The storm and Adorno

The storm hit us on Sunday and for five days we were without power. It's so hard to live without power particularly in the context of modern America. If one were in a village in Nepal or Tibet, perhaps it would have been manageable to live for weeks without power because then the imagination would not expect, would not have a known reference to look to. During this time, we took a suitcase of clothes and our dog, jumped into a car and drove as far as we could get at 9 PM that night. In semi-darkness, I grabbed whatever books seemed important to me at the time. On reaching a little bed & breakfast we had stumbled upon, I found myself reading the works of Theodor Adorno and the writers of the Frankfurt school e.g. Habermas. What it must have been like, writing in exile, away from home, leaving behind one's possessions, living in uncertainty, waiting to hear the latest news about the homeland. Adorno and his Frankfurt friends had escaped to America and would face a kind of inhumanity expressed in the form of passive indifference. This was something Kant had warned against when he wrote about the ethics of hospitality. Hospitality is not simply allowing the stranger to come and live temporarily in one's country, but it is also the spirit of making that stranger feel welcome. As Gayatri Spivak mentioned when she visited our class this week, the first thing most people are told when they are allowed to stay in a foreign country is the law of return. Perhaps it was all that pent up feeling of exile or facing passive inhospitality that drove Adorno to write about ethics inherent in aesthetics. Adorno emphasized the importance of "non-identity thinking" - the moment one moves beyond a subjectivity tied to identity connected with race, ethnicity, nation-state etc, one begins to understand subjectivity in terms of what Confucius would call 'human-ness' - an affinity with the human no matter where he or she is from. This is an affinity that seeks to understand rather than judge, that seeks to value individuals not so much for their usefulness but for the value of their humanity.

Austerlitz

A book that directly contrasts with "When we were orphans" is Sebald's "Austerlitz. This is one of the best books I've read this year. It is disorienting at first but starts to come together in the latter part of the book. All this is part of the whole sense of being lost, of losing one's childhood, of trying to piece the fragments while recognizing the fluid, slippery nature of memory. The book is an aesthetically and ethically brilliant work of memory set in the context of the holocaust.

When we were orphans

Just read this work and am appalled by it. In my opinion this is the worst of Ishiguro's work. It may be aesthetically well-written but I think it is ethically flawed primarily because it trivializes the massacre of the Chinese by the Japanese during WWII. The protagonist in his search for his mother is seemingly deluded and delusional in that his obsession causes him to ignore the reality of what is going on around him. Some could argue that this is part of Ishiguro's aesthetics, that he is not concerned about representing history but is instead exploring the instability of subjectivity which in part may reference the art for art sake's argument i.e. the work of art should be appreciated for itself not for some moral or transcendental message believed to be inherent in it. The question here concerns the ethics and responsibility of writers in adequately representing global trauma, global holocaust and global massacres without trivializing them. This is particularly so given that the book is written for western readers who may be less aware of the asian holocaust. By glossing over this event which is superficially mentioned in the background of the text, the author is complicit in the larger, political trivializing of this in the imagination of the west.

The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I'm not really a fan of historical fiction but recently had to read this book for a class. It's entitled "The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell and it's absolutely fascinating. Aside from all the intrigue and charges of over-romanticizing oriental culture, Mitchell deftly depicts in stunning clarity the extraterritorial transnational spaces that existed in the seventeenth century. These were essentially trading posts on artificial islands on colonized lands such as Java and governed by companies such as the Dutch East India Company. The text depicts this in-between space where the sovereignty of the nation state and state laws become ambiguous and fuzzy.

The Spectator

Today I'm pouring over articles published in eighteenth century peridoicals of Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator as well as Jonson's Idler. The periodicals mark literature's entry into the public sphere as so well argued by Habermas. Essentially, they established the foundations for literary education later in the late nineteenth century. What's particularly interesting to me is the obvious tensions between anicient and modern; critical reading and critical writing; the notion of taste and the notion of the popular. The function of the critic and the criticism's essential ties to public literary engagements become obvious at this point.

18th century German Aesthetics

I spent the past week reading through five core classic German philosophers in aesthetics beginning with Baumgarten, and proceeding to Kant, Schiller, Scheling and Hegel. Baumgarten, credited for first coining the term aesthetics as the philosophical study of sensual perception, paved the way for aesthetics as a discipline. It was Kant, however who, in his 1790 publication of Critique of Judgment, established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline moving it away from aesthetics as the study of formal properties of art works instead emphasizing the ontological characteristics of art work through its relation to cognition, beauty, morality and the transcendental Absolute. Someone once told me that among all his three critiques, his last one i.e. the Critique of Judgment, was the least important. Yet, on reading Schiller, Hegel and various other secondary readings, I cannot help but see how absolutely influential Kant's ideas are. Almost every philosopher of aesthetics after Kant theorizes aesthetics based on one or another of Kant's claims or assumptions. One may ask what all this has to do with literature education today. In fact, I think Kant's critique is one of the first philosophical writings on aesthetics that is based on the significance of collective aesthetic judgment in the public sphere or what he terms "subjective universality". This subsequently paved the way for further theorizing on aesthetic and literature education. Another interesting point I found is that all five of these scholars situate their philosophy of aesthetics against scientific utilitarianism of their period. For example, Schiller states, "Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient". Much like today, they were reacting against the pragmatic-instrumental impulses of the time and in doing so, were fervently attempting to re-establish aesthetics as a core discipline.

Arcadia

Watched this play on Broadway a couple of weeks ago and then bought the play script to read. I must admit, it's been a long while since I watched a play that left me thinking for a long time. An aside here - I think the play might be better read than watched! What is brilliant about the play is that it seemingly leads you in one direction so that at the beginning, you follow along an investigative path; as you come to the end of Act one however, the play's philosophical interest comes to the forefront. It is encapsulated in the question asked right at the beginning "do you think God is a Newtonian" and the merger of investigation and philosophical debates, sexual love and mathematics, past and present all leads to the very powerful climax and the very problem of sponaneity that confounds determinism.