#36: Henri Lefebvre, Gene Wolfe, & Alexandre Kojeve
Hello friends. These past couple weeks I’ve been competing with the heat, trying to get myself outside a bit more. It’s hot and I hate it, but my days feel more full even when so much of my day is spent treading through bureaucratic molasses.
Congratulations to Dr. Ruby O on her Presidential Distinction award - best teacher in her entire university!
The final round of the very dramatic Guatemalan presidential elections will be held today on the 20th of August. The likely winner, Bernardo Arevalo, is the son of the 1945 president Juan Jose Arevalo who initiated what is now known as the 8 years of spring where the country momentarily pried itself from the grips of imperialism and colonialism. With cautious optimism I hope to see some historical rhyming.
This post is largely a continuation of my last, with me reading the second volumes of the Lefebvre trilogy and the Wolfe tetralogy. The Lefebvre surprisingly became tiresome and the Wolfe became interesting.
Critique of Everyday Life Vol II by Henri Lefebvre
If my thoughts on the last volume of this trilogy seemed insufficient, prepare to be further underwhelmed. The second volume, written in 1961, was clearly a seminal text for the spirit of ‘68, but it’s so dry and so aimed at being useful that it’s prose becomes a little stulted. There is a distinct sociological turn and my eyes were constantly glazed over. What I remember from the haze was a sharper definition of the everyday as the combination of the what is repeated through our days as well as the eternal barreling forwards. I thought of the wheel of a train gaining moment along its predetermined track. I guess this is where the Bergson influence is coming out.
Lefebvre creates a “theory of moments,” where moments come into dialectic with the continuous - both critiquing each other. This feels distinct from and better than the Bakhtinian “carnival” or Bey’s “moment of uprising,” in that it acknowledges the revolutionary potential of both without forgetting that what matters most, to Lefebvre and those who want a better world for all, is everyday life. You can keep your party, I just want daily life to be more interesting and more engaging.
There’s a lot more in here, but I didn’t latch onto much of it - the takedown of structuralism, his enhanced semiotic theory, etc. It’s all cool but quite burdensome. I’m told this volume is the slog of the trio and that the third is definitely the climax. We’ll see.
Anyways, I was listening to Purple Mountains this week and thought this song fit. David Berman understood alienation in consumer culture, especially when he said “the end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting.” Somebody thought it made sense to pair this song with footage from Akira and while I don’t, I’m not complaining:
Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty by Alexandre Kojeve
Last weekend I was supposed to go to my friends’ wedding in Marfa as somebody’s +1, but they got covid and so I wasn’t able to go as I did not have my own invite. I had a nice weekend at home instead, no problem. However, I only started this book the night before the wedding because I didn’t want to bring the dorky volume of sci-fi reviewed below to a wedding full of, I imagined, hot people. When I woke up the next morning and my wedding date told me they had covid and that we couldn’t go to the wedding anymore, I rode my bike to the lake and read the remaining 50 pages there.
I have been wanting to read Kojeve for some time since I read Derrida’s Specters of Marx some 53 weeks ago. Kojeve is genealogically responsible for Fukuyama’s stupid book that claims that with the fall of the Berlin wall (i.e. communism), liberalism had secured its place as the reigning mode of the world and humanity had reached its apotheosis thus ending our sociocultural evolution. It’s a pretty stupid idea considering the wars happening during the book’s 1992 publication, the economically destitute across the U.S. where he was writing and the rest of the world, and the uneven development of the world. Obviously none of that has really changed and Fukuyama’s claims seem even stupider in hindsight. Derrida says as much, but in much more beautiful prose while also breathtakingly synthesizing Marx and Shakespeare. I can’t remember what exactly Derrida said about Kojeve other than that basically Fukuyama was doing a disservice to his mentor.
This book mostly touches on none of that, except that the introduction mentions Kojeve’s relation to the post-historical condition and how he feared that a post-historical condition that reconciles humans with nature would also mean the end of art, which feels like a legitimate concern.
Kandinsky was Kojeve’s uncle and, upon his migration to Paris, Kojeve wrote this essay to convince the Parisian elites that Kandinsky’s art was worth their time (and money too probably). He defines beauty as that which is “sustained in-by-and-for itself,” that is, something that exists without purpose and has enough merit to maintain its own existence. Once there is purpose, it ceases to be beautiful. Kandinsky becomes then an ideal of beauty, lacking representation but creating a world worth admiring through his groundbreaking employment of abstraction and platonic ideals.
I might disagree with Kojeve’s definition of beauty, but it’s romantic nonetheless and the letters to his uncle at the end of the book are really sweet.
The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
What Wolfe is doing here has become pretty interesting to me, especially since the simple act of reading the words on the pages has become more fun in this volume. It might be that the first volume was too engaged in its very complicated world building, but this volume has a bit more action, and I needed the literary experience of transportation after the slog that was the Critique of Everyday Life vol 2.
Anyways, that ~action~ allowed me to engage with the book a bit more than last time and I found myself wondering at Wolfe’s masking his science fiction as fantasy. As the series builds, I find myself searching for a utopian current. Instead, and by Wolfe’s design, what is most prevalent is a dark age with sword-and-sorcery style fantasy. As I mentioned last time, the lexicon and narrative slowly reveal to the patient reader that what indeed seems pre-technological is in fact so post-technological that the characters lack a language and understanding of the architecture, devices, and world that they engage with. The unsympathetic, unreliable narrator becomes part of a grand scheme beyond his comprehension to reinstate a long forgotten golden-age of technology and peace. It remains to be seen how that plays out, but I’m nervous that the glorification of the past hints at an approaching fascism - whether it be in the vein of Build Back Better or Make Urth Great Again.
Most intersting is that the technology-become-fantastical of the series goes against the strain of fantasy of the era (1980-1983). Instead, the mode of fantasy is mapped onto technology creating a super interesting synthesis that complicates Frederic Jameson’s distinction between the two genres:
If SF is the exploration of all the constraints of thrown up by history itself — the web of counterfinalities and anti-dialectics which human production has itself produced — then fantasy is the other side of the coin and a celebration of human creative power and freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints. Magic then, may be read, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production), but rather as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualization of everything latent and virtually in the stunted human organism of the present.
In The Claw of the Conciliator, technology becomes a magical figure for “the enlargement of powers” and this magic becomes a tool for freedom and oppression. What I want to see is if the series aligns with the utopian currents of SF or the good vs evil theme of fantasy or if Wolfe can continue to synthesize the two. Fantasy was in a very interesting place in the early 80s with this series, Delany’s Neveryon series and Le Guin’s Earthsea pentalogy constituting a beginning of a High Fantasy.
This review is a mess because, honestly, so is my comprehension of the book. I still don’t know what’s happening. It’s a weird book.
I continue to frequent the Austin Film Society because of the heat and the compelling programming. Saw some heavy hitters since last:
Marquis by Roland Topor and Henri Xhonneux
Absolutely bonkers representation of the Marquis De Sade’s time in the Bastille right before the French Revolution and how his libertine ideals shaped various aspects of the revolution. The Marquis has a talking penis that looks like Bobby Hill who he spends much of the movie conversing with, a man gets a lobster shoved up his ass, and the masks are generally horrifying and amazing. If you couldn’t stomach Pasolini’s 500 Days of Sodom, you can still absolutely watch this and you probably should if you like good and funny art.
The Unknown Country by Morrisa Maltz
A pretty flawed and formally inventive debut feature that blends documentary and fiction with no clear distinction, much to its benefit. An exploration of U.S. indigenous culture and the importance of land and community. The narrative parts are a little rough and I’m wondering if the lead is intentionally neither likeable nor unlikeable. The mode of storytelling alone is so interesting it doesn’t matter. I have my doubts that there is a Sebaldian influence here, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there is one.
The Wicker Man by Robin Hardy
I first watched The Wicker Man a few years ago, sometime after Midsommar’s release, and my only feeling was that Wicker Man was good where Midsommar was bad. Seeing it again, in a theater crowded with people who hate cops, I felt so much more. For one, the film is a comedic masterpiece. Two, the film is not a horror about the evil of paganism, but, like I said, a comedic masterpiece about Christian ethics, repression, and oppression. The detective who is constantly being made a fool is a perfect metonymy for the state and his constantly sweaty face, made exceptional since no other character is shown to sweat, is indicative of the state’s inability to exist among the atmospheric pressure of self-determination, sexual freedom, and a void of Kantian ethical constraints.
“It’s been a great pleasure meeting a Christian copper!”
More on Lefebvre and Wolfe soon, along with some other books and films. More of the same, essentially.