? Or what, as McLuhan says above, if we get some products we do not desire, like neurosis or psychosis? Do we abandon the process?

The question seems ridiculous, nonsensical, not worth asking. But psychosis still exists. We can follow the contours of process and attempt to circumvent certain effects of process for the time being, but not for eternity. In allowing process to take place, psychosis (for example) is always possible so we have run into a limitation of process, and not because process cannot address something that is, but because process creates something that never was.

Is the violence of cinema a “psychosis” of cinema, so that if cinema is destined to depict passage, process, it is destined to depict certain products of that process not to our liking (such as violence)? And how do we reverse this trend? By following the contours of process perhaps, but this is ultimately defeating because the medium itself demands action. But surely not all action on film need be violent action?

Here is a bit by Noel Carroll discussing medium-specificity, which, at its boldest, predicts where and what subject matter a given medium of art is liable to be successful dealing with, based on preset ontological limitations and/or capabilities of the medium itself.

The doctrine [of medium-specificity] is … seductive for critics-at-large and ordinary audience members … because it gives them the means to account for why some films fly and others flop. Those that excel are cinematic – that is, they engage in and exploit the distinctive properties of the medium. Those that are insolvent can often be explained away on the grounds that they have failed to take advantage of the special resources and distinctive capabilities of film, often by stumbling into the realm of the medium of an adjacent artform (usually theatre).

Thus, someone might claim that the doctrine of medium specificity explains why Hitchcock’s film Psycho is superior to his The Paradine Case. The latter, with all its palaver, crossed over into the domain of theatre, whereas Psycho – remember the shower-sequence montage – is pure cinema (cutting, that is to say, editing, every inch of the way). (His emphasis, 38)

Medium-specificity is not the last word for Carroll. He recognizes many magnificent moments have been captured on film that are both palaver and shot continuously. But something of the promise of cinema is denied when people speak (too much), as if to reflect on life while living life is not our lot to do.

Here is precisely why JCVD is tragic: JCVD reminds us that our lives only make sense to us after they have been lived, and, even then, in such a way that compromises our understanding of what we take process (a life) to be. The action star is attractive because he forgoes a life of dialogue, a life of posing questions, and commits to a life of process, as though one with it, taking the ultimate stance against contingency.

Furthermore, the best way for us to assert our dominance in face of being unable to obtain the answers we want is to pretend that we understand, or are on our way to fully understanding, the particular unfolding of process, which is to hide from the burden of asking questions that may yield no answer or answers we do not expect—in short, to hide from the burden of discovering the world, or being blindsided by it. This line of reasoning suggests it already (fully) exists (somewhere, elsewhere).

Putting our trust in process means we cannot speak to, or are no longer the authors of, our own narratives—that the narrative of our lives is being written elsewhere. We can only uncover our lives; we have no say or stake or authority in its makeup. It is not simply that as the action unfolds, we cannot be fully aware of what we are getting into. Rather, we have no means or right to ask what we are getting into, to demand certain answers and not others.  We watch action movies which need bad guys, but beyond that, there is simply nothing else to ask.  The genre, or process, simply entails certain products. 

The violence of cinema is not the depiction of violence against corporeal bodies. Rather, the psychic violence carried out against subjectivities – in the depiction of passage, and in the authority of the image, hence of action over words – and the systematic silencing of both men and women, all of which is put on display explicitly in JCVD, is a characteristic of cinema that haunts its promise.

Indeed, in presenting a world “dead” to us, cinema begs us to surrender to passage, to process, to flux—for better or for worse. I’m not saying that films which respect medium-specificity are (exclusively) cinematic. What I want to say is that tragedy can be depicted by cinema, hence rendered cinematically. And this is not because film depicts what the theatre depicts, but because what we call tragedy as depicted on film is medium-specific. Tragedy on film, that is, is a recognition of process, passage and flux. If Renaissance tragedy was marked by the corporeal deaths of all its players in the final act, then cinematic tragedy marks the psychic deaths of all its actors.[10]  Stars were once able and likely to explore the possibilities of genre; now they are restricted by them. 

A final word on the art of cinema and the ontology of film from André Bazin, who says that “an art’s origins provide us with a glimpse of its essence” (17). How he recounts the invention of cinema is noteworthy:

Basing ourselves on the technological discoveries that made cinema possible gives us a very poor account indeed of its discovery. Rather, an approximate and complicated elaboration of the idea almost always precedes the industrial discovery, which alone enables the idea’s practical application. (14)

Bazin touches on the problem of hindsight. It is easy, that is, after the fact, to imagine cinema was invented once the proper technological and scientific breakthroughs had been made. But Bazin says this is not the case. Cinema was not the inevitable result of a commingling of scientific discoveries. Rather, the idea of cinema, the “myth” as Bazin calls it, was and always has been for a “complete realism, the recreation of the world in its own image” (17).

And the achievement of this realism in the form of cinema did not occur because process was simply allowed to happen. Rather, we started from product – the desire for realism – and worked our way toward cinema.

To posit the scientific discoveries and industrial technologies that have had such a significant role in the development of cinema as the sources of its invention is thus to invert, at least from a psychological point of view, the concrete order of causality. Those with the least confidence in the future of cinema were precisely the industrialists …

The fanatics, the maniacs, the disinterested pioneers capable … of burning their furniture to obtain a few seconds of flickering images, were neither industrialists nor great thinkers, but men with imaginations. That cinema was born is due to the convergence of their obsession: the myth of total cinema. (His emphasis, 18)

In its essence, cinema was not born by following the contours of process, scientific or industrial or otherwise, but by asserting the answers we wanted, making process subservient to our desires and needs. Yet the desire for “complete realism” also brought with it the desire for “an image upon which the irreversibility of time and the artist’s interpretation do not weigh” (17).

Cinema does not annihilate completely the possibility for interpreting the world, but it does present us with a world in which we, as passive viewers, have no say in the outcome. Film’s essence is ironic. Cinema was born by demanding answers, yet its depiction of passage is meant to circumvent the need to pose subjective questions, which is to deny, or at least lessen, our subjective claim to the world. And though the passage of time can be construed to a director or an editor’s liking, no doubt time’s irreversibility is presented to us on film, denying the present or presentness of its actors, affirming their pastness.  If the medium is the message, and the message is (I’m saying) tragic, then film is a tragic medium—or, at the very least, a medium well suited to depict tragedy, in terms of both form and content. 

So why this film? In order for JCVD to be doing what I take it to be doing, it is not only imperative that it be aware of the filmic (say, technical) conventions it is operating in and behind, but also, that it recognizes and acknowledges its existence at the end of a movie-cycle or genre.[11]

Clearly what is being thematized in this film is the death not of a particular action star, but of a genre – say, of action movies. The film’s acknowledgment of its existence at the tail end of this cycle comes in its opening minutes, when the Arab patron of the video store begins listing past Hollywood action stars and the movies they starred in: “Stallone in Rambo 3, Hauer in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bruce Willis in The Siege, Steven Seagal in Executive Decision, and what’s his name, Mark Wahlberg who fights in Iraq.” Part of what this movie asks is what comes next when a particular genre of movie dies, leaving, say, questions unanswered.

Obviously other genres may pick up the slack, or the genre itself may descend into senseless spectacle, to avoid its own shortcomings. JCVD does not chart out for us a way forward; rather, it leaves us hanging on a precipice. The movie ends on a particularly painful but sweet (sweet because so painful) moment of silence, with JCVD facing off against his daughter, with whom we are to understand the shame of his past to be most acute.

All he can do is sit, not stand, before his daughter, responding to her initiation of conversation with a simple “Hi.” If Lear’s tragedy is sealed the moment he refuses to see Cordelia, concealing her away with him like “birds i’ th’ cage,” then JCVD’s tragic fate is assured the moment he unconceals himself to his daughter, sitting before her, vulnerable, armed only with speech and starting out once again with process under no presumption that the next round of dialogue will be any better than the last. He moves forward on faith.

But the movie ends there. Neither cinema, nor action star, nor genre can (at this particular time) chart for us a way forward. The temptation for each (or the moral imperative for each) in the interim is to avoid spectacle.

***

The in-betweeness of JCVD, its straddling of worlds whether linguistic (French, English) or geographical (Europe, North America), and, most notably, its existence at the end of one genre of film and on the precipice of (possibly, eventually) another makes it exceptionally suited to commentary from Canada, or Canadians—another reason to juxtapose JCVD against the writings of Marshall McLuhan.

This is less to say that McLuhan and JCVD are a natural fit than to say that Canadian writers have something to say about film and cinema, because the ontology of film is caught in an ironic double-bind in demanding to be the last word (asserting the subjective human need or desire for “complete realism”) while at the same time depicting a world of passage that works progressively to deny subjective human claims on reality. Bazin’s “myth of total cinema” still haunts our movie watching today and works to (further) silence us.

Hence good film commentary must occupy the middle ground within this double-bind, and necessarily mediates. Listen to these very timely and interesting comments by Timothy Barnard in introducing his fine scholarly translation and edition of Bazin’s classic text:

Prepared and produced entirely in Canada … this volume will also, we hope, provide impetus for a long-overdue redefinition of ‘Canadian culture’ and ‘what it means to be Canadian.’ This redefinition would look not only inward but also outward, to the mediating role Canada can play in many international spheres, not the least of which is culture. (Bazin xiv-xv)

Furthermore, he banks on the fact that Canada, straddled between “the language of Bazin and the first or second language of many of the world’s inhabitants in every corner of the globe” (Bazin xiv) has something unique to offer the world of film criticism—meaning here perhaps a better translation, but meaning also, I take it, a better mediation between languages.

Irony – the effectiveness of which depends on an ability to stand back or aside (hence a passivity or passiveness, not unrelated to passage) from double or competing meanings – as a sort of natural pedagogical habitat for Canadians is expressed by Linda Hutcheon:

[T]here is a structural and temperamental affinity (though not causality) between the inescapable doubleness (or even multiplicity) at the base of irony as a trope and the historical and cultural nature of Canada as a nation. Indeed, one of the familiar clichés about Canada is its doubleness: historically, this was first inscribed in the “meeting” of native peoples and colonizers … There is also, of course, the French/English linguistic and cultural doubling … . (12)

The doubling I am interested in here is certainly the one between French and English, but also the one between Canada and America, particularly English Canada and America, which means that a French movie, or the French language, has a particular ability to mediate between, say, competing Englishes.

This is not in light of Canada’s Frenchness, of course; but the ironic or peripheral position this movie takes is a natural fit, or would seem to have a natural affinity with, a Canadian viewership. This may be the reason the film’s producers chose Canada to premiere the film in North America.  Canada, a bilingual country which respects the role of French – via, say, French Canada or even Canada herself – as a vehicle for addressing the problem of violence or spectacle in American cinema.

If this movie leaves us on a precipice, then Canada is certainly closer to that precipice – geographically, linguistically – than other nations, though perhaps not by much, because, as Barnard notes, English has managed to penetrate every corner of the globe. Mediation, in Canada’s case, primarily for her own sake; but then, for the rest of the world.

End Notes

---

[1] I am not the first to make this claim. Here is Northrop Frye: “When you start to read or listen to King Lear, try to pretend that you’ve never heard the story before, and forget that you know how bad Goneril and Regan and Edmund are going to be. That way, you’ll see more clearly how Shakespeare is building up our sympathies in the opposite direction.”

Frye goes on to tell us that it is Gloucester and Lear who are (initially) presented as fools; yet the more pertinent reminder is that it is possible to perceive Cordelia (immediately) as foolish (Coleridge reminds us of this). While Frye also begs us to appreciate all the more the formal achievements of Shakespeare’s play, I am saying that such “alternative” approaches to reading the play make salient (once again) the play’s tragic resonances. See Frye 14.

[2] Yet too often trailers are made with no particular consideration of the plot points they needlessly overturn, hence dousing the aesthetic effect the movie is out to achieve, namely, by co-opting the audience’s own discovery procedure. For example, the summary on the back of my DVD copy of JCVD reads: “The ‘Muscles from Brussels’ is back and facing the biggest fight of his life. Returning to his home town for some much needed rest after losing his daughter in a lengthy custody battle, Jean-Claude Van Damme finds himself smack in the middle of a bank heist. Even worse, the cops think the penniless aging action star is the culprit.”

This last line is atrocious! To those who read the backs of DVD cases before buying or renting movies, such “knowledge” of the film is entirely unhelpful. The pains Mabrouk el Mechri takes to unfold his narrative, to depict JCVD’s guilt before his innocence, is entirely compromised by this supposedly harmless blurb, which is why anyone serious about movies should demand that trailers be outlawed.

[3] This says something further about the ontology of film for no other art form is so overtly “Machiavellian”—divorced, that is, from being, not simply because the frames of a film pass before our eyes in the manner of movable type. But because no other art from is more dependent on roles, on specialists, to achieve its final aesthetic vision. Moreover, films are presented in sequence but shot in fragments. The continuity of a film is less a directorial than editorial achievement, completed after the fact (i.e., in post-production).

If film is a legitimate medium for tragedy, it is certainly because it is a Machiavellian art. But are tragedy is not mere Machiavellianism gone awry. The idea behind a more political Machiavellianism is that specialized, fragmented and limited viewpoints are necessary for the sake of achieving immediate results. But the tragedy emphasized through cinema stresses that precisely the limitedness of this approach forces us to overextend the applicative power of Machiavellianism, so that there is something more to achieving the ends we desire.

What this is is difficult to know beforehand. And it is not tragic that we cannot know beforehand. Rather, it is tragic that we must pretend we know (or we knew) because otherwise, we would get nowhere. This is not characteristic of Renaissance Machiavellianism, but common enough in our times.

[4] Mabrouk el Mechri comments on the difference between American and European reception of his film as part of the Midnight Madness festivities at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. You can watch the interview here. See Mechri.

[5] But how can “presence” be relayed? This is why Cavell says Bazin’s comments suit live television, where “mirrors” stand a chance to relay an event happening in real time. However, no amount of relay can account for a difference in space, and presence depends on both time and space. Film offers neither (time nor space), so truly, film cannot account for presence in the least. Though JCVD, in presenting itself as a story unfolding in the present (with a star aware of his own presence in the world of a film dead to us) goes a remarkable distance in quashing spans of both space and time. See Cavell 26.

[6] A stage actor might not pursue intimacy in the same way; he/she seeks union with a particular character, to feel less separate from others by occupying another’s psyche. But film actors do not supplicate themselves to character; they invent their character(s), become them, so suddenly, they find that their identities are only as good as the latest script they hold in their hands. See Cavell 28.

[7] Whether “rebirth” is actually possible or only a “mythic” possibility remains to be seen. That is, despite all the hype of JCVD’s newfound “dramatic” prowess, it remains to be seen whether or not Jean Claude Van Damme can actually reinvent himself (in Hollywood or elsewhere) as anything other than an action star. JCVD registers this burden (of history) when he says “C’est tout la.”

[8] The “thirty-year old” is a translation of “Trentenaire,” which is the name that appears in the closing credits. Also, who I am calling “the man in the leather jacket” is listed in the credits as “Homme au Bonnet,” translated elsewhere as “the man in the cap”—confusing because the man clearly does not wear a cap.

[9] Klein, of course, grounds her discussion on the infant’s desire for the mother’s breast: “The breast, towards which all desires are directed, is instinctively felt to be not only the source of nourishment but of life itself. The relation to the gratifying breast in some measures restores, if things go well, the lost prenatal unity with the mother.”

This insight is articulated more thoroughly by prominent British psychoanalyst John Bowlby in his work maternal deprivation and what he calls the “Primary Return-to-Womb craving.” See Minsky 236; Bowlby 350; also, Klein’s “A Study of Envy and Gratitude” reprinted in Minsky 236-53. For a more recent discussion on Klein’s work, see Minsky 78-109.

[10] Stevie Simkin, in a very interesting survey of Early Modern tragedy through to more contemporary “violent” film, seeks to do more with the comment, often made by teachers in passing, that “works of Webster, Middleton or Shakespeare … may not be so very far removed from the entertainment of their own time.” Though he does not initiate an explicit discussion of tragedy, he seems to distinguish between “revenge tragedies” of the Early Modern period and those which provide “extended mediations on justice and revenge,” as though the latter encompasses what we take more successful examples of Early Modern tragedy to be.

What I’m saying is that in JCVD, the genre of what Simkin might call contemporary “revenge tragedy” has been exhausted and for whatever reason, there is simply no room for meditations on justice and revenge. This may be a shortcoming of cinema, which does not accommodate such digressions (as theatre, say, can). But cinema is not the reason we cannot have such digressions. Passage (or process) slowly works to silence us; cinema shows this most explicitly, even if we can only digress upon it after the fact (of watching a film). This is how cinema inherits tragedy. See Simkin 4.

[11] Cavell has it that “the familiar historical fact that there are movie cycles, taken by certain movie theorists as in itself a mark of unscrupulous commercialism, is a possibility internal to the medium; one could even say, it is the best emblem of the fact that a medium had been created. For a cycle is a genre (prison movies, Civil War movies, horror movies, etc.); and a genre is a medium.” See Cavell 36.

I take this to mean that movies communicate directly through formal considerations of genre, so that a movie “genre” becomes a “concept” in itself – a word, so to speak – which carries the burden of respecting, extending, or transfiguring the conventions associated with it. (A genre presupposes certain “answers” which allows it to explore questions a certain way.) It is less that a movie cycle or genre dies than it demands rebirth—often taken to be the “same-old,” hence as crass commercialism. But what happens when a studio formula has run dry? If cinema is more dependent on its genres as mediums, then what were once distinct genres, it seems to me, are destined to merge, or share characteristics. Action films, for example, will become action comedies. Contrasting conventions will suddenly find themselves next to one another, like chords in music.

Works Cited

Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Trans. Timothy Barnard. Montreal: Caboose, 2009. Print.

Bowlby, John. "The Nature of the Child’s Tie to his Mother." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (1958): 350-73. Print.

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971. Print.

Donovan, Barna William. Blood, Guns, and Testosterone: Action Films, Audiences, and a Thirst for Violence. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.

Frye, Northrop. "King Lear." Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: King Lear. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2010. 13-30. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen et al., ed. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. Double Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art and Literature. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Print.

Mechri, Mabrouk el. Interview. Mabrouk el Mechri on JCVD YouTube, 9 September 2008. Web. 14 March 2011.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2DXbxChaos.

Minsky, Rosalind, ed. Psychoanalysis and Gender: an Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Simkin, Stevie. Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Print.

 

Harper: the Steely-Eyed Propaganda Man

Discussing who “performed” best at the leaders’ debates is always a vulgar exercise. It is not a free exchange of ideas but a chance to link ideas to a persona, as though ideas have anything to do with persona.

This is news to no one. But what is evident is that the manner in which lies are presented to the Canadian people can overturn the truth. And I’m not talking about a difference of opinion or a technicality, or even so-called policy “grey areas.” I’m talking about a bald-faced lie.

Gilles Duceppe tried to force the issue. Does anyone believe that Harper would not have jumped at the chance to be PM in 2004? No one who is honest with him or herself could. It’s impossible. Even the most hardened Tory would answer with something like: “Yes, but Harper has to say something, and he cannot possibly say that the party who wins the second most seats can try to form government. He’d have his foot in his mouth.”

Anyone who says such a thing is tacitly approving the most viscous form of propaganda. When the steely eyed propaganda man says what he does, he is a committed person—and party faithful must toe the line. This is the best their leader can give them: the means and ways to wilfully deceive themselves.

Never mind the ideological lies presented in cool, calm and paternalistic fashion, namely that tax cuts to the wealthy will create job growth or that the so-called tax increases will affect working and middle class families adversely. (The NDP and, in lockstep, the Liberals are proposing to tax a $500 billion pool of capital that is not being re-invested in the Canadian economy. Most of this new wealth was created because interest rates to Canadian big banks have been so low; in effect, retail Banks could borrow money from the Bank of Canada for next to nothing then lend this money out to the average borrower at interest. Now what sort of economic activity is this? What “job” is created when the rich simply make more money by lending out to the poor? None, unless the rich, in their infinite benevolence, actually use that capital to reinvest in the “risky” marketplace, where small and medium sized businesses actually have the potential of going under. But why undertake the laborious task of looking at company balance sheets when the Federal government makes it easy to profit at zero risk?)

Presenting such lies in such a fashion is apt, amazingly, to warrant the characterization of being “Prime Ministerial.” But even if one is comforted by Harper’s ideological bromides, one has to go to an extra level of self-deception not to be scandalized by a man who looks squarely into the camera and flat out lies, in the most craven manner imaginable, knowing full well that others will not exactly believe his lies but grant him the authority to tell it.

I suppose when people hear the word propaganda, they are incapable of believing that they are capable of being propagandized. The reply here would be something like: “I’m not being propagandized; I know this is something Harper has to say. He says it in a comforting manner, the way a Prime Minister should.” Which is to either a) keep reiterating his lies to others or b) admit that lying, with no attempt at “damage control” of any kind, no spin of any kind, is an acceptable form of political discourse. The latter is “totalitarian” propaganda, where the attempt is no longer to confuse the citizenry, but to impose a narrative on the citizenry. The former is bad enough. How far do we allow the latter to go?

That is, Harper does not even have the decency to try and temper his lies, with, say, a tacit acknowledgment of his “error,” to forward some sort of spin that shows he is at least afraid of the charge of being called a bald faced liar. In fact, he is not afraid. He believes that if he lies, with enough steely-eyed compunction, and right into the eyes of the Canadian people, he will get away with it. Not only does he get away with it, many around the country have the audacity to call such a quality “Prime Ministerial”—as though they expect to be coddled through the unpleasantness of why Mr. Harper had to tell the lie in the first place.

Whatever your political “ends,” such means are cause for concern, and atrocious. Mr. Harper is taking you for a ride, showing explicit contempt for you by lying to your face then banking on the fact that you will actually come to his defense! If you find yourself apologizing for Mr. Harper in this regard, please take pains to understand that you have been very effectively subdued, coddled, quashed. You have been propagandized.

 

Reading Seal’s music

Separating strands of popular culture, that is, the popular from culture, or what we take to be significant, usually implies that we have found or discovered what is actually culture, as though what is popular has been allowed to pass and only the diamonds remain from the dross.

In this sense, commenting on popular culture is liberating because one can speculate only on those areas of popular art that are, in a sense, aphoristic (i.e., which “ring true”) thus avoiding the sort of embarrassing critical reach one expects when suggesting that what Seal says or does in one way, in a one video, has bearing on how or what he sings in another video (or song).

Perhaps it does; cases are made and have to be made all the time. But the apriori search for thematic unity and wholes does not simply make aesthetic claims about popular art all too tenuous. Rather, the need for such wholes when talking about art usually directs the esthetician elsewhere, so that the courage needed to make what might be tenuous claims about a popular work of art is abandoned before it begins, as though because it is a known fact that no serious aesthetic unity could exist between, say, a music video, and a song, and its lyrics—aesthetic comment is misplaced here, hence better placed there, around and about more prestigious objects (like, say, Shakespeare).

Perhaps it is dangerous to elide wholes for particulars—particularly when aesthetic commentary, for all its emphasis on wholes, is now awash in specialized commentary. Focusing on just the lyrics of a song, or just the music, or just the video, then, doesn’t seem to be too far off the radar screen, so even if we are asked to comment on the whole, we can simply assert our area of expertise and leave the rest to other disciplinarians.

Yet what I want to say is that such commentary, the commentary I will take up here in discussing Seal’s track “Crazy” is an effective antidote to specialized commentary, and is the sort that seeks to open up the “penetralium” of experience precisely by focusing on the particular and avoiding the general and not because I have no interest in the general but because I often find that discussions in search of the general from the outset elide the particular. (One could say, experience is all too easily elided.) It is only via the particular (i.e., via our particular experience of the world or a text) that we can begin to have any business commenting on the general anyhow. Nor is the trajectory guaranteed. Armed with good intentions, one simply tries it out.

I’ll begin by saying what I think the song isn’t about. The song is not about a crazy person, though the line that certain people are walking through Seal’s head, one with a gun “to shoot the other one” seems to suggest otherwise—conjuring up all sorts of post-facto images of Columbine and the trenchcoat mafia.  Even if Seal couldn’t possibly be alluding to these specific incidents, certainly school shootings weren’t foreign to him or his experience of the world, growing up as he did in Central London. So while such a reading wouldn’t of itself be crazy, I don’t believe the song is out to say that such people are crazy. No doubt they are. Why say it?

Alanis Morissette, who composed a fine cover of the song, capturing and emphasizing its subtlety and pace, undermined her notable musical efforts by presenting a rather cheesy version of what she (apparently) takes “crazy” to mean in her video. Impersonating a “crazy” ex as she does, one who takes it upon herself to act crazy in a world of desire (i.e. relationships) gone haywire seems to imply that going “crazy” is what we all need to do on occasion to keep our sanity, so that Seal’s song becomes a reminder of this fact. I don’t think the song denies any of this; but it certainly does not take pains to spell out such a trite moral stance.

So what about when he says “But we’re never gonna survive unless we are a little crazy”? Yet the line with the greatest semantic weight is not the “But we’re never gonna survive“ line but the alternate chorus line which goes “In a sky full of people only some want to fly isn’t that crazy?” the one Seal repeats in another track, this one his own cover of a Steve Miller song (“Fly like an Eagle”). What I hear in the particular anguish expressed in this line is a plea for understanding or knowledge of the world while acknowledging, at the same time, that such knowledge is impossible to attain in this world. (This is not the first time Seal expresses such anguish, nor the last.)

If a plea for knowledge, then what does Seal not know? And what does he acknowledge he can’t know? Let’s begin by asking ourselves from what vantage point Seal is singing. He starts off, clearly, in the third person: “In a church, by the face, he talks about the people going under,” which is followed by a first-person injunction (to an “only child”) and then: “A man decides after seventy years, that what he goes there for, is to unlock the door.”

So what we are left to believe is that a man has decided to go to church, after seventy years, and as such, warns those just at the exterior of the church (its façade or face), i.e., those coming into the church, of those, seemingly, within the church, going under, which sounds a bit morbid, as though the only reason this man has avoided going to church all these years is to avoid his own mortality, hence cannot stop talking about the people going under.

But none of this serves to explain the song’s next bit which is that he goes there to unlock doors, a needlessly cryptic line perhaps, or one which somewhat inelegantly explains or equates the facing of death with the unlocking of a door. But if this is the case, then why should those around him criticize and sleep? Unless the man in question was a hustler or pusher, of drugs perhaps, so that when he stands by the face and talks about people “going under” he is talking about people going under the influence—that is, of drugs.

What follows is a long modifier and eventual introduction of the first person into the narrative of the song: “And through a fractal on a breaking wall, I see you my friend and touch your face again.” That these two have managed to meet, first person and third person, across whatever intervals of time and space, occurs only through or because of drugs so that the miracle of their meeting happens not in any earthly, mortal setting but in some other higher, metaphysical otherworld accessible only because both have been put under.

(I don’t want to make too much either of the image of a fractal, nor the strange notion of what it would mean to look through one except to note that in analyzing fractals, one must certainly look to find patterns of similarity among geometric patterns otherwise infinitely differentiable so that juxtaposing “a man decides” against “Amanda decides” and “seventy” with “seventeen” are only as compelling as comparisons and points of intersection as we wish to make them. Is this a verbal fractal? Perhaps there is no significant pattern here (and I am, despite my earlier warning, reaching) and we are free to ignore what is right before our eyes (and/or ears). Does a “fractal” have aesthetic value? Certainly words do.)

So what Seal doesn’t know is why it took this man seventy years. Nor is the answer that he was simply too afraid to try drugs and further that drugs are the key to salvation. The point is that whatever method you choose to achieve salvation, such methods don’t come “naturally” and if this is true, why aren’t more people doing more to ensure that they do or, failing that, posing questions of and making demands on their own versions of reality. If nature does not make this easy to do, to achieve salvation, who wouldn’t try drugs in the name of achieving it?

So the answer to the second question – what does Seal acknowledge he cannot know? – comes, to my mind, in another track, one where he beautifully and wrenchingly registers the angst of such unknowing, appealing to “peace as our one salvation.” I’m talking about “Dreaming in Metaphors.”

Drugs are apparent in this song as well, though in a more definitive negative register, as those who have lost faith “turn to the needle” and “back to the cradle” which doesn’t mean that drugs somehow infantilize its users as much as it returns them to a state where they are “cradled”—an existence not necessarily vulgar but one certainly not fractured and, further, one which perpetually “stays the same.” We usually equate drug use (the vulgar kind) with wild ups and downs (“highs” and lows) but what Seal is saying is that the drug in question here, via the needle – the mention of which elicits rather dramatic and sinister sounding chords – acts more to soothe and lull us into a state of conformity. Everyone is on drugs (the bad kind); to break the spell, one must then tamper or risk engagement with the good kind.

Yet to ask why we dream in metaphors is an inquiry with as much potential for devastation as asking why we speak in metaphors, or why we speak at all. What would it take for miracles to happen “as we speak” rather than “as we trip”? It would require us all being awake to our speech, simultaneously, so that if the spell or lull that comes over us over the course of our use of language with one another requires a drug to break it, then only if “all were there when we first took that pill” – that is, together – could we ever hope to make our dreaming life become our waking life because only in the former (not the latter) do we find ourselves truly awake.

I’ll return to the discussion of the supposed “Jonesboro” boys, those walking through Seal’s head, one with a gun “to shoot the other one.” Certainly it is feasible that Seal is reminiscing or recounting the horror of some school shooting, hence why these people are “walking through” his head. Yet it is also equally possible that Seal is not reminiscing but conjuring—that is, imagining a scenario that has yet to play out which means that he is once again conflating first and third person points of view. He is taking up the slack of a first person narrator by inventing or telling a story at this particular instance (one that has yet to come into being, is on the verge of happening: “one of them has got a gun” (present tense)) and also recounting a story that may have happened already (third person narratives often rely on the past tense: “Yet together they were friends at school”).

The Jonesboro reading ultimately fails not simply because we are never told that a shooting actually happens (though there may be reason to infer that it does, as Seal ends the tale with an “Oh no!” followed by an “If [only]” suggesting something bad has indeed taken place), but also because we don’t know that the shooting, if it happens, happens as school. They were only friends at school. They may have both left at this point. So we have no reason to suppose either one “crazy” outside of the fact that one has a gun pointed at the other.

Yet intent is not crazy; pulling the trigger might be but Seal takes great care not to victimize his characters but to present them to us with the outcome of their interaction in question, hence as radically, spiritually, free. By showing us what is in his mind, what potentials exist out there not for violence, but for healing, what Seal is asking us to do is to take up arms to heal rather than lash out, which means that such tragedies, so preventable if only people were awake to them, are not liable to make us crazy like the characters in question (if only we risk seeing), but rather, demand that we make ourselves crazy enough to save them. Most of us won’t have the courage or temerity or foresight or care to make the business of other crazies any of our business; hence Seal can only ask, incredulously, why

In a sky full of people
Only some want to fly
Isn’t that crazy?

Hence the reason I call this bit his true refrain, especially when, upon repetition, he reiterates first “sky” (full of people), then “world” (full of people), then “heaven” (of people). This neat assimilation of sky/heaven, world and mortals is only one term away (gods (or divinities)) from Heidegger’s fourfold, which gains its particular resonance in damning human beings to exist in a dangerous nexus in which dreams are impossible to distinguish definitively from reality, and language from metaphors.

That Seal earlier mentions his “head,” i.e., the people walking through it, who have yet to come into being, making up that which he dreams, though that which is reality precisely because it is not his waking life, implies that he has found a place within the cosmos or fourfold or what have you to rest his head, at least momentarily, because this is the only vantage point he cares to comment on or from—a vantage point removed from “reality,” hence subject to the charge, perhaps, of arising from or in a “crazy” person (i.e., himself); but the point is merely that if we aren’t willing to deal with such a charge, to be crazy, we are never going to survive.

Finally, what about the last lines, cut from some versions of the track, but still in this one, where he says:

And then you see things
The size of which you’ve never known before
They’ll break it
Someday

Whatever it is that is to be seen is not the same thing that is to be broken. What is to be broken is the spell, and the charge to “break it” is less a lament that humans are doomed to destroy their monuments than an affirmation that one day – someday, someway – humans will break through to see the things they’ve never known before. At the same time, the plea for knowledge, to know something, is a charge to break whatever it is we have achieved, as though knowledge puts our afforded understanding at risk.  So we have simultaneous readings here—one where Seal is optimistic that we can indeed break the spell, but also, where a pessimism forces him to conclude that our will to knowledge risks breaking however or whatever we have come to break in the first place. This simultaneous affirmation of hope and despair dissolves any claim to pop-naiveté and assures the integrity of Seal’s sublime message: to yield to otherworldly forces, to break the spell of reality, is not an eternal achievement but one which requires eternal vigilance—the continual spiritual desire to destroy and then rebuild our monuments.

Lastly, where Seal grafts certain segments of this track onto another track (“Fly Like an Eagle”—mentioned earlier), he also conflates certain segments of this track with another, the recognition of which takes us deeper into Seal’s conceptual universe and forces us to begin to flirt with the idea that Seal has indeed achieved, that is, crossed, some sort of aesthetic Rubicon where the entirety of the outer world is alive not only in his mind, but in his expression of it through song. One cannot make such a claim too hastily of course, but at this point, the die is cast—though it may take many more discussions of many more tracks and albums to flesh out the veracity of such a claim.

But let’s look at some lines from “Future Love Paradise,” another track where drugs are invoked, in a (perhaps maddeningly?) positive light:

They’ll make you feel surely
Like you’ve never felt before

The exasperating syntax of this track means that drugs could be the last thing Seal is referring to here, but set against the concluding lines of “Crazy,” we have “feelings” set off against “knowledge,” something we have not “known” before against something we have never “felt” before. The renegade optimism of “Future Love Paradise,” which appears later in the track listing of Seal’s first eponymous album, means that in a world of feelings, utopia, a paradise, is possible, whereas in a world tinged by (the desire for) knowledge, the best we can do is commit to a type of craziness that leaves utopia just beyond our reach, dreaming of it without ever achieving it, which makes the need to save ourselves both greater and the desire to renege on the opportunity more understandable.  Who would save a doomed planet?—that is, who would work to decode metaphors in the first place?—when whatever we are left with is destined, truly, to be lost. That such an endeavour is necessary is crazy; that so few are willing to do it even crazier.

King Lear in hindsight

“We” are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

– Taleb

Negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.

– Keats

Marjorie Garber, making a case for reading Shakespeare “slowly,” raises the pertinent critical question of what we bring to the plays we read, how we seek to mollify them, in a sense, rather than allowing the words before us, on the page, to mollify us. There is a triteness to this line of inquiry, as though our words will magically sing to us in all sorts of ways if only we are able to resist certain professional urges to generalize, categorize, theorize, etc. Furthermore, if reading in “slow motion” is an attempt to (re)discover humanistic knowledge for ourselves, why ought we to divorce whatever it is we want to say about a text from the “general context of human experience or history” (de Man qtd. in Garber, 152).

Are close readings and the knowledge they afford us ahistorical?—and if we insist that they must be – that the value of the pedagogical exercise in question comes with a sort of seal of approval that wishes to obviate the anxiety surrounding historical or contextual contingencies, as if to understand, once and for all, that our deconstructions are always subject to (historical) deconstruction—then the type of knowledge we are inevitably making a claim for is not only not definitive in nature, aware of its mortality, but further, cannot claim or purport this understanding as any sort of achievement.

Rather, it takes this achievement and makes it its fundamental assumption as if to say that reiterating such understanding is not, and cannot be, part of its prerogative. In avoiding calling out such understanding, it is immediately suspect to what others before me have called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”[1]

I do not doubt that we are right to be suspicious. Surely the fact that we make assumptions is our lot as human beings, as users of language, so that the humanistic knowledge I am interested in could only begin with prior assumptions anyhow and the only way language could carry on is if those prior assumptions are continually ratified. Is it our lot to ask what a particular reading of King Lear commits us to before doing the reading itself?

But this is like saying we cannot use language until we know what using it in the way we do commits us to. This is simply not how human beings use language. Divorcing ourselves from this type of critical inheritance seems to be what makes such a dramatic call for close reading necessary in the first place.

Yet we often bring our apriori understanding of history and context to a play precisely, we think, to comment on the broader thematics of the play, as though making a push for the universal over the specific and hence for a type of authority that is universal and not specific. Are close readings (say of a line or two from Lear, separated out even from the rest of the soliloquy) narrowing down our interests, guaranteeing that our afforded “humanistic knowledge” becomes parochial? This seems cause for more anxiety.

Yet let us take a look at the type of error certain apriori understanding affords us. Here is Garber commenting on the potential for close-readings as misreading:

The logic of slow-motion … like the logic of the dream, can sometimes seem alogical or counterintuitive. For Shakespeare such incertitude was not merely an occasional effect but also a fundamental technique. “This dream is all amiss interpreted,” says the conspirator Decious Brutus, brushing aside the prophetic dream of Caesar’s murder dreamt by Calpurnia and substituting his own, plausible reinterpretation: both come true (JC 2.2.83).

Malvolio finds a letter thrown in his path and interprets it as a love missive sent to him by his employer, the lady Olivia. Macbeth compels the witches to speak to him, though they warn that he should “seek to know no more” (Mac. 4.1.103): inevitably what he takes from them is a fatally partial message, the dangerous and slippery echo of his own desire.

Errors in reading are not only semiotic and syntactic but also visual and observational: Iago shows Othello a tableau in which Desdemona seems to flirt with Cassio; Claudio watches while his beloved and virginal Hero seems to be engaged in dalliance with another man …

To say that these misreading are evidence of character flaws (Othello’s self-doubt, Claudio’s lack of sexual experience, Malvolio’s vanity) is necessary but not sufficient: what is being performed here is not only character but also language, and in many cases the spectator or listener makes, at least briefly, the same mistake. If King Lear were immediately to reward Cordelia for her plain speaking, not only would there be no play, there would also be no role for language. (156-57)

My immediate response would be to ask why equating such misreading to evidence of character flaw is “necessary” at all, and that if the spectator or listener makes the same “mistake,” it is because the reader, in this case, is exercising her capacity to read language (that is, to use language) in the first place.

What does it mean to say that we are apt to characterize our first readings as misreadings? That the second or third or fourth will necessarily be better? But it is the second or third or fourth reading, precisely, that brings more historical contingency, not less. Part of reading a Shakespearean text, then, is learning to read it for the first time.

So far, no real argument with Garber; this is what she has been saying all along. But that the listener or spectator is mistaken at all (at any point I mean, from reading into the situation before her what the protagonist of the play happens to believe is true) is itself untrue. First of all, it is patently false, in some of Garber’s examples, that the reader would misread the situation at hand, as some of the characters do. That is, having “seen” Maria throw the missive in his path (2.5.17-18), we are not likely to misread the letter as Malvolio does. Neither are we likely, having overheard Iago’s inner thoughts, to insinuate what Othello (not unreasonably) does about Cassio and Desdemona.

That is, parceled off as they are from the rest of the play, these characters are innocent. Their actions only carry the burden of being objective correlatives to specific character “flaws” after the fact—after we know that a mistake has indeed been committed. (Actually, after we know a play ends badly, that is, tragically, which means that if the misreading in question actually led to a happy ending, we would have difficulty using terms like “character flaw” or “mistake” at all.) Human beings are not perfect; to say they have fallen victim to a character “flaw” is to speak of or assert their “perfect” humanity.

We as readers do not make such “mistakes,” at least not in the case of Othello and Twelfth Night because we know beforehand what sort of forces really are at play, whether Iago’s diabolical motives or Maria’s mischievous ones. What we bring to the text in these cases are not really suspicions at all, because we are certain, in the knowledge afforded us, that these cases are, in fact, misreadings. But the case of Lear is entirely different.

To say, “if King Lear were immediately to reward Cordelia for her plain speaking” assumes 1) that Cordelia is indeed speaking plainly and 2) that she should be rewarded for such plain speaking. Yet both assumptions, 1 and 2, can only be made after the play is over because we have no reason, at the point when Cordelia begins to speak, to assume she is not speaking out of turn.

Unlike Othello, we have not, at this point, been made privy to the otherwise inaccessible thoughts of Regan and Goneril, and, unlike Twelfth Night, we know of no dramatic ruse underway. Because Shakespeare chooses to begin in medias res the way he does, with little or no prior back story to the main plotline, we are supposed to read Cordelia’s intransience as precisely that. We are supposed to inhabit Lear’s thinking, not criticize it.

So even if Shakespeare lets us in on the joke, on the misreading, in the case of Othello and Malvolio, he certainly does not in the case of Lear. Even if we have reason to ascribe character “flaw” to the first two, we have no reason to with Lear. That is, in the first case, our apriori assumptions are given to us as the narrative moves along. In the latter case, however, our previous assumptions are based on hindsight (i.e., on the play ending badly) giving us reason enough to assume that when Cordelia first speaks, she speaks (too) plainly.[2]

Here, either Lear or Cordelia is at fault for the ensuing tragedy—either Lear for not perceiving that Cordelia is speaking plainly or Cordelia for speaking too plainly. This still leaves us well within the boundaries of pinning the blame for tragedy on some “flaw,” which is not very far beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion.

To say that neither one was actually “mistaken,” that both were employing language in ways deserving of empathy, may be the first step in moving beyond such hermeneutics—which is to say that sometimes the things we say can have effects beyond anything we could possibly imagine beforehand. This seems to me a truer picture of how language operates so that to do a close reading of a text does not bank on misreading per se, but must risk misreading, which means, in a sense, making ourselves as vulnerable as Lear.

There are, so far, two orders of contingencies here; those given to us within the context of the play itself – say, narrative/contextual contingencies, which means that our knowledge is contingent on what we know from within – and those contingencies we bring to the play from without, say, historical contingencies, which, more often than not, we bring in hindsight.

You may argue that no one was ever expected to see or hear or read Lear from a position of tabula rasa anyhow, which means we must consider some of the contingencies Shakespeare himself was surrounded by and how he responded to these contingencies. The following prose cuts right to the chase:

Why does [Shakespeare’s] Lear, who has, as the play begins, already drawn up the map equitably dividing the kingdom, stage the love test? In Shakespeare’s principal source, an anonymous play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir …, there is a gratifyingly clear answer. Leir’s strong-willed daughter Cordelia has vowed that she will marry only a man whom she herself loves; Leir wishes her to marry the man he chooses for his own dynastic purposes.

He stages the love test, anticipating that in competing with her sisters, Cordelia will declare that she loves her father best, at which point Leir will demand that she prove her love by marrying the suitor of his choice. The stratagem backfires, but its purpose is clear.

By stripping his character of a comparable motive, Shakespeare makes Lear’s act seem stranger, at once more arbitrary and more rooted in deep psychological needs. (Greenblatt, 2309-10)

In other known sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and even, the brief stanzas allotted to Lear’s tale in Spenser’s Faerie Queen (2.10.27-32), Lear is ousted from the throne by his two wicked daughters only to be restored, eventually, by his third virtuous daughter.[3]

So prior knowledge in Elizabethan times banked not only on an inequality of suitors at the outset – that is, of Lear desiring a suitor for his youngest daughter – but also, on the assured certainty of the wickedness of the older two.

So if no one has ever read the opening of King Lear without prior knowledge of Cordelia’s virtues and Regan and Goneril’s wickedness, what good would it do (now) to feign prior knowledge? What good, that is, might such a hypothetical (counterfactual? counterhistorical?) reading afford us?

I say hypothetical because if we say “counterfactual,” we do not exactly mean the term in the same way the social-scientists mean it, because feigning prior knowledge about a text does not affect the text itself; nor can we say counterhistorical, for largely the same reason. [4]

We are not changing history; we are just pretending that whatever history surrounds this particular play does not affect how we read the play because, as a work of art, we think of King Lear as a self-sufficient entity, a universe all its own. There is promise in such an assumption, particularly for literary types. And finally, we cannot say “countertextual” because, as noted earlier, we will commit to any textual contingencies afforded us in the time it takes things to go haywire in Act 1 of the play. Let us try to establish, then, what sort of narrative contingencies we can bank on.

According to my sensibilities, we are first reasonably aware that things are going haywire at line 108 of the opening Act (“Let it be so! Thy truth, then, be thy dower!”). Until then, we are, as readers, as likely (perhaps more likely) to expect a calm resolution of the misunderstanding at hand, which has yet to achieve anything we can perceive as cataclysmic. In fact, Kent and Gloucester’s initial exchange expresses the relative banality of the coming ceremony:

KENT. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

GLOUCESTER. It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most: for equalities are so weighted, that the curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety. (1.1.1-6)

One could argue, alternatively, that Shakespeare raises the stakes in terms of the coming stand-off, the three-way “speech-off” that will determine, once and for all, how the kingdom will be divided, so in making all things else relatively equal (i.e., in terms of suitors), the division of land could only bank on the significance of the coming speeches.

But knowing what we know, of what Shakespeare knew about what his audience knew or expected, we see that Shakespeare does away with a dramatic plot device that once served to provide purpose to the coming ceremony, if, say, Lear were interested in Cordelia marrying the suitor of his choice. But all suitors have been created equal so at what point does a given audience recognize the staging of events as being entirely superfluous? The question is critical because it is only at such a point that we are entitled to begin comprehending Lear’s madness.

If Shakespeare wanted to present to us a version of Lear as mad, then he seems to be equating tragedy or the tragic with madness, which is not entirely incorrect, but places tragedy at certain removes from the human, or what we would take the “sane” human to be. Yet tragedy does not necessitate the presence of a madman. So the more pertinent apriori assumption to make is that Lear is sane, or, perhaps, that it is certainly possible that Lear is not mad. And the longer we (he) can hold onto his sanity, the greater the opportunity for critical engagement not only with Lear, but with Cordelia as well.

So what are we to make of, say, Marshall McLuhan’s (who, people forget, was Professor of the English Renaissance) lively reading of the play, placing it and a discussion of it at the forefront of a “Gutenberg galaxy”?—one in which the sensory shift from a world of the oral is taken up by one that favours print—more specifically, sight and the linear progression of thought across lines of moveable type.

McLuhan makes the case that King Lear chronicles some of the anxieties accompanying the seismic shift in human consciousness as Renaissance Europe moved from oral to print communication via the Gutenberg printing press technology. McLuhan sees in the Renaissance a world newly divorced from a the manifold of “sensorium” and increasingly tethered to one of action in which power is tied to linear interests expressed most soberly by the specialist, whether Lear himself (who delegates authority so that he may “still retain/ The name, and all th’ additions to a King” (1.1.135-36)—that is, still retain power as an advisor rather than a ruler) or Regan and Goneril, whose initial flattery is a divorce from an archaic world of roles and duty in favour of one in which language is uttered as an expedient augment to power.

Yet where McLuhan’s reading takes hold for us in his understanding of “reader” (or “viewer”) response, noting that Elizabethan audiences would have been wise to something not at line 108, but much earlier at line 34 when Lear expresses his “darker purpose.”

[Lear’s] “darker purpose” … the Machiavellian cant term … would have been recognized at once as left-wing Machiavellianism by an Elizabethan audience. The new patterns of power and organization which had been discussed during the preceding century were now, in the early seventeenth century, being felt at all levels of social and private life. King Lear is a presentation of the new strategy of culture and power as it affects the state, the family, and the individual psyche. (11)[5]

Again, one cannot know this. That is, what one knows, in this regard, is always speculative, or, even if it were knowable, is the type of knowledge we do not expect to discover in a Shakespearean tragedy anyhow. At best, a play of Shakespeare’s could only corroborate something which the historicist has previously asserted or speculated.[6]

Such speculations may be useful in helping us to articulate a vision of the world, as McLuhan does, so that he reads King Lear not (at least, not in this case) as high tragedy, but as historical evidence attesting to the existence of something called the Gutenberg galaxy, which may or may not be tragic.[7]

Furthermore, McLuhan, who admirably seeks to elide “valuation and therapy” for the sake of “diagnosis” (7) in The Gutenberg Galaxy, never makes the case that Lear is mad, or that audiences had any reason to suppose him to be mad. What he does say is that they had every reason to suppose him Machiavellian, which is certainly not the same thing, unless one views Machiavellianism as a type of insanity.[8]

It is obvious (within the text, I mean) that Shakespeare negates Lear’s desire to see Cordelia marry a suitor of his particular choosing by making us privy, as he does, to the conversation between Gloucester and Kent. So when Lear finally does interrogate his daughters, at line 49 (“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”), or even earlier, at line 34, Elizabethan audiences may have had their guard up.

I do not plan to speculate any further how exactly Elizabethan audiences received this novel alteration of events as much as I do want to make myself vulnerable to a type of misreading, at precisely this point, by saying that despite whatever historical contingencies may have been alive in the minds of Elizabethan audiences taking in Shakespeare’s play for the first time sometime in 1605, at some point, such contingencies would have been strange to audiences at large, which means that the early tell-tale signs of Lear’s madness (or, simply, ulterior motives) could come only at or after line 108 (“Let it be so!”) which means that up until line 108, readers of the play today are perfectly in their right to oscillate between suspicion of Lear’s strange request, and suspicion of Cordelia’s strange response to such a request, the kingdom having been, in effect, divvied up already.

(Could Shakespeare have banked on this? That is, even if he couldn’t, because, say, Elizabethan audiences were prone to read into the play certain contingencies, how could we possibly say that whatever contingencies eventually fell away from popular (critical) consideration make the play’s tragic resonances more palpable, not less? The question is critical to criticism, as if to say that the farther away we are from immediate historical contingencies, the more privileged we are in understanding or appreciating tragedy. Yet just because of that, all the more opportunity for newer historical contingencies to have their say.

So at what historical remove are we allowed to make a claim for an ur-text, if ever? If never, then what we are saying is that in order for texts to resonate as tragedy in living language, or living criticism, certain (historical) discoveries have to be made or chartered again; but such a strategy does not risk one’s present understanding of experience as much as it banks on found historical knowledge. The latter can be used to articulate the former, but what we crave from the latter are definitive readings of history, whereas the former seems to guarantee that our discoveries are maddeningly, terrifyingly, mortal.

Hence, a critic committed to living language must risk true engagement with audiences more popular than specialized, must forgo the last word and, finally, must implicate him/herself in the endeavour. I’ll return to this idea of implication and its ramifications on how we think about tragedy.)

Yet as I mentioned, a hermeneutics of suspicion is what I seek to avoid. Why should readers, then, be suspicious at all, as things unfold I mean, prior to line 108? We arrive at court at Elsinore, for example (in a play first performed only years earlier), to a world already divvied up, or passed on; yet we are given no reason, post-facto, to ever doubt the surrounding contingencies that make the coronation ceremony of Claudius necessary.

Sometimes, we must simply go through the motions, just as, sometimes, we are forced to utter language we would rather not speak. In that particular play, Hamlet’s deviation from the banality of court is the first spark of drama we are given after the ghost-sighting (to my mind registered at his wild non-sequitir: “Seems, madam?” (1.2.76)) and the first spark of drama at Lear’s court comes not at line 75 (“Then poor Cordelia!”), but at 108 (“Let it be so!”), when all hope for the restoration of banality is lost.

Cordelia’s “interjection” could only be seen as grave, could only be viewed as “mistaken,” as a “misreading” of the events at hand after Lear explodes. We have no reason to believe, until things go south at 108, that things are not progressing as they should, that Cordelia’s mutterings, however unusual, are, at this point, entirely unconventional or inaccessible to the given conventions of this particular court.

We may decide after the fact, after becoming more intimate with the court (i.e., the text and the particular historical contingencies surrounding it), that such an outburst was, in fact, unconventional—but such an assertion is always subject to interpretation. The subsequent events make a certain interpretation likely, but not definitive and because no one is “from” the world of the play, we can only be as shocked and horrified as Cordelia or Kent when things take a turn for the worse.

(Cavell cannot imagine what else Lear (or Cordelia, I gather) could do (or say); nor can I, which suggests to me that what Shakespeare intends to do in King Lear is make a state of wonder at this particular unfolding events permanent. No historical contingency or consideration of convention can (ought to) erase it. Once it does, we have moved beyond tragedy. )

In what ways do we seek to undermine this sense of wonder? I have mentioned several. Suggesting Lear is mad is one way; suggesting he or Cordelia is “mistaken” is another; suggesting Shakespeare sets his characters off arbitrarily in order to allow his tragedy to unfold is yet another. So what? It is, rightly, the job of interpretation and criticism to judge the world, and then, not hastily, which means allowing events to take their course and then commenting appropriately.

I am not taking issue with commentary after the fact, merely with the idea that any commentary that comes before or without the benefit of apriori knowledge is somehow wrong or mistaken (that Lear or Cordelia’s reading of events, say, is mistaken). Living criticism, the kind which does not deny the discoveries the text elicits (of which, we might say, close readings form the bulk), is aware of its own vulnerability and comfortable in its own contingencies, whether historical or narrative, and seeks not to intellectualize out from behind them.

Bradley implicated hamartia in his study of tragedy. I am implicating anagnorisis, or “recognitions” instead, and not the sort that the character in a tragic plot experiences, but the type which exists at a nexus where reader, character, text, and immediate historical contingency are all implicated; but because the latter cannot be immediately known (i.e., because we do not have to be aware of the specific conditions of culture that enable us to use language before using it) one can only use past historical contingencies to make definitive claims about the present experience of a text, which is less an exercise in stating verifiable truth claims than in expressing a coherent vision of the human, a definitive version of selfhood that banks on incomplete knowledge rather than the definitive version of an all-knowing, all-seeing self.

The type of “recognition” I am looking for is the sort first raised to serious critical register by Northrop Frye in his renewed poetics which make up the Anatomy of Criticism (1957). That is, Frye’s discussion creates the discursive space for Aristotelian anagnorisis to operate outside of the mechanical inner workings of plot, where the type of recognition under scrutiny is usually the sort suffered by the central protagonist alone.

Frye, by implicating (at times) the reader equally under the shock of what Aristotle seemed to be discussing in regards to the characters within the work of art , raises the thematic implications of what we might otherwise be tempted to treat merely as a formal artifice making up his (our) particular poetics. Terence Cave, commenting on Frye’s reassessment of the term for twentieth century tastes, notes:

[Frye’s] definition assigns anagnorisis to ‘us’, the readers or spectators: we recognize the unifying shape of the whole design … In one sense, what he is doing here is parallel to the accounts of peripeteia in which the ‘surprise’ it occasions is the spectators’ rather than the characters’: anaganorisis is the structural feature producing an effect outside the fiction. But the effect in this linear, narrative movement to a grasping of ‘unifying shape’ and ‘simultaneous significance’; plot gives way to theme and interpretation. This appropriation by the reader of anagnorisis as a recognition both of overall form and of thematic coherence is a radical manoeuvre … . (194)[9]

Frye seems to raise the critical importance of anagnorisis outside of or beyond the text, which may be making more of a case for historical knowledge. Yet Frye’s notion of anagnorisis is not contingent on apriori knowledge; rather, its articulation means greater implication of the reader within the text, with the sufferings that makeup the particular moral universe at hand. This is not the same as Auerbach’s notion of mimesis, for instance, where “recognition” is more intimately tied to the protagonist, validating his/her suffering as real.[10]

Nor is it Dr. Johnson’s assumption that we feel we would do the same thing were we in the character’s position (Johnson, “King Lear”). The idea is that we don’t know, cannot know, what we would do and hence, are powerless to judge the world as it unfolds before us. We are implicated not because we catch ourselves empathizing with Regan or Goneril’s hatred at a given instance, but because evil radiates outward, clipping even good intentions in its wake. In Lear we are born into an evil moral order without knowing it. In Hamlet, we can tread more carefully, allied as we are with the good from the outset.

Such recognition is key to Cavell’s reading of King Lear, in his assertion that like Lear we seek to avoid recognition when reading the play and that the aesthetic achievement of King Lear is in exposing this human predilection of ours; how is this achieved? Cavell describes how criticism through the years has coalesced on occasion around the tricky problem of Gloucester’s blind march to Dover.

Some, like Kenneth Muir, have suggested that upon being blinded, confused as he is, Gloucester simply makes his way to Dover in supplication to Regan’s indelible charge: “Go thrust him out at the gates, and let him smell/ His way to Dover” (3.7.96-97). But Cavell’s reading indicts critics for not asking the more pertinent critical question which is why Regan should have sent Gloucester to Dover in the first place.

We know at this point that Lear is headed to Dover; we have no reason to suppose Gloucester is. Cavell’s answer is that Regan completes or finalizes a dramatic doubling of the Gloucester sub-plot within the main Lear plot. Sending Gloucester to Dover is not simply an act carried out by Regan in retaliation to Gloucester as informant, but one which marks her inability to distinguish between her father and Gloucester—thus raising the play’s recognition of evil of to a frightening new register. “In [Regan’s] mind, the man she is sending on his way to Dover is the man she knows is sent on his way to Dover: In her paroxysm of cruelty, she imagines that she has just participated in blinding her father” (53).

Yet the more troubling aspect for Cavell is that critics have failed to offer up an explanation for why she should do so in the first place. My initial reaction to Cavell’s reading was that Regan had every reason to suppose Gloucester would head for Dover, accomplice in the plot that he is, hence to seek protection at the camp there, where France’s ships will land.

Yet not only does Gloucester profess no such intention before being blinded, he not-so-cagily states that his only intention upon reaching Dover is suicide (There is a cliff … / Bring me but to the very brim of it … / From that place/ I shall no leading need (4.2.73-78). So wherefore to Dover indeed. Of course, Regan never hears these lines so it may be beyond the pale for her to ask herself why she assumed Gloucester’s march to Dover, but it certainly is not beyond the pale for me. Perhaps one day I would have posed the question to myself, perhaps not.

But if the confusion surrounding the occurrence has simply been brought to the fore by misplacing the confusion as Gloucester’s and not Regan’s, then in not coming up with satisfactory answers for Gloucester, we have all the more reason to be asking the question of Regan. Even if the answer I originally formulated – that Regan had every reason to suppose Gloucester to join her conspirators at Dover – suffices, it certainly does not suffice for Gloucester once we see he has no intention of going to Dover.

If he is “tricked” into going there by Regan, it should follow that he follows her thinking. But here he doesn’t. He contemplates suicide instead, which suggests that even if Regan supposed him to meet up with his conspirators, such an assumption is somewhat farfetched if only because the thought never crosses Gloucester’s mind. The final doubling of Gloucester, made outer here in Regan’s conflation of him with her father is begun just after the abdication scene, when Gloucester is in a huff, out of sorts and ruminating over the happenings at court:

GLOUCESTER: Kent banished thus? and France in choler parted?
And the king gone tonight? subscribed his power?
Confirmed to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad? Edmund, how, how! what news?
(1.2.23-36)

Later Edmund, upon hearing the news of the Duke of Cornwall’s arrival at court, comments on his good fortune (“The duke be here tonight? The better! best!/ This weaves itself perforce into my business” (2.1.14-15)) and effortlessly uses Cornwall’s appearance as a harbinger to force his brother to flee (“Have you not spoken ’gainst the Duke of Cornwall?” (2.1.23)).

This obviously suggests that Edmund had no specific prior plan to disinherit Edgar, and indeed, Gloucester arrives before Cornwall does anyhow; but Edmund has already put Edgar into enough of a frenzy that upon the mere suggestion that someone is coming (in this case Gloucester (“I hear my father coming” (2.1.28)), Edgar is off. Nor does Edmund concern himself all that much with what might happen if Gloucester’s servants actually find Edgar.

Part of Edmund’s diabolicalness is in his lack of foresight. He is opportunistic, which seems to suggest he is able to manipulate the world as it presents itself to him; he has concocted no grand scheme of how things will go but possesses a tacit belief in his own ability to con players to do his bidding.

Which brings us back to his second exchange with Gloucester – the one where he utters his famous speech, still shaken as he is – taken by most these days to highlight Gloucester’s provincialism and pathetic inability to assess or face a world filled with Machiavels. Certainly Edmund has it right when he says “we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the/ stars, as if we were villains by necessity” (1.2.111-12).

Yet once again, such critical distaste for Gloucester is only confirmed after the fact, after we discover that Edmund, Machiavel and manipulator that he is, so easily and effortlessly gains the upper hand; even though his enterprise ultimately fails, he very nearly succeeds simply because he has the audacity to refuse such a conflation.

Gloucester hears of Edgar’s betrayal after he has seen the madness at court. He has seen the division of households. Does Edmund know this? Does he exploit this? If appealing to the sun and the moon to save us is an attempt at making whole our otherwise fractured universe, then Gloucester, in imploring the sun and the moon as he does, is asking or pleading for the foresight to intuit some master plan at hand, and not because it is foolish to do so or to believe in one, but because stepping back and bearing witness is sometimes the only recourse we have in averting disaster.

Yet in acknowledging the heavenly bodies as he does, Gloucester is further implicated in an evil he has every reason to believe comes not from himself but heaven. If Cavell cannot fathom what else Lear could do, neither can I fathom what else Gloucester here can do. If you say he could have parceled off events, respecting the King’s court as separate from his own, then what you are saying is that he too should avoid madness by doing precisely what Lear does—that is, divide his own kingdom, split off courtly duty from familial duty. Where is the logic, let alone salvation, in that?

If Regan’s conflation of Gloucester with Lear seems inconsequential (upon reading the play for the first time that is), and if it is too dramatic to insist that anyone caught unawares of such conflation is somehow an accomplice in the evil of the play, then what I am saying is that as we find ourselves witness to moments of evil, as Gloucester surely recognizes, the logic of evil so easily gains its own momentum so that before we know it, characters are where they are and we cannot quite recall how they got there. But when four hundred years of a critical tradition has routinely failed to mark the event, then we have may have reason to assume criticism has certain paroxysms of its own.[11]

It is worth asking if the particular aesthetics of King Lear banks on such recognition by those who view it. Whatever critical predilections have led to the avoidance of Regan’s conflation of identities throughout the years, the same critical tradition has also preserved two remarkable moments in its critical reception. The first, of course, is Dr. Johnson’s famous reaction to the play—a recognition, to be sure, of its evil if less an articulation of it (Johnson, “Preface”). The second is Nahum Tate’s insistence to “rectify what was wanting”[12] in Shakespeare’s original, particularly where the ending is concerned.

Tate’s 1681 adaptation of the play, the preferred version for audiences for the remainder of that century and the bulk of the next, shows – and then, in hindsight only – that certain critics did not forgo acknowledgment as much as they managed to express it in “unconventional” and even indirect ways. That is, the extremity of such avoidance is itself an acknowledgment—the sort that tells us that we are in the right to be so horrified by King Lear as to 1) leave the theatre like Johnson or 2) rewrite the ending to our liking like Tate. What sort of critical enterprise nowadays, I mean, would acknowledge a genuine aposterior disgust with the play? deny an aprior admiration?

If we believe we have moved beyond such trivial and/or childish reactions, or if we convince ourselves that such reactions are not in order or unbecoming of us, or even if we accept that this is simply what high art or tragedy is, giving either Shakespeare or ourselves too much credit, then our apriori assumptions of its greatness does not allow us to register the horror we must first acknowledge, hence to deny its greatness by extolling its greatness. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who isn’t writing about the tragic valences of King Lear does not him or herself appreciate those valences.

But is it too much to ask of criticism to rehash or rediscover the horror of Lear’s tragedy over and over again? But then what is it to ask of criticism to read Lear over and over again in the first place? What does it mean if no one, anymore, walks out of performances of King Lear in disgust, or rewrites its ending? What if they do?

The (re)discovery of tragedy, or at least the championing of the tragic vision as something worthy of rediscovery carries with it the threat of ostracism, particularly when reminding others that tragedy enfolds both reader and character in its wake. This sort of critical enterprise, then, risks sermonizing, the quickest way to turn inquiring minds away from texts whose accessibility rests in their secularity.

If McLuhan is to be appraised for making the tragic vision of Lear resonant with what he calls “the electronic age,” the age which sits at the tail end of a Gutenberg galaxy, the age we now live in, then so too is Cavell for finding a philosophical voice that is both reproving and conversational. Yet both are vulnerable: McLuhan for not reading (at least not here) King Lear as high tragedy; Cavell for not situating tragedy—that is, for exposing the contingency of his own reading in a particular time and a particular place.[13] These are the sorts of critical inheritances and achievements that concern me.

Now it may be entirely correct and likely that Elizabethan audiences had their guard up at Lear’s wickedness, his prior evil the moment Shakespeare 1) took away any possible motive for staging the event (in wanting a daughter to marry a suitor of his choice, a possibility the early conversation between Gloucester and Kent seems to deny) and 2) as McLuhan points out, the moment he utters his “darker purpose.” The Machiavellian reference, to me, is the one I think modern audiences are likely to stumble over not simply because we are more Machiavellian (which is not to say we are more “evil”), but because the afforded “darker purpose,” to our tastes, need not be referenced as “dark” at all.

What does Lear want to do? He wants “that future strife/ May be prevented now” (1.1.42-43) by dividing his kingdom up equally. Why darker? We can attribute these words to Lear by saying something like: “Lear means that the gesture of dividing a kingdom in three, however opportune or beneficial, carries with it a tinge of sadness, as though sowing the seeds now for a future nostalgia of (re)unification.”

Fair enough. But if the words truly were more conspicuous to an audience more familiar (that is, closer to) the historical example and message of Machiavelli, then the entendre, or its ineffectiveness now, seems to be damning us, as if the evil of Lear’s act (let alone the madness at line 108) ought to be present to us sooner, as soon, that is, as the “darker purpose” is expressed.

Why is Lear’s “darker purpose” lost to us? Are we all Machiavellians now? Then what I am saying is that certain specialist schools of criticism, particularly those that “bring more” to the text than they take away, risk a type of Machiavellianism, of parcelling off the world, refusing to express wonder at it because it is out of line with critical posturing, as though in order to get on with tragedy, we simply refuse to talk about it, and hence instead to talk about these texts in ways that do not implicate us in exposing what Cavell calls our “human finitude” (16).

We might better ask: why do we demand a version of Lear where Cordelia lives and not a version of Hamlet where Hamlet lives? In Hamlet, we are made aware of certain apriori truths, or suspicions (largely through the ghost)—namely that the Court at Elsinore is corrupt (morally, not politically), so that to follow out the narrative stream banks on reaffirming the particular inner contingencies we understand of this dramatic universe. The work of discovery is one of verification.

In Lear, however, the narrative trajectory is in somewhat the opposite direction. We are at a loss for apriori knowledge, putting the play, its moral valences, together piecemeal, in what might be called posterior fashion, lending weight to Cavell’s position that Lear subjects us to a “continuous presentness,” in which we must take on faith 1) that the world we inhabit truly exists and 2) that the characters in it, at every moment, are radically free—a particularly demanding spiritual, if not critical, exercise. The surest way to deny this is to search for a cause, and surest way to do that is to look for some character “flaw,” establishing the sort of clear demarcations of good and evil we could only make after the fact anyhow.

We only know we are fully in the presence of evil, that is, when King Lear is over. The reason Cordelia’s death is so shocking is not because we are unprepared for it conventionally (though this may have been true as well, especially for Elizabethan audiences) but that we are wholly unprepared for it aesthetically, within the rapid movement of events that make up the play—for just as our moral valences are set aright (is it reasonable to show up at your in-laws’ with a train of one hundred knights? who can answer?), just as our understanding of Cordelia’s virtue comes into view, she is killed off, and we are left feeling that we did nothing to prevent it.

We scream silently at Hamlet to do the deed, knowing what we (and he) know(s), demanding verification, but we are given no opportunity to scream silently at Cordelia because we know of nothing she could do to fix things because we aren’t sure, until her death, that anything is frighteningly, tragically, amiss. Children turn on their fathers, sure; perhaps we desire to see Lear avenged, perhaps not. Perhaps, after his night in the cold, he will come to his senses, humbled, and we’ll take pleasure from the inflicted spiritual austerity.

But it is not commented on enough that the opening scene of the play actually ends happily. Cordelia is taken by France, dowerless, saving us a fair amount of moral anguish. Evil is left to contend with evil, a situation, at first glance, more comic than tragic. As we catch wind that the forces of France are set to invade, we may begin to feel a moral order taking shape, and indeed we are left with one when the play is over, with Edgar set to inherit the throne.

But if King Lear manages to verify what we have reason to expect, such verification is, as Cavell notes, severely compromised. Then why isn’t Hamlet’s death a comparable compromise? Perhaps because he vacillates, like us, and when he finally learns the truth, dies, so truth is not compromised and we are revenged on ourselves for ever doubting him, or truth, in the first place. But Cordelia never vacillates—we do; but she dies. Does the “truth” die with her? If it was indeed dowered to her, only her death reveals this. Otherwise, we cannot say for sure; we can only watch as knaves inherit the earth.

 

---

[1] Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase as early as 1970 in his Freud and Philosophy, where he calls Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche “masters … of the school of suspicion.” He meant the term glowingly, for only true hermeneutical suspicion would pave the way for a “more authentic word.” Since then, Harold Bloom has added a wrinkle, coining the term “school of resentment,” and adding, most notably, Foucault to the mix. He meant the term derisively, where a poststructuralist tradition largely takes away from the aesthetic achievement of key texts in the Western canon instead emphasizing their political/social significance. See Ricoeur 8, 32 and Bloom 15-40.

[2] I may have this wrong. I may be discussing posterior knowledge rather than prior knowledge. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, commenting on the “narrative fallacy,” puts it so: “It is literally impossible to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.”

What I take prior knowledge to be is that which we bring prior to a reading of a text, often impossible, as Taleb reminds us, to ignore in trying to “solve” or “read” a text. Yet perhaps it is better described as being posterior knowledge, which we then apply in apriori fashion. The distinction is still muddled for me; the difference may the one between Aristotelian deduction (relying on verification in the natural world, still a form, to my mind, of posterior (rather than prior) analytics) versus Cartesian deduction (i.e., deductive verification through inductive experimentation in the laboratory). See Taleb 70.

[3] Catherine Belsey launches a fun and interesting discussion on King Lear, in particular, on some of Lear’s textual origins. See Belsey 43-44.

[4] For a fine collection of essays that employs “counterfactual” history, see Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History. In particular, Ferguson champions the counterfactual method as a bulwark against (historical) determinism, a method sympathetic to an inordinate human freedom often downplayed when talking about the past, let alone the present (or future). See Ferguson 64-90.

[5] Elsewhere, Marshall McLuhan states: “To divide and rule was the dominant new idea of the organization of power in the Renaissance. ‘Our darker purpose’ refers to Machiavelli himself, who had developed an individualist and quantitative idea of power that struck more fear in that time than Marx in ours. Print, then, challenged the corporate patterns of medieval organization as much as electricity now challenges our fragmented individualism.” See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 175-76.

[6] To do some historicist housekeeping here, I can quote Hugh Grady discussing Machiavelli and modernity: “Machiavelli is thus one to the first producers of Western value-free instrumental rationality … . Instrumental reason—the splitting off of ‘values’ from ‘facts’, the production of a technical mentality indifferent to ends focused only on means … [was] powerful and liberatory in many ways, producing vast increases in productivity and greatly enlarging the possibilities of human existence … . William Shakespeare was, as Marx recognized in his somewhat different terms and emphases, an important predecessor in defining these and related themes.”

As Marx recognized and so too McLuhan. For McLuhan, Lear’s use of a map to delineate, in typographic terms, the transference of power serves as ostensive proof not of the boundaries in question per se, but of “power and wealth” so divided, fraying earlier tribal loyalties while allowing competing interests to fester. McLuhan, who stresses the “visual” element of the map, puts the sudden imbalance in sensor y perception (which now favours sight) at the origin of the “production of a technical mentality,” so that the move to print technology away from oral modes of communication leads us to what Grady here calls “instrumental reason.”

That is, literate man, following “a line” of thought across a single visual pane of typographic characters on a page, soon finds himself reoriented to his surroundings. He too acts in “linear” or “specialist” fashion, having been liberated by a type of rationality that could only follow print technology. A world once largely indivisible is now highly divisible. See Grady 61 and McLuhan, Gutenberg, 11-18, 122-23, 241-42.

[7] The idea that McLuhan presents a “tragic vision” of “typographic man” is somewhat of a stretch, as much of a stretch, that is, as attributing “tragedy” to a Machiavellian worldview. That is, even if one were to say that Renaissance tragedy cannot be explained adequately without reference to Machiavelli (or, even, to the invention of the printing presses), neither McLuhan nor Machiavelli are making efforts to explain tragedy, so that their claims can only help us articulate a tragic vision post-facto—that is, in hindsight. Machiavelli is not the cause of tragedy, any more than the printing presses.

The contingency of their appearance on a cultural scene that caters to high tragedy does not make them the last word on tragic pathos but only two among a multitude of possible explanations, testable only in relation to how we feel or view or read about Machiavelli and the printing presses now. In this way is McLuhan’s critique timely, I think, just because his discussion of typographic man extends to the present day, to what he calls the “electronic age.”

As for Machiavelli, we are drowning in Machiavellianism, so much so that much of the semantic weight behind a phrase like “our darker purpose” is likely lost on us, unless we pretend, post-facto, that we knew all along the phrase was about Machiavelli. But this historicist sleight-of-hand situates the tragedy of King Lear exclusively in the early English Renaissance, saying something like: “Because Machiavelli does not scare us the way he did Elizabethan audiences, we have no right to assume we are perceiving the play as Shakespeare would have wanted us to.”

Perhaps; but our deafness to certain Machiavellian undertones does not make us deaf to tragedy. In fact, one could argue that we are more susceptible to tragedy nowadays, mired as we are in Machiavellianism. It is post-facto historicizing that gets in the way.

[8] J.G.A. Pocock describes the “Machiavellian moment” not as a moment of insanity; rather, it is a moment of crisis, and denotes not a single historical event but any event which exposes the contingency of our own experience thereby requiring verification, in the political sense, of whatever ruling Republican authority by the polis. The burden of Machiavellian republicanism, that is, is personified in the “new Prince,” who must balance virtù – the previous forms which he must impose on the polis (legitimately) – with fortuna, “the force which directs … events and thus symbolizes pure, uncontrolled, and unlegitimated contingency.”

To assert something like “We are all Machiavellians now” would be to assert that we are now living in “history” or in “secular” time, where the virtue of eternal authority crumbles against the weight of the contingent. What, if anything, this has to do with tragedy may be captured by Paul A. Kottman in his distinction between Attic and Shakespearean drama: “When Aristotle defined tragedy in the Poetics … he … linked [his] account to a normative understanding of their impact on the audience. In this way, the plots of tragedies … make a partial claim about the nature and conditions of those actions that cannot be separated from the way in which these actions move us; that is, the feelings induced in us are constitutive of the social bonds that connect us to our fellow audience members (katharsis). If the tragic story moves us, in other words, it does so in a way that lays bare our communal bonds—which must be strengthened, broken, or altered through these fearful and pitiful events, just as the protagonists’ social bonds … ought not go unchanged by these events. At stake is not just the community “internal” to the play—the family or civic drama itself… —but the community that stages the drama and finds itself moved by it. The way in which we are moved is—as Aristotle sensed—the arbiter of the social bonds our responses effect.”

While the atemporal oscillation between the existence and dissolution of social bonds is thematized in Attic dramas, Shakespearean drama presents the difficult problem of how those social bonds are to be reestablished after their complete dissolution in historical time. “Shakespeare’s dramas … compel us to regard the social bonds on which we depend for the meaning and worth of our lives together as being, in spite of that total dependence, fully dissolvable. The plays therefore throw into question the very inheritability, or transmissibility, of human sociality.” See Pocock 1-8, 156, 160 and Kottman 4, 6.

[9] Barry B. Adams, who disentangles Aristotle’s formulation of anagnorisis from tragedy, uses the term to anchor discussions of complex plots in Shakespeare’s comedies. Safe to say that such an approach requires a dramatic disentanglement from Frye’s notion of anagnorisis and “self-knowledge” as well. Building on Gerald F. Else’s landmark work on Aristotle’s Poetics, Adams explicitly “restricts” the term to the “less exalted realms of human experience” in order to discuss the importance of “coming-to-know across a broad range of human activity and experience.” See Adams 2 and Else.

[10] Terence Cave initiates a wonderful discussion of Auerbach’s notion of mimesis as it relates to the trope of his particular, and comparably exhaustive, study. Cave says that Auerbach’s emphasis on the move to greater and greater mimesis (read “reality” or the representation of “reality,” without such things as suspense, moral/psychological tensions—an “achievement” of “classical Greek poise,” particularly in the lines of Homer) is actually an evasion of “anagnorisis.”

The first chapter, that is, of Auerbach’s seminal study on “Odysseus’ Scar” discusses “recognition” of Odysseus’ scar as fundamentally reassuring, where doubts as to Odysseus’ identity are put to rest. Yet this version of “anagnorisis” or “mimesis” undercuts that which is salient about the trope Cave is seeking to uncover. In a particularly Derridean move, Cave notes: “Recognition … is not the recovery for good or ill of certain knowledge, nor the reassuring restoration of the co-ordinates of kinship and social position. It unmasks a crisis, a perpetual threat of imposture on the one hand and arbitrary law and coercion on the other.” And later, leaving room for wonder: “Recognition … is a sign that the story, like the wound, may always be reopened.” See Cave 14-15, 22-24 and Auerbach ch.1.

[11] To this I could add Edgar’s (as Tom) cruelty in withholding his identity from Gloucester. The idea that he is somehow wise in his decision to reveal himself only when “false opinion” (3.7.105) dissipates, or that he is entitled to enforce a type of spiritual penance/journey on his blinded father, in retaliation that is, for being so quickly and categorically shunned by him, misses the fact that Edgar too falls victim just as quickly to Edmund’s schemes as his father does.

Which means that the journey up and over an imaginary cliff, on Edgar’s part, is itself a form of abdication or avoidance, not of filial responsibility, but of explicit recognition – shame, as Cavell would have it – in understanding that you fare no better than anyone else in your ability to judge evil in the world. What better metaphysical solace than to convince yourself that the cruelty you are now inflicting on another is an example of seeing/setting the world aright (when, in fact, it shows how deeply you are implicated in the world’s wrongs, and what lengths you are willing to go to hide from that knowledge).

[12] See Nahum Tate’s dedication to Thomas Boteler. See Lynch.

[13] Cavell acknowledges this: “What I have in mind can best be brought out in the following way. Suppose that what I have said about why Gloucester is blinded, why he goes to Dover, why he tries suicide … suppose my answers are true. The problem is then unavoidable: How can critics not have seen them? For it is not that the answers I take to be correct are recherché; one needn’t have the learning of Bradley or Chambers, or the secrets of Empson, or the discrimination of Johnson, or the passion of Coleridge or Keats, to arrive at them. Their difficulty is of a different kind, an opposite kind.” See Cavell 81-82.

Works Cited

Adams, Barry B. Coming-To-Know: Recognition and the Complex Plot in Shakespeare. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2000. Print.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. 1994. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Print.

Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. 1987. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Else, Gerald F. Aristotle’s Poetics: The Arguement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957. Print.

Ferguson, Niall. Virtual History. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.

Fyre, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. 1957. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Print.

Garber, Marjorie. "Shakespeare in Slow Motion." Profession 2010 (2010. Print): 151-64.

Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Johnson, Samuel. "King Lear." Preface to Shakespeare, by Samuel Johnson. 28 August 2010. University of Adelaide Library. 22 Web. January 2011 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/lear.html.

Johnson, Samuel. "The Preface to Shakespeare." Preface to Shakespeare, by Samuel Johnson. 28 August 2010. University of Adelaide Library. 22 Web. January 2011 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/preface.html.

Kottman, Paul A. Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2009. Print.

Lynch, Jack, ed. King Lear: Adapted by Nahum Tate. N.d. Rutgers University, Newark. Web. 1 January 2011 http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tatelear.html.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Print.

—. Understanding Media. Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1964. Print.

Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Print.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Black Swan. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.