Bohemia

My musicologist friends tell me what they have to unlearn in order to write, to speak about music. What would it mean to unlearn philosophy in order to write and speak about what calls for thought? Foolish reflection which could only be conducted here, at the blog and in the idle abandon of blogging. Foolishness of a reflection that laughs at those who pay me for my time – a waste of resources of those taxpayers who fund the academic edifice.

But this is my own time – it’s early, although already hot. The potted plants in the yard are dry; even the weed-plants which  sprout with great vigour from the concrete are dried out. My own time, and mine to waste. For an hour or two, I will allow myself to be turned from paper-writing and essay-reading to a more obscure object of attention. Hardly here, though it is everywhere. Hardly anywhere, but everpresent. It is not God of which I write, but the everyday. The everyday alongside which this blog lingers. With which I would like to enwrap words written here in haste and in idleness as ivy around its great limbs.

Have I read the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit called ‘The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the ‘Matter in Hand’ Itself’ properly? Unlikely, but here goes: It is a certain kind of work which produces the individual, according to Hegel. It is conditional on the appearance of a class of skilled albourers, whose work is in an important sense an expression of their individuality. A class whose work is valued for exactly that reason.

Yet the world of such specialised creatures (‘animals’, Hegel calls them, finding them deficient in what would make them whole human beings) is not yet a world. Each is separate; each paces separately around their own cage taking himself for an individual real in and for himself even as each is only a fragment. A fragment, though, busily occupied with the ‘task at hand’: that labour in which she disinterestedly relinquishes selfish gain from her task. His accomplishments are now measurable by public approval; his talents and skills are recognised by others and by society at large.

Hegel reserves the merchant class for special ire because they have busily translated all value to a monetary measure. ‘Currency must be honoured, but family, welfare, life etc., may all perish’. The problem, for Hegel, lies in the fact that the merchant does not embody a universal class; they seek to serve only themselves. The true universal class would work for the Good of society as a whole; compare the civil servant who would aim at Justice in general, or the scholar who aims at Truth.

But what happens when the bourgeois animal fails to receive this recognition? What happens when the conceit of one’s self-worth is mismatched in the work produced? When the book you have written seems to fall short of the talents and skills you are sure you harbor? Begin again; start over again – write more books. Strange cousin of hedonism where what compels you is not the sense of success but of failure. ‘Next time I’ll get it right’ …

Tangent: does this provide insight into blogging? Activity of those who feel the mismatch between the inner and the outer so strongly as to create, with blogging, another kind of work? Activity which seeks another kind of recognition even as it divides itself very quickly into something close to an official discourse, an alternative academia and to something more interesting – the initiative at Long Sunday, for example, where a kind of drift is allowed to seize writing.

Back to the spiritual animal kingdom. The difficulty, Hegel shows, lies in the way worth is placed on a performance, on something realised by an individual which nevertheless falls short of the full expression of the skills and talents of that individual. The novelist writes what he takes to be an imperfect novel, that is, one inadequate to his talents. He begins again. The poet may write what she takes to be a perfect work, but that perfection lies behind her as soon as it is realised and she must begin again. The diremption between the inner and the outer leads to an ongoing, if productive, dissatisfaction.

Short step from here to the Bohemian image of the French romantics of the 1830s where it is not the work produced by the artist that matters so much as the attitude of the artist. Short step to an inversion of what Hegel would mean by the ‘whole’ human being where the wholeness of the artist, his defragmentation is the result not of work but of worklessness (idleness, abandon). Now the artistic attitude is what matters and life the ultimate medium of the artist.

Once again, the paradox of the spiritual animal kingdom lies in a diremption between the inner and the outer. You depend for your worth on a product, on something you make. For Hegel, at least, this is not yet all of society; the spiritual animal kingdom is a kingdom of the bourgeoisie where each is lost in the ‘task at hand’, in specialised labour. Perhaps, moving away from Hegel’s analyses, the figure of the artist would be of one unlost from this task, the one unspecialised.

1926. Breton wanders the streets with a volume of Trotsky under his arm. The workers he passes, he thinks, are not yet ready for the revolution; they are chained to the assembly line. How to unchain them? He doesn’t know. Then, all of a sudden, he sees a fascinating young woman who sees him in turn. They meet; talk. This is Nadja who will give her name to the book he writes in part to document their encounter as it is lived; feverish diary that records the extraordinary events which occur around her and the paths which open to them both through the Paris they cross as waking dreamers.

Surrealism aims at the overcoming of art and at the revolution of everyday life. The creativity specific to artist existence must cross over to life; one must live as artists created their works. Your life is your work as it is bound to others who have likewise given up bourgeois existence. In this way, the Surrealist is on the side of the revolution, of that great transformation of the most banal aspects of existence. So it is that Bohemia will spread everywhere, only this is a responsible Bohemianism, one allied to the proletariat of the world, one to awaken the multitude from the slumber of capitalism.

Breton dreams of the great unchaining. He has unchained himself; he writes, he wanders. But it is Nadja who is really lost. She wanders into the everyday, Breton writes, which is to say, she is lost there.  Herewith, Breton anticipates what was to come in Lefebvre (but also in Heidegger, in Lukacs …): the great topic of the everyday.

The everyday: a topic I discovered – or was reminded of again – through writing in abandon at the blog. And isn’t this the chance blogging affords – to discover a writing which reveals much more immediately than a writing scholarly and indifferent, the particularities of an existence – of an individual life? This is not autobiography but the quest for a kind of reduction, an epoche that would discover in a life a leap into thinking. Writing unspellchecked and ungrammarchecked as drift and embarking … but this sounds too complacent …

Where is it taking you, you who by writing have lost hold on yourself and on work – upon that externalisation which would afford you the chance of societal approval? Hegel’s study of the animal spiritual kingdom opens the way to Marx’s notion of alienation. There is another discourse of alienation in Lukacs and Lefebvre’s studies of the everyday. But there is a welcome alienation where it is not the inner and the outer that exist in diremption; where the worker cannot recognise himself in his work and does not seek recognition; where work and worker reveal themselves as the fold of a more expansive economy. Is alienation the right word? Is it a question of defragmentation or of another experience of fragmentation? How is this experience bound to what the Surrealists or what the Situationists would understand as revolution?

This question instead: How to discover the everyday? It finds you. Oblivious, work devours the hours of your day. All time is worktime and space is that abstract distance which must be overcome. Boredom, unemployment, illness, retirement maroon you in the everyday. Time and space unchained from work become oppressive. Dust motes drift in the air. Your dwelling place spreads to include all time and all space; your boxroom encompasses the whole universe. Of course there are many modalities in which the everyday allows itself to be discovered. 2nd May 1989: let out of the warehouse early, I caught a glimpse of it, of the modern One-All, as it spread indifferently across the hi tech industrial estate. I saw it reflected on the lenses of the glasses of a girl at the railway station; I thought: remember that, for flashing there is the nothing into which the One-All loses itself; it is what there is only as there is nothing.

Breton’s book is a voyage into the everyday. Much of it is in diary form because he is afraid he will be lost there. Like the comedy sketch that shows rock climbers mounting an assault on a pavement tilted from the horizontal plane to a vertical one – mock-struggling climbers with crampons and rope whom pedestrians pass in amusement – there is something laughable about the idea of such a voyage. The everyday is here and it is everywhere. Ah, but it is has to be discovered and according to the familiar Heideggerian move, it is only when it breaks down that it might reveal itself in its truth. What does Nadja’s breakdown, her dispersal into the everyday reveal? She is lost, dissolved into the empty air. And what does Breton’s book Nadja reveal as it deterritorialises the novel, the memoir, the theoretical treatise?

Foolish dream of a proletariat of the everyday. Bored, dissolute, dispersed but who assemble in the Great Refusal. Cripples and lepers: St Lawrence brough them to the emperor who asked him to produce the treasures of the church. Treasures of capital: the early-retired, the unemployed and the sent-mad, the ones who do not work; the proletariat as the class of the critique of work.