Global Burnout (2013)

Pascal Chabot, Global burn-out. Paris: Presses universitaires de France (PUF), 2013

I was so impressed by the arguments detailed in this review by Stéphanie Favreau of a new book by Pascal Chabot that I am posting up a quick translation. These ideas tie in extremely well with my own observations and sentiments in relation to the current situation in the higher education sector as well as other sectors. Chabot provides a very useful analytical framework to help understand and gain some distance from what is currently occurring. I am looking forward to reading his book.

You can find the original review in French on the nonfiction.fr site

Global burn-out : Syndrome of an ideology of the absurd

The Cholera of modern times

Attention must be drawn first of all, to the sleek and precise style of this book: a book which allows the various elements that make up the heart of that complex and multifactorial phenomenon which is burnout, to be distinguished. The reader will also be surprised by the first pages of the book which are like reading a novel. The detailed description of this woman who suddenly burst into tears at the wheel of his car, stopped in the emergency lay by on a highway is indeed reminiscent of some scenes from the The Horseman on the roof where Giono depicts emptied bodies, distorted by cholera, their disease oozing from every pore. We see a similarity in style but also perhaps more fundamentally, it is tempting to see burn-out as the cholera of modern times.

Contemporary acedia

To better define burnout, the author first proposes a quick overview of the history of the notion. We learn that if the contemporary psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Freudenberger was the first to introduce this term into medical language, there are much older traces of this phenomenon in quite another domain. Thus the rapprochement with the acedia that affected the most devoted of monks and other theologians is particularly well-chosen insofar as it illustrates the paradoxical nature of burnout, namely the fact that it is the most fervent defenders of a cause who eventually exhaust themselves through their very dedication. Acedia for the religious “is the Our ​​Fathers which can no longer be uttered, the forgotten Hail Marys, the genuflections that one doesn’t get up from”. In the same way, according to Freudenberger’s observations, it is the doctor or nurse who, one fine morning, after having believed for so long in the value of their commitment, simply cannot get up and go to work.

If there has been so much discussion around burnout today, it is because it no longer affects just those in the caring professions working at the bedside of those, which an ideology that we will look at later on, defines as “weak links”. But it affects the very pillars of the liberal system, “the meritocratic battlers, the heroes of rewarded effort”. If burnout is of concern, it is it because it represents a “challenge to dominant values: it generates new atheists in relation to techno-capitalism”.

Mechanisms of the absurd

To try and explain this paradox, Pascal Chabot distinguishes three characteristics of our postmodern era which are of course in practice all intertwined.

Burnout is perfectionism which has run out of steam. Global economic development is largely based on the ideology of the self-made man. In this archetype which characterises liberalism, the individual is encouraged to transcend him or herself chasing the mirage that he or she will reach full self-realisation through work. In short, professional success has replaced salvation. What gives such a life its zest, is that given the best places are rare, you have to elbow your way through the crowds to win. Engaged in spite of themselves in this competition, individuals then throw themselves into the melee and sacrifice an entire part of their own person on the altar of work. Hence it is not enough, once the career has been set in motion, to maintain cruising speed, more and more has to be done because the competition never sleeps and profit waits for no man. Perfectionism in the service of such an abyss is transformed into a veritable regulatory nightmare.

Burnout is also humanism which has run out of steam. Indeed, to keep up the pace, more direct means accompany the race for recognition. Every enterprise worthy of its name, thus has at its disposal two major components: a human resources department and a management team. Of course, the human resources department is an essential element for the survival of the company, but what the author criticises here is the slippage from a figurative sense of the term to a sense that transforms the formula into a true oxymoron. In effect, in the postmodern era, “the human is a resource: which disgorges its best energies, its sweat, its time. It is, in every way, supernumerary, and therefore replaceable”. Human resources are therefore responsible for identifying the best stallions for the line up in the race for profit, and also for the letting go of the lame and other washouts while the management team deals with those who are still on track. To give us an idea of the completely dead souls that such a system generates, the author gives the floor to the manager himself: “I have fulfilled my mission. I managed by terror, I singled out the weak links. There were indeed suicides, but what could I do?”

Because there is necessarily a hidden motor in this infernal machine, burnout can also be defined as a race for recognition. In effect, “the human, who, constrained by necessity, does violence to his selfish needs, wants to see his or her sacrifice recognised”. He or she is willing to sacrifice themselves, but a minimum of recognition must be given in return. The height of cynicism is that it is precisely because they have the all too human feeling that people are grateful to them that they will persevere in their efforts. On this point, Pascal Chabot also cites Axel Honneth who understood very well that “recognition can be an ideological weapon with which, under the guise of flattery, individuals can be confined to a subordinate function in order to prevent them from escaping”.

What burnout reveals through three characteristics is that basically not even those most dedicated to their work are dupes of the non-sense of service which taps their forces. Burnout means that flattery and smiles are no longer sufficient to hide the vertigo of the logic of profit. Only sensed, not explicitly spoken or thought, absurdity is lived and somatized. “Bodies are smart. They sometimes know more about our needs than our blinkered psyches”. Burnout tells us that we cannot ignore the need that everyone has to have time for themselves. No number of fetishes can help, we have to live.

If this phenomenon has come to undermine the body, it is also perhaps because there is no space to express the absurd: culture also having entered in effect into the race for profit. In this sense one can only observe “the false promises of the knowledge economy”. Capitalist logic, which can thus be described as absurd insofar as nothing seems to be able to assign limits to profit, this logic which sustained enterprise, has now spread its tentacles into the private lives of individuals to the extent that leisure itself and any kind of search for meaning have become profitable. You are sold everything right down to recipes for happiness.

What burn-out reveals, is an uprooted form of existentialism where “there is an immense tribe of people who feel with ready-made feelings, [...] think with ready-made ideas, [...] who want with ready-made wills”.

Ideological roots

To better conceal this incendiary spread through the postmodern world, some claim that burn-out applies only to “the weak” and other “maladjusted individuals”. In short, they take refuge behind that other ideological weapon which is the pseudo-Darwinian argument of the survival of the fittest which necessarily involves collateral damage. “But this is not the right axiom. In reality, humans are plastic beings par excellence.” Humans adapt to new situations and ethnological museums are bulging with the remains of this human diversity. In every civilization besides, we find a form of spirituality and culture which responds to other requirements besides those of simple adaptation to the environment. This is because adapting, controlling one’s environment is one thing, “but one must also in addition realise oneself”. Humans are those beings who needs to find meaning in what they do with their life, they need to project themselves towards a horizon that transcends everyday concerns thereby giving them confidence in themselves. When the logic of the absurd ends up covering every base, the system goes into crisis.

Thus “humanity groans, almost crushed under the weight of the progress it has made”. Technical advances that were meant to liberate are now in the service of a logic of production which is cut off from any sensible relation to reality. The work by means of which people should be able to free themselves from the grip of nature to devote themselves to “more interesting metaphysical and more caring purposes,” has become a trap that no one is able to avoid and that nothing seems to be able to undo.

Finally, in relation to this cult of performance, which has its roots in the patriarchal model, another remark by the author deserves to be pointed out. The issue of burnout takes on a particular dimension when it comes to women. Numerous cases occur in the area of professional care and education – positions occupied primarily by women. Mechanically therefore, burnout most often affects those who are white-collar battlers. A double trap opens up here. The cliché is that women turn to these professions because they are naturally gentler, more compassionate, more dedicated. In reality, it is history that has shaped this myth and “this naturalism is controlled by more or less understood corporate interests”. But the tragedy of this situation is that somehow women have allowed themselves to be caught in this trap, that it adheres to this discourse and interprets their behaviour in the light of this reading.

The author’s emphasis on the issue of “Women’s burnout” is interesting insofar as it may, to some extent, also illuminate the overall situation. Indeed, in the same way that no-one is responsible for anyone else’s situation but nonetheless to some degree contributes to the survival of patriarchal values, no postmodern individual is responsible for anybody else’s situation even though he or she continually endorses it. It is of course tempting to apportion blame but in reality everyone is “half victim, half guilty, like everyone else”.

Psychologists say that burn-out is an endogenous reaction, sociologists that it is an exogenous phenomenon. But “this is where the philosophical approach which is relational, enriches the debate. For philosophy, in the diseases of civilization and the troubles which mirror it, it is the relationship between the individual and the social which is the problem. It takes two to build a relationship”. Of course both types of factors may be intertwined but burnout is not visited on the individual from above, neither does it come up from below, it appears on this edge of existence where the individual strives to achieve as much as take in relation to his or her environment. If burnout indeed characterizes a logic of the absurd it is in that it corresponds to some extent to the Camus’ famous definition: “The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human appeal and the unreasonable silence of the world”.

Towards a technological pact

To take the first steps towards eliminating “the burn-out machine” the author proposes two things.

Firstly, we need to seriously “consider reflecting on creating penalties for personnel management techniques which use fear and bullying as strategies”.

Next, we need to envisage the development of a pact or “technological contract” which as a regulatory ideal puts logics that have no other ends than themselves back in their place.

The analysis of burnout shows that there are two possible paths of evolution. On the one hand, there is the path willingly embarked on by the post humanists. To overcome the shortcomings of modern man, they invent technologies capable of making a machine that doesn’t call on “the bureau of metaphysical claims”. On the other hand, there are humans with all their flaws, or rather a vision of humans in which the need for time and the search for meaning are essential conditions for which “there is no solution because there is no problem, but only life which continues on through the generations and which is the raw material for all humanisms”.

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Watchmen (2009)

Warning spoilers
My rating: *
imdb link

Watchmen has been on my ‘to view’ list since it first came out and I read the rave reviews and numerous comments to the effect that it was an intelligent superhero film for those who didn’t like superhero films. I am one of that number. I generally find superhero films and other films derived from comic books or even graphic novels to be tedious and unengaging. I am simply unable to connect to the characters they propose and the alternate realities they inhabit.

Unfortunately last night’s viewing of Watchmen has done nothing to change this view. I found it tedious, overlong and pretentious. If the cultural references looked interesting to begin with during the opening credits, they are never extended beyond the range of the average first year undergraduate. Let’s make a list of this cultural hot potch.

American history and politics: the assassination of Kennedy, nuclear proliferation and deterrence, anti-communism, Richard Nixon and Vietnam, the much-touted loss of innocence and belief in the American dream.

Science and religion: the mysteries of quantum physics and a blue god-like figure (Dr Manhattan) looking vaguely like a Hindu god (he actually sits in a levitated lotus position at one point). Dr Manhattan exhibits super powers acquired through the standard experiment-gone-wrong leading to hideous-transformation-of- scientist. This god-like alien figure who through his immense powers has become detached from the trivial mundane matters of ordinary beings must, of course, be shown and be humbled by the true universal and superior value of what it means to be human etc. etc.

Poetry: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ – hoary standard of many an English language high school curriculum. Although the writing, to its credit, makes the associations with Ramses II and Ancient Greek civilisation at the origins of Shelley’s sonnet published in 1818.

Arthouse film: Some of the character Rorschach’s right wing vigilante voiceover fulminations about vice and corruption in urban America as he moves through seedy streetscapes come across as a very close echo of (‘hommage’ to?) the rantings of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976).

Philosophy: Benthamite utilitarianism versus Kantian deontology, is it morally justifiable to sacrifice 15 million people to save billions?

Music: Perhaps the use of music is the most interesting cultural aspect of the film. Classics of the protest and counter-culture era occupy prominent positions: Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are A-Changin’ (1964), Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ (1964), and then Leonard Cohen’s later 1984 classic ‘Halleluja’. If Dylan’s music over the recreated historical montage of the spectacular opening credits is obvious, a little research is required to judge the appositeness of the other two songs. One wonders why ‘Sound of Silence’ is played during a rainy (of course) burial scene in a cemetery for the character of  ‘the Comedian’ who is shown in a flashback to be Kennedy’s assassin until one realises that the song was originally written by Paul Simon in the wake of the assassination. The controversial juxtaposition of Cohen’s song about romantic loss and longing with an extended soft-core porn sex scene is perhaps somewhat more jarring. Perhaps the film makers were thinking of Jeff Buckley who performed the most famous cover of the song. Buckley remarks that in his interpretation, the song is about ‘the halleluja of the orgasm’. But even then, it is Cohen’s version, not Buckley’s, that is used and many viewers have baulked at the sheer obviousness of it all and the elision of the more subtle aspects of the song.

To conclude this list and to paraphrase the Scarlet Pimpernel in his guise as the inane fop Sir Percy Blakeney quipping to his French republican archenemy, Chauvelin: ‘So much for culture and fashion’ (The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)).

‘Cultural’ references aside, Watchmen is wonderfully inventive and quite spectacular on the visual front. But like many contemporary Hollywood films, this immense and impressive visual creativity is disappointingly and fatally undercut by poor characterisation and story telling. As many have commented, not only is the writing the most essential factor in the film equation, it is also the cheapest, so why so frequently does it go wrong? Other films that come to mind on this front include the recent Prometheus (a review in The Guardian entertainingly points out the many character and plotting problems showcased by this film), and the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I haven’t included Avatar here, as for all the hype, I found much of the visual landscape it offered cliched rather than inventive. I commented earlier in this blog on the other problematic aspects of this film. But so as not to seem entirely negative, there is at least one film trilogy that does get it right and that is Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (for all the failure of its ending(s)).

I hadn’t intended to write so long a review of Watchmen, but in many ways it is emblematic of so many things that are irritating in the contemporary Hollywood multinational (but monocultural) film productions that swamp the global market.

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Ethics – Badiou (2001)

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. and intro. Peter Hallward. London: Verso.

I will say from the outset that I found this book opaque in its argumentation and fundamentally alien to my own philosophical stance. Thus I am happy to stand corrected on any of the points I make here. From my perspective at least, Alain Badiou comes across as an old-fashioned existentialist with a few postmodern trimmings around the edges. His other work enlisting esoteric mathematical and set theory in the discussion of philosophical problems does nothing to alter this impression.

I’ll begin by making a few points of comparison with another thinker with whom I’m more familiar, namely Foucault. Foucault is interested in how truth emerges in and through quite specific historical experiences and the historical complexities of the interaction of truth with power relations, whereas Badiou seems more interested in proposing a number of abstract and eternal ontological principles. Even if the latter are only able to manifest in history and in specific instances and through embodied subjectivities, they effectively transcend time and culture and are universal. As Badiou remarks: ‘I think there are truth-procedures everywhere and they are universal; that a Chinese novel, Arabic algebra, Iranian music … that all this is, in the end universal by right’ (pp.140-1).

Badiou mentions Foucault in his book to applaud his rejection of humanism in the 1960s. He notes that this didn’t mean that Foucault and other anti-humanists of the 1960s were amoral nihilists as they took an activist stance in favour of the oppressed. He doesn’t mention, however, the reasoning Foucault used to support his anti-humanist position. This was precisely that ‘humanism’ provided a very limited and abstract definition of what it was to be human, with the end result that large numbers of people were actually excluded from the ranks of the human. In short, humanism was not inclusive or ethical enough.

Badiou makes the assertion that if the human animal is certainly mortal, humans can transcend that limited animal condition and achieve a immortality through accessing the truth. This ‘immortality’ is guaranteed by the fact that the truths being accessed are eternal and exist across time – even if they still need to be historically embodied or brought into history in order to exist. So individual humans remain mortal, but the truth they bring into history transcends time and culture and makes them (metaphorically) immortal in general and in theory. Thus, we have immortality of some kind of abstract human spirit rather than the human individual.

Unfortunately, I can see no good reason to be convinced by these assertions or by the convoluted arguments around what constitutes an ‘event’, where truth somehow emerges in history and then persists through subjective practices of ‘fidelity’. Interesting ideas, but without any detailed historical or empirical grounding to provide some kind of real world purchase, I remain sceptical.

Badiou makes the interesting point that popular contemporary ethics makes the tacit assumption that Evil, rather than Good is primary. By this, he means that ethics doesn’t crank into gear unless it has an evil (oppression of minorities, discrimination etc) to rail against. This leads essentially to a loss of hope and a diminishment of truth. If we start from ideas of the Good or a Utopian stance against which to measure things then we have a more viable ethics. Fair enough, but again this is all terribly vague. Badiou firmly states that there is no God in his schema (p. 25), but he offers a range of abstract concepts which, it could be argued, do nothing but stand in as problematic substitutes requiring an equal amount of belief and whose power effects remain unclear, for all Badiou’s declared radical political stance.

For a more extensive and perhaps more sympathetic review see Andrew McGettigan on The Philosopher site (Interactive electronic incarnation of the Journal of the Philosophical Society of England)

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Foucault and the event

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

I shall sum up [...] the critical operations which I have undertaken [To question] these three themes of the origin, the subject and the implicit meaning, is to undertake – a difficult task, very strong resistance indeed proves it – to liberate the discursive field from the historico-transcendental structure which the philosophy of the 19th century has imposed on it [...]

There where one used to tell the history of tradition and of invention, of the old and the new, of the dead and the living, of the closed and the open, of the static and the dynamic, I have undertaken to tell the history of perpetual difference; more precisely to recount the history of ideas as the sum of the specified and descriptive forms of non-identity.

Michel Foucault, (1996) [1968]. “History, discourse and discontinuity” S. Lotringer, ed., Foucault live (interviews, 1961-1984) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), Translated by Anthony Nazarro, pp. 41-2. Translation modified.

Random thoughts in response
Foucault defines the event as something that has a beginning and an end. Every human experience, activity, idea and cultural form can be analysed as an event or as a series of events. Foucault uses this concept as a way of arguing against metaphysical essences in history. It is important to emphasise that his notion of the ‘event’ shares little in common with the event as it has been defined by other forms of philosophy which define it as the rare and earth shattering eruption of transcendence (or the eternal) into history.

If each event has a discrete beginning and end, it does not exist on its own, it can only exist in relation to other events and to other levels of events. An event when it begins, is already part of a history and a social and cultural structure. It both perpetuates and marks a break or difference – no matter how small – from those structures. It is both the Same and the Other.

Foucault also applies notions of the event, of difference, to his discussion of the formation of the self. The self is likewise an ‘event’. We are born into a language, culture and historical situation and we are trained by, and train ourselves, with the tools produced by our history and culture. At the same time, however, we have the capacity to modify how we belong, to make a unique contribution.

People are continually trying to tie things down and render them the Same so as to maintain social and other forms of order, but the Other, that which is different, keeps on dissolving these orders. One could argue, using worn out and questionable philosophical terms, that in Foucault’s work, this Other is ‘immanent’ rather than ‘transcendent’. Hence the Other is something that is constantly present and in dialogue with what is going on here and now and in ordinary lives. Continual difference pervades our existence, opening up the possibility for transgression at every moment, not just exceptionally. Of course, whether or not people take up the opportunities offered is another matter.

Thus one can oppose the terms ‘difference’ and ‘transcendence’. There is a vast tangle of moral judgment and elitism attached to the notion of ‘transcendence’, given only some people and some situations have access to it or are effected by it. Transcendence also reductively subsumes everything into itself and removes it from history. The term difference never operates this reduction and has far fewer grand pretensions. It doesn’t merely emerge in chosen moments but remains stubbornly historical and of this world. Transcendence has reductive and elitist overtones and is rare, whereas difference is multiple, common and accessible to everybody. Transcendence tends towards a gnostic rejection of the world, a removal to an eternal outside place (or non-place), difference tends towards an active engagement in history and the recognition of injustice.

For thinkers such as Arendt, Agamben and Badiou if the event is indeed singular, only certain events count and those events are rare. These events take on the status of crisis, revolution, exception, the extra-ordinary, the definitive break, wholesale political transformation, the departure from biological or animal necessity. Other occurences simply exist in the shadow of these rare or formative events.

Hannah Arendt, while eliminating the notion of causality and championing the cause of history, posits the idea of the division of action into two forms – one that is characterised as everyday and concerned with the mere maintenance of biological life and the social and cultural status quo and the other as ‘extraordinary action’, which has political and innovative effects. The second form of action is clearly more highly valued than the first.

The risks of elitism in proposing such a divide are high – as has of course been pointed out in various ways by Arendt’s critics. Some people become capable of producing worthy social and historical action, whereas others are condemned to spend their lives as anonymous drones. And disappointingly, especially given Arendt is a woman, those concerned with the biological continuation of the species rather than grand politics, often happen to be women.

Foucault, on the other hand, argues that all actions, thoughts, experiences and physical happenings are historical events which at one and the same time both maintain the status quo and depart from it to varying degrees. Every event by sheer virtue of the fact that it appears in time (history) both belongs to what has gone before and marks a departure from it. This departure or difference can be either virtually non-existent or large – but there is no division in what qualifies as an event and what doesn’t. There are no fundamental ontological differences between types of events, just differences in levels and strategic placement and degrees to which actions or events are transgressive (or not). And further, one has to think very carefully about how one valorises the transgressive.

So rather than a metaphysical reading of the event – where the transcendent comes down and erupts into history or negates history altogether in the maintenance of transhistorical essences, Foucault offers a historical reading where difference permeates everyday existence from moment to moment. This is not to say that the notion of difference is at a fundamental ontological level any more explicable than transcendence or less intriguing, but it is certainly far less pretentious in its ambit and a far more operable and empirically observable notion in terms of the analysis of micro-events and practices.

With thanks to Eduardo Duarte for starting the discussion which prompted these ideas.

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Tarkovsky on art

Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrey Tarkovsky (1989) Sculpting in Time. Reflections on the Cinema. Translated from the Russian by Kitty Hunter-Blair, University of Texas Press.
My rating: *****

Publisher’s page. Includes table of contents and extract.

I want to underline my own belief that art must carry man’s craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist’s vision, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition to it – otherwise life becomes impossible!

I have been reading Tarkovsky’s truly wonderful book in which he reflects on and explains the thinking that went into his films. If some of the language in the citation above, with its mention of the ideal, hope and faith appears old-fashioned to hardened veterans of the new millennium, it would appear nonetheless, as Tarkovsky argues, that life is still impossible without these things. Having recently viewed a TV series, Spirited, which after the long and careful establishing of two strong and independent characters with a positive control over their own existences, suddenly in the last three episodes, opts to turn them into the pathetic victims of a cruel and heartless universe, his remarks seem very apposite.

Faced in this case with what essentially appears to be a radical loss of faith and hope by the writers in their own creation, the consumer, who feels betrayed by this loss, is left wondering which way to turn. Perhaps this is the experience of many fan fiction writers. (Just to be specific, this is not an art form that I personally practise). And indeed not just fan fiction writers, but a whole range of other creative practitioners. They are forced into creating their own story to make up for the failure of other texts in providing the ideal they were hoping for. Thus in some instances, they might actively engage, as Tarkovsky would have it, in opposing the hopelessness of particular artistic visions.

One could take this further and argue that in Lyotard’s postmodern world, everybody is looking for the perfect story and when they don’t find one ready-made, they are forced to create their own. This applies as much to the most esoteric flight of theory as to the trashiest piece of fan fiction. It applies to a range of other practices as well – including the political, and right down to the way people tell themselves the story of their own lives. This desire to create one’s own story is, of course, by no means simply limited to the so-called postmodern age or culture. As many have argued, the desire to tell and to consume story is something deeply embedded in human experience. Story is not simply about diversion, bread and circuses, the mindless ‘entertainment’ much touted by Hollywood and its ilk. Story is about imagining better (or worse) worlds, of reflecting on our everyday and the possibilities of human experience, and experimenting with different ways of thinking those possibilities.

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Les philosophes et l’amour (2008)

Les philosophes et l’amour: aimer de Socrate à Simone de Beauvoir by Aude Lancelin

My rating: ***

Aude Lancelin et Marie Lemonnier (2008) Les philosophes et l’amour: Aimer de Socrate à Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Plon

I was prompted to read this book by Alain Badiou’s reference to it in his essay In Praise of Love. Written by two female journalists working for the prominent French intellectual and cultural weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, this book is a lively, well-written and often subtly ironic account aimed at an educated general public.

The authors point out that love and philosophy have never made happy bed fellows with philosophers engaging in only limited discussion on the notion of love. Further, what discussion does exist, is very one-sided as most philosophers historically have been male.

The philosophers the two authors examine, with numerous additional references to both historical and contemporary works of fiction and other philosophers, include Socrates, Lucretius, Epicurius, Montaigne,Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Arendt, Sartre and de Beauvoir.

For all the generosity of the authors in trying to render justice to these thinkers, they cannot help but highlight the outrageous hypocrisy and frequently toxic practices and ideas of the chosen philosophers. The two female philosophers, Arendt and De Beavoir, are unfortunately on a par with the men. If one is looking for positive, insightful or even helpful writing on love and male female relations this book demonstrates that one should under no circumstances turn to mainstream Western philosophy (for all Alain de Botton’s attempts to reinstate Schopenhauer in his book The Consolations of Philosophy).

If however, one is interested in some of the less pleasant byways of the human psyche or insights into the historical ideas that have aided and abetted ongoing hostilities between the sexes and the denigration of women, then a reading of mainstream Western philosophy is an instructive if somewhat gloomy experience.

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In Praise Of Love – Badiou (2012)

In Praise Of Love by Alain Badiou

My rating: ***

Badiou, Alain with Truong, Nicolas (2012) In Praise Of Love. Trans. Peter Bush, London: Serpent’s Tail

I approached this short essay interview about the notion of love (as it is enacted between lovers) with caution. I was not expecting a 75 year old male philosopher to have much to say that would resonate from a female point of view. There was however slightly more on the table than I expected and some of the discussion provided potential food for thought which crossed gender lines.

I was particularly interested by Badiou’s comments criticising the portrayal of love as something that exists in a moment outside of time. This is a view that pervades romantic literature. It is a love that cannot be enacted in the real world or survive through time. It is also reductive, fusing the difference of two into one. A philosopher like Levinas (whose religious focus Badiou rejects but adapts for more secular purposes) would argue, of course, that love presumes difference and can only exist where difference exists, it is never reduction to the Same. Badiou remarks:

‘I think many people still cling to a romantic conception of love that in a way absorbs love in the encounter. Love is simultaneously ignited, consummated and consumed in the meeting in a magical moment outside the world as it really is. something happens that is in the nature of a miracle, an existential intensity, an encounter leading to meltdown.’ (p. 23)

He cites Tristan and Isolde as an example, continuing that we need to challenge this romantic conception which although it might be beautiful in art fails to make the transition to real life. He notes:  ‘Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world’. (p. 24) The duration of love is seldom dealt with in fiction (p. 50) which usually focuses on the ‘ecstasy of [..] beginnings’ (love at first sight, the ‘encounter’) and ends with ‘they got married and lived happily ever after’. He mentions Samuel Beckett as a somewhat unexpected exception. (I might add paranthetically that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is of course a demonstration of the pitfalls of trying to apply the myths of romantic fiction to everyday existence.)

One can look at this problem in relation to a variety of TV series and films. The stock standard romantic comedy of course usually falls within the expected boundaries of the magical encounter and then the happy end. Another ploy is to kill off one or both partners in order to preserve the purity of their love and happiness from the ravages of time. Many American TV series try the strategy of indefinitely postponing what the writers seem to regard as the inevitable suburban and domestic doom of all relationships, by failing to get the couples together in an infinitely prolonged process which fans commonly label as UST or unresolved sexual tension. Henry Jenkins, the noted scholar of fandom, complains about this common fan frustration in a post on his blog titled ‘A Rant About Television’s Difficulty in Representing Committed Relationships’. He observes:

I often suspect that Hollywood’s inability to depict relationships that grow over time has everything to do with the divorce rate in the entertainment capital, very little to do with the constraints of the medium (given how well television depicts the unfolding of interpersonal relationships over time) and even less to do with the desire of fans. (One of the things to pay attention to is how many of the “commitment” episodes for television series are written by a small handful of writers who have consistently ruined every couple they touched.)

He also adds interestingly that ‘contemporary writers seem incapable of writing such relationships — could it be because they are twenty-somethings still recovering from their first major breakup?’ The convenient (American) production myth has it that if you get two characters together in a series, viewers will lose interest. Perhaps this is because the writers can’t seem to imagine a relationship other than a white picket fence with both partners doomed to the drudgery of ball and chain domesticity. (Perhaps these writers could read up a bit on alternative models for relationships such as the ‘commuter marriage’, popular in academic circles). A couple of series which readily spring to mind in terms of being unable to come to a sensible resolution on this front are Remington Steele and La Femme Nikita (the 1990s series).  There are many others. Jenkins cites Castle as perhaps an exception, but I beg to differ. Like Bones, I find that if the writing in this series is able to sustain fairly basic (and not terribly adventurous) characterisation, it is less successful in demonstrating how those characters are modified by their relationships with each other.

Attempts to show long(ish) committed relationships in romantic comedies like Brett Ratner’s The Family Man (2000) can also be dreary, unconvincing and unbearably saccharine. One can only wonder what demographic this particular film was addressing.  The story takes place from the point of view of a rich executive male (Nicholas Cage) with a Ferrari and a string of one night stands, who slips into a parallel world of ghastly suburban domesticity of seemingly volontary semi-poverty with a one time girlfriend. The film – or writers – seem irretrievably torn between (what they regard as) the moral example which is life in the suburbs versus the guilty but exhilarating freedom of a high-flying Christmas-neglecting single life.

Returning to Badiou’s terminology, there is good material out there which shows love between couples (of any orientation) as duration rather than the momentary eruption of the eternal into the real, but one has to search for those rare examples amidst the mountains of dross which foreground the love/romance event with all its artificial boundaries and dubious links to the transcendent eternal.

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The Addiction (1995)

Warning spoilers

My rating: ****
imdb link

While on things vaguely religious, I thought I would post up another item from my now defunct film website. I originally wrote this review in 2002. I have made some very minor updates.

Plot
A New York doctoral student in philosophy, Kathleen (Lili Taylor), gets bitten by a female vampire in evening clothes and becomes one herself. Drifting aimlessly and neglecting her thesis, Kathleen stumbles across an ancient vampire called Peina (Christopher Walken) who promptly sucks all her blood and gives her a lecture on philosophy and literature which inspires her to finish her thesis. A post-doctoral party becomes a vampire feeding frenzy and Kathleen, having already infected the rest of her philosophy department, ends up in hospital. There she repents of her addiction to evil, dies and is saved. The film’s dialogue consists mainly of heavy duty quotations from, and discussions of, pre-1960s philosophy, mostly of the existentialist and Jansenist variety.

Review
This is not a movie for the faint hearted. But then Abel Ferrara‘s films never are. This bizarre and intense film operates at a number of levels: first of all, as a suitably blood-festooned vampire flick (although the word vampire is never mentioned). Secondly, it operates as a philosophical and religious reflection on human evil and redemption and finally as an amusing take on certain aspects of university life, probably best appreciated by those directly involved in that venerable institution.

To comment first of all on its vampire credentials. It helps if one has more than a passing familiarity with the vampire genre in order to stomach the gore. The action is filmed in black and white which helps distance the viewer from the more graphic elements. Indeed in colour, the effect would probably have been unintentionally comic, evoking the lurid excesses of Hammer horror in its hey day. Even so, a vampire feeding frenzy at Kathleen’s post Ph.D party looks amusingly like some avant-garde actors’ workshop. Having said this, if there were such a thing as vampires, this would probably have to be the most realistic depiction of the sheer mechanics of their practices in all their repulsiveness. No romantic sparkling vampires of the Twilight variety here! But in the end it is probably the documentary images of the piles of bodies in concentration camps at the end of World War II which form the most disturbing visual material of the film. As for sound, the most disgusting scene must surely be the evil vampire Peina sucking Kathleen’s blood.

But the core of this film is its philosophical and religious reflection on evil. Clearly writer Nicholas St. John has been reading some heavy duty philosophy of the most gloomy existentialist kind: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire and theologians such as Calvin and J.C. Sproul are referred to and quoted at some length by the characters. It seems he wrote this film and Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996) after his son’s death. No-one has a mundane or even a remotely cheerful conversation in this film and certainly no-one refers to any philosophy produced more recently than 1960. No Foucauldian, structuralist, or postmodern vampires here! The tone is reminiscent of such Catholic pre- and immediately post-war novelists as Graham Greene, Shusaka Endo, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac – all heavily influenced by a bleak angst ridden Jansenist outlook. One is also reminded of the French film maker Robert Bresson’s approach -  another atheist/Catholic film maker who was concerned with showing how evil people could be and the grace of God that could save them in extremity.

The only people in the film able to resist the lure of the vampire are a priest and a young man handing out religious pamphlets in front of the building where the post-doctoral gore fest is about to occur. Kathleen, after having her vampire advances rebuffed by the young man, goes inside and starts screaming hysterically ‘I will not submit!’, an obvious reference to Lucifer’s ‘non serviam’. The whole premise of the film seems to be that if one does not recognise and face the evil within oneself and the rest of mankind and accept the saving grace of the Christian God, then one is controlled by evil, becomes addicted to it and is compelled to pass it on to others.

The nausea of existence à la Sartre is also much in evidence – quite literally as the newly made vampire Kathleen sits in a café and toys digustedly with her food. Nonetheless, for all its references to the philosophy of another era, this is very much a film of the 1990s with its passing references to AIDS and its view of postmodern social detachment and disconnection.

The philosophical dialogues and pronouncements of the various characters are anything but naturalistic and it helps to have some philosophical background to follow what is being said and the links between the action and the talk are not always clear. This produces a similar, but perhaps less extreme effect, to the one produced in Luis Bunuel’s film The Milky Way where characters from different periods in history conduct sword fights, drink in taverns, sing at school fêtes, all the while discussing the finer points of medieval Catholic doctrine or arcane heretical deviations. But the radical disjunction between words and things or actions is an attractive one and serves to emphasise the non-naturalness of all human words and actions.

Along the way Kathleen meets an evil and corrupt vampire who tells her his name is Peina and who is able to control his hunger and pass as human through a kind of asceticism of evil – a Nietzschean will to power. He has managed to make his evil mundane and almost invisible and he is able to control it for his own purposes which makes it far worse than Kathleen’s. Peina achieves a kind of perverse evil enlightenment and asceticism through the management of his addiction. Kathleen is more classical in her salvation but is far less interesting because we don’t see her involved in anything like the 12 steps to get to that point. All we see is the addiction and then the miraculous salvation. Peina on the other hand has a whole ascetic practice which is much more intriguing – but it is an asceticism in the service of darkness rather than light.

I would suggest that any postgraduate student who is having trouble finishing their thesis would probably benefit from Peina as a supervisor. He roars at Kathleen frighteningly: ‘You are nothing! You know nothing!’ gives her a reading list of French and German philosophers and Beckett then sucks all her blood. Prior to running into this vampire she had been neglecting her thesis. Afterwards she gets on and finishes it. Amusingly, by the end of the film Kathleen has turned most of the philosophy department into vampires. Some academics would no doubt feel quite at home with the whole notion of postgraduate students sucking their blood.

This is not a big budget production and the filming is rough and ready but it is the ideas that carry this work. Watching this flawed film, if not always a pleasant experience, is certainly a challenging and thought provoking one and as such well worth the effort.

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Repetition, fandom and practices of the self

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Secular society] expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and give us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.

For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way to oblivion, just like so much else which once impressed us but which we soon enough came to discard.

Alain de Botton, Religion for atheists. A non believer’s guide to the uses of religion, London: Hamish Hamilton p. 133

Random thoughts in response

De Botton argues that religion is aware of our propensity to forget and provides repetitive structures, activities and calendars to continually remind us of the important things. This is something that secular society does not do, except when it comes to work and economic productivity, leaving us free to source inspiration from wherever we can find it. This means we forget and don’t reinforce self transformative practices. From an entirely different angle, John Medina in a popular science discussion of how the brain and memory works posits as ‘brain rule’ number 5 ‘Repeat to remember’ and ‘brain rule’ number 6 ‘remember to repeat’. In short, repetition is essential to the process of learning. [1]

One could consider media fan practices of viewing long form serial television in the context of these two discussions. Fans will draw lasting lessons and engage in transformative practices of the self by exercising quite particular viewing practices in relation to their chosen subject matter. Although films – particularly films which have sequels – are also subject to fan activity, television series are perhaps more strongly susceptible to a certain kind of work on the self. A television series features a story, characters and a universe that can sometimes span years in real time and is delivered in weekly, sometimes daily instalments. Thus, we have a regular calendar occurrence which keeps the material present in the viewer’s mind. Further to this, a typical fan viewing practice is to view episodes multiple times, and to repetitively rewind and review select short scenes within those episodes. The fan may then go on to further reinforce this input by transforming it into creative and social practices such as discussion with other fans, fan fiction writing or other creative output.

This process allows the fan viewer to assimilate those lessons and insights that they have connected to and garnered from the source text. Thus the fragility of the secular experience of art, drawn attention to by de Botton, is counteracted by certain kinds of fan practices. This indicates, perhaps, that there exists considerable resistance to contemporary incitations to engage in a disposable consumerism that has no term. Further, if one goes down the sometimes dubious brain science route, it might indicate that people continue to be aware of the techniques that need to be practised to foster learning and self transformation. In either case, it is clear that living in an unstable void of an endless featureless stream of temporary rhizomic connections is not an attractive proposition to many people.

[1] John Medina, Brain Rules, 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school, Brunswick: Scribe Publications, 2008, pp. 119, 147

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The Good Book (2011)

The Good Book: A Secular Bible by A.C. Grayling

A.C. Grayling The Good Book: A Secular Bible, New York: Walker & Company, 2011.

AC Grayling is a British philosopher who forms part of an (un)holy trinity leading the British school of ‘new atheism’ along with Richard Dawkins and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. This loose but reasonably coherent movement of thought has quite a few supporters – mainly an assortment of philosophers and science fiction writers: Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchet, Douglas Adams, Dr Who writers Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt, all espouse similar ideas. Recently, popular English philosopher Alain de Botton has offered a more balanced intervention into the discussion with his excellent book Religion for atheists, (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

Leaving aside Alain de Botton, who provides truly enlightening and productive insights into religious practice as a cultural form, I am in general no great supporter of the British atheist movement for a variety of reasons. The fundamentalist belief in science and narrow materialism espoused by its members wears thin after repeated exposure as do their terrorist polemics whose main aim appears to be to reduce their targets/opponents to ridicule and silence. It is also perhaps no accident that many of the proponents of ‘new atheism’ are science fiction writers. The God they (don’t) believe in emerges as a powerful and inaccessible alien with super powers, a morally ambiguous and not particularly benevolent being who displays an inexplicable fixation with humans over and against the rest of His (and this God is irretrievably male) creation. The new millennium Dr Who has been irritatingly rendered as a version of this ambiguous divine figure to be alternately adulated and condemned (with high moral outrage) at every opportunity.

Another problem I have with this school is nicely summed up by Terry Eagleton. Speaking of Dawkins he writes:

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. [1]

The bottom line, perhaps, is that there is a severe dearth of non-partisan, non-sectarian intellectual or imaginative language to discuss a particular dimension of human experience in the contemporary era. This experience can be divided into three categories: the religious which provides, moral and psychological instruction, guidance, support and group rituals which aid social bonding, all within the framework of an institutional organization and hierarchy, the ‘spiritual’ which encompasses techniques of self formation and the relation to others, and finally the supernatural.

The best and most convincing attempt I have come across so far to provide a new contemporary language to discuss religion (as distinct from spirituality), framing religion as a cultural and historical practice worthy of serious consideration, is Alain de Botton’s new book. Foucault, of course, has developed useful and convincing frameworks for a rigorous discussion of the ‘spiritual’ (in the sense of an examination of historical techniques of self formation and how the individual relation to others is constructed). His discussions on religion tend to be more fragmentary – even if those fragments are extremely enlightening. On the supernatural front however, there is no language at all. The supernatural has become the domain of literature and fiction as the only viable contemporary language for its expression. A mainstream intellectual and non-partisan language to discuss this dimension of experience simply does not exist, if one discounts history of ideas approaches which simply detail what are usually regarded as odd beliefs and practices.

But to turn to AC Grayling’s book, the ostensible subject of this review essay: Grayling is perhaps less ferociously polemical than Dawkins or Hitchens, but he is still committed to the cause. The Good Book subtitled A Secular Bible is a strange exercise. It reads like a rather dull Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, and the format modelled on the King James Bible and the deliberately slightly antiquated language, to my mind at least, further add to the rather contrived and twee nature of the whole project.

My initial introduction to this book was through an elegantly structured talk delivered by Grayling to the Sydney Writers festival in 2011. I was particularly interested by a number of comments he made about wishing to make available to the contemporary reader a treasure trove of useful tools and ideas produced by people in the past. This echoes Foucault’s comments about the past providing a useful set of tools which people can use in various ways today to help them form themselves and ways of living. [2] Grayling also stated that he wanted to relegate authors to the background and anonymity so as to focus attention on the bare wisdom of their statements free of authorial constraints. Again, this echoes Foucault’s archaeological project in its examination of ‘statements’ and orders of discourse as an alternative to the examination of authors’ intentions and the subjectivities. One could argue perhaps, that Grayling is attempting to reactivate old notions of author attribution (or lack thereof) if we refer to Foucault here:

There was a time when the texts that we today call ‘literary’ (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of the author; their anonymity causes no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. [3]

But this surface appearance of a concordance between the two thinkers is just that – a surface appearance. Their renditions of how they delve into the treasure trove of the past are radically different. If Foucault’s approach is to carefully and meticulously locate ideas and thought in their historical setting and context – which then leads to a practical understanding of how these ideas operate and are transformed in quite different historical contexts, Grayling’s method is to remove the ideas completely from their historical and authorial trappings. And that is perhaps the main problem with this book – its lack of contextualisation of its content. Stripped of their historical trappings, the various extracts tend to come across as a series of rather bland platitudes and irrelevant and sometimes puzzling anecdotes and stories about dislocated historical doings.

If Grayling situates his project within the context of biblical studies and processes of ‘redaction’, he might more usefully and convincingly, in my view, have characterised it as an exercise in hypomnemata as described by Foucault, the Ancient Greek practice of keeping notebooks for administrative, public or personal use. Foucault notes:

Their use as books of life, guides of conduct, seems to have become a current thing among a whole cultivated public. Into them one entered quotations, fragments of works, examples, and actions to which one had been witness or of which one had read the account, reflections or reasonings which one had heard or which had come to mind [4]

Grayling explains that this is precisely the process he had followed for decades – finally culminating in The Good Book. It is surprising that given Grayling’s close familiarity with the Ancient Greeks, he didn’t frame his book in these terms. This kind of framing would have in fact considerably strengthened the claims he was making for the validity of his project and added force to his ambition to provide a real secular alternative to the Bible, as opposed to what emerges as a rather dubious analogue. But then perhaps his project might not have achieved the same succès de scandale.

Other reviewers have also offered the rather cynical observation that providing this compendium of non-attributed statements has saved the publishers a fortune in copyright payments and has also helped bolster Grayling’s reputation as a philosopher, as his own text and organizational strategies are woven into the arrangement of quotations in the book, in a way that makes it hard to draw the boundaries between his own interpretative framework and the citations.

The end result of all this, as I have already mentioned, is actually rather bland, which is not an accusation that even its most stringent critics can level against the Bible. On these grounds alone, it is doubtful that Grayling’s Good Book will have the same longevity or impact as its model for all its secular pretensions to the contrary.

References
[1] Terry Eagleton, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, London Review of Books, vol 28, no 20, 2006.

[2] ‘Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analysing what’s going on now – and to change it’. Michel Foucault, “On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 350.

[3] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 109. See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. (London: Tavistock, 1972 [1969]).

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