Hi. Susan Tomaselli is taking a well-earned sabbatical from 3:AM this summer, so I’ll be stepping in as co-editor in chief, focusing on non-fiction. I’ve been commissioning for 3:AM since 2011, so some of you will know me, and will have worked with me already. But I’d like to say that, right now, I’m open for speculative pitches and submissions, and will be reading them continuously. So get in touch. I’ll be especially pleased to hear from you if you have an idea for an essay, interview or book review related to one of the following three areas, which I’m keen to increase our coverage of:

– Fiction in translation
– Contemporary American fiction, particularly work published by small presses
– Critical theory and continental philosophy

A brief word about book reviews: I love long-form criticism, and rarely impose word limits. As long as your writing is strong and self-consistent, I won’t ask you to simplify it for the sake of “accessibility.” Similarly, for fiction reviews, I don’t demand banal contextualization or plodding plot synopses. Online, the form and function of criticism are fair game for redefinition. I encourage criticism that is creative, unconventional, and that brings books into active collision with the lived experience of the critic. Of course, I’ll happily publish a thoughtful journalistic review. But if you’re willing to write something a little wilder, I’ll welcome it with open arms. If you’re wondering what I mean, here’s a favourite quote, from Geoffrey Hartman:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the critic has become a retainer to those in our society who want not the difficult reality but merely the illusion of literacy… if he becomes a journalist or reviewer he flatters, cajoles, and admonishes the authors of books whose profits keep the publishers happy and his own job relatively secure. The only critic, therefore, whom we must take seriously is one who may not yet exist: who overextends his art, having decided that his role is creative as well as judicious. The critic’s words should enter the world of art even as the arts and institutions he comments on have entered his. As the work of art is an event in the history of interpretation, so the work of interpretation is an event in the history of the work of art.

Thanks, and best wishes,
David Winters

Gordon Finlayson is the ubercool continental philosopher with Marxist-influenced radical, progressive, non-aligned politics lined up with modern Europen philosophy and critical theory. He is bold and deep. He finds Agamben on Aristotle rubbish, wonders how far the moral domain extends, throws light on what is bad about the abuse of things, believes Habermas to be very important as a political theorist, discusses the dispute between Habermas and Rawls,discusses the relevance of Kant, Hegel and Habermas on contemporary political and ethical thought, chews over the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Habermas’s objections to his critical theory, wonders about austere negativism, negative theology,the muteness of art works, the sinister crisis of Universities, the unreliability of Roger Scuton on anything left wing and how despite the overall bleakness of our contemporary world there are signs of hope. All in all, this is rad. Blowin’.

3:AM: Why did you become a philosopher? Were your politics a driver in this decision, or have they come after the philosophy?

Gordon Finlayson: I sidled into philosophy. I went to university originally to study English Literature. I took some philosophy too, but I found the introduction to moral philosophy I was given somewhat trite and uninspiring. I ended up taking Modern Languages because I was more interested in German and French literature. As my interest deepened and broadened, I branched out into 18th and 19th Century thought. It gradually dawned on me that I was more fascinated by the Denker than the Dichter, and I turned toward Modern European Philosophy and critical theory.

I won a D.A.A.D. scholarship to study ‘General and Comparative Literary Theory’ at what is now called the Peter Szondi Institute at the F.U. Berlin, where I first came to study the Frankfurt School. I already had an interest in Marx and Marxism, which meant that in Berlin in the mid-80s, when post-modernism was rife, I was a fish out of water. At the time, most of the German students, who were in perpetual occupation of some area of the Rostlaube, were reading Derrida or Foucault in autonomous seminars. I was spotted walking around with a copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man by Peter Halberg, translator and editor of the Swedish Edition of Benjamin’s Arcades project. He felt sorry for me and took me under his wing. I learnt a lot from him and from various of my other friends there.

I gradually worked my way into philosophy on my return from West Berlin. I planned to go to Cambridge to work on Nietzsche in the German Department. However, I heard Onora O’Neill give a talk on Kant at St. Andrews University. She was Professor at the University of Essex, which had a taught M.A. in Continental Philosophy, with core courses on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It was the only one in the country and seemed a sensible preparation for a D Phil on Nietzsche. In the end, I stayed there, and wrote a Ph.D. on Hegel’s criticism of Kant.

My politics are largely a matter of conviction, not applied philosophy. They were mainly driven by a sense, which has never left me, that there was something deeply wrong with Western capitalist society. I was surrounded by Marxists, both at school, and at some of the Universities where I studied and worked. At St. Andrews, mind you, most students were Conservative, which at the time meant Thatcherite, and even though I counted some of them personally as friends, I was instinctively repelled by the Thatcherite ideology. Consequently, I was both pushed and pulled towards Marx and Marxism, and inclined to the progressive and radical politics associated with them. Anyway, I made it my goal to find out more about Marx, which led me eventually to study Hegel and Kant, and German Idealism.

That said, I had been brought up by liberal, tolerant and non-doctrinaire parents, and the respect for individual freedom that they instilled in me made its mark. And even some of my most radical activist friends were fiercely anti-totalitarian. Like them, I had a critical and sceptical attitude to Marxism and especially to Eastern Bloc communism. I made several good friends who were brought up in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, respectively and who suffered under the communist regimes there, enough not to have any illusions about actually existing communism. These various convictions settled into a radical and progressive outlook, which has perhaps more pragmatic and less utopian as the years have passed. Nowadays, my politics are progressive non-aligned, issue driven, and pragmatic. It is important to be radical, where social and political problems are deeply rooted. At the same time, there is a time and place for conservatism about those things that are worth conserving. Blanqui’s radicalism – “Everything is bad. Something else must take its place!” (which could be the motto for much of Frankfurt School critical theory) – even though it might be well-motivated, is in the final analysis as undiscriminating as the reactionary instinct to preserve the status quo, and to see every attempt at amelioration as jeopardy.

3:AM: You are concerned to ensure that high standards of scholarship inform all radical thought. As an example, you criticize the Italian theorist Agamben for being sloppy. You rather think his reading of Aristotle in Homo Sacer is deeply flawed and his conclusion that ‘Today it is not the polis but the camp that is the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West’ based on his reading is just wrong. Yet his conclusion that there is a ‘previously concealed common link secretly governing the ideologies of the 20th century totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin … and the institutions of Western liberal democracy’ is one heard quite often in some circles. Can you tell us about why Agamben shouldn’t be taken seriously, and whether there are other well-known culprits of inflamed conclusions based on poor work. Do you see philosophy as having an important role in preventing this kind of bad thinking?

GF: Well not all criticism is scholarly, but some is. And where social and philosophical critics are scholars, like Agamben claims to be, the quality of their scholarship affects the quality of their thought and can impair or enhance their criticisms. Actually, I think Agamben should be taken seriously. I find some of what he says provocative and interesting. However, what he writes about Aristotle is, well, I was going to say cavalier, but I really mean rubbish. I’ve taught Aristotle for 15 years or so, and though I certainly would not consider myself an Aristotle scholar, I know some of his work well. I noticed that many of my students – particularly MA students who were new to philosophy, and or did not know much Ancient philosophy, were taking at face value what Agamben writes about Aristotle’s Politics, particularly what he writes about the supposed distinction between ‘bios’ and ‘zoē’ as fact, on the grounds that he is supposed to be a super-erudite classical scholar.

I was suspicious. What he said clashed with everything I knew about Aristotle. Also, whenever I checked something – for example I looked up most of Aristotle’s uses of the terms ‘bios’ and ‘zōē’ and related words and phrases in Bonitz’s Index Aristotelicus – I found the evidence conflicted with Agamben’s assertions. He appeared to base his reading of Aristotle on passing remarks by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt – thinkers, incidentally, whom I also take very seriously, and indeed admire, but not as authorities on Aristotle – and then piece these together with other bits of theory from Walther Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The result is a preposterous thesis about the destiny of Western Politics – we are all supposed to be captivated by a paradigm of politics dating back to Aristotle, which paradigm is ‘secretly’ responsible for the worst atrocities of the twentieth Century among everything else. It seemed preposterous in at least four different ways.

First, there is not just one tradition of Western political philosophy. It’s a whole tangle of different traditions, movements and counter-movements, which pull in many different directions. It’s at least as plausible to claim that Western politics rests on a single paradigm of political thought dating from Hobbes’s break with Scholasticism and Aristotelianism.

Second, since the 4th Century B.C. there have been innumerable smart and well-informed people reflecting on politics, why has no-one noticed this hidden paradigm until Agamben?

Third, though I’m not one to downplay the role of ideas and theories in shaping political reality, their influence is diffuse, opaque, riddled with contingencies. Claiming that there is a discernible link between Aristotle’s Politics and, say, modern liberalism, not to mention the Nazi deathcamps, stretches credulity to breaking point.

Fourth, the actual passages from Aristotle that Agamben quotes do not support his claims; they say almost the opposite.

Having said that, I did not write that article to divest the crow of his peacock’s feathers. A good thing too, because, as I was revising my piece, I found that the Cornell scholar, Laurent Dubreuil had done that far more effectively than I could. I wrote the article because I think the virtues of good scholarship are fundamentally important to humanities disciplines, and that critical theorists who are worth their salt cannot afford to treat them lightly. I respect good scholarship. It’s hard, slow, and often unrewarding. The reason it is unrewarding, is that like some craftsmanship, the better it is, the less you notice it. Maurice Blanchot puts the point better than I could. “Critical writing has this peculiarity: the more it realizes, develops and affirms itself, the more it has to efface itself… Not only does it not impose itself on the object, and take care that it does not replace that of which it speaks, but rather it only fulfils and successfully carries out its aim, when it vanishes. ” It’s just the opposite with Agamben. His scholarliness is meretricious. That is why he has such a reputation for his erudition: not among classical scholars of course, but among high profile academics who you think should know better. Ernesto Laclau, for example, praises his “dazzling classical erudition.”
To my mind Agamben’s work is all about emulating a certain gesture and pathos that one finds in Heidegger about the fate of Western metaphysics, and to some extent also in Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. Agamben’s trick is to claim to do something similar for Western politics.

But just as some Derrideans, who claim to reject an entire tradition of Western metaphysics, vastly oversimplify and homogenize that tradition in order to confect something ready for deconstruction, so Agamben makes his grand narrative up. And I don’t buy the argument that Agamben is deliberately purveying what he knows to be a fictional ‘counternarrative’, in order to contest the prevailing ideology. It is not as if his writing is redolent with irony. Dubreuil is right. Agamben’s ex cathedra pronouncements about Aristotle, and the ancient world, on which he bases his thesis about Western politics, claim scholarly authority, but don’t stand up to scrutiny.

3:AM: Your philosophy is politically engaged at all sorts of levels. So when you ask why things matter – beginning with an example of breaking things as a child and why even those things mattered even though easily replaceable – you brood on how we’ve thought about things mattering and found that actually we don’t philosophize about it. Except Heidegger, who did. And Christine Korsgaard who does in footnotes. Why do you find Korsgaard’s approach a good start and how do you develop your thoughts about things? And why do you think things matter?

GF: You’ve picked on rather quirky piece of mine. I was asked to talk to a conference entitled Real Things: Matter, Materiality and Representation. I had no idea that there was a branch of theory (in the broadest sense) called ‘thing theory’. But I had always been interested in how far the moral domain extended – to animals, to the environment, to material things. And Adorno’s work makes one think about the ethical dimension of one’s relation to the material world. So I decided to investigate to the question of whether and to what extent real things matter, morally speaking.

To your first question, Korsgaard is, to my knowledge, the only contemporary philosopher of any moment who has even begun to address this issue. And she canvasses the thought that we might have duties “not only to our fellow creatures, but to our fellow entities” only at the “risk of being thought a complete lunatic.” I don’t think she is a lunatic, but I do think that that her Kantian moral theory is not a promising basis on which to pursue such an inquiry. I take a broader, more historical, and phenomenological approach.

Ironically, given what I’ve just said above, it began with a reflection on how in the history of Western metaphysics, in what A. O. Lovejoy called ‘the Great Chain of Being’, and in the axiological hierarchy that chain represents, inanimate material objects occupy a rather lowly place. This goes hand in hand with a certain ethical outlook that is primarily concerned with the obligations that we owe to other human beings. These two views seemed to me to be natural partners.

But there are other important factors that govern our attitudes toward things. In our world, most things are the property of someone. And proprietors dispose absolutely of their property. What they do with it, is completely up to them. As Proudhon puts it, a proprietor may “allow his crops to rot underfoot; sow his field with salt; milk his cows on the sand; change his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park.” Legally speaking it is in the main perfectly acceptable to maltreat one’s material (inanimate) possessions. Finally, in our commodity-rich consumer society artefacts are nearly all readily substitutable with like for like equivalents. If something gets broken or lost a replacement can in most cases easily be found, and this affects our sense of the value of things, as opposed to the value of persons.

My rather speculative idea is that these several factors have had the effect of narrowing the ethical domain to that of our relations to other persons, and thus of expelling things from the realm of ethical values and obligations. The effects of this are hard to gauge. Perhaps it helps explain why our domestic lives, and our economy and society in general, are governed by instrumental relations, and patterns of exploitation of nature and material objects, rather than, say relations of care, stewardship, trust, or whatever.

3:AM: You write: ‘The wrong or the bad in the destruction, damage, neglect, abuse of things, whether intentional or not, has a different shade. It has the shade of desuetude, the cessation of an attachment to something there is reason to value, and the desolation of something that no longer belongs.’
Is your thought that many of the horrors of the contemporary (such as the abandonment of civil values, political and intellectual decency, ecological and social care, the absence of fairness and public endorsement of greed) can be understood in these terms? Are, for example, the protests of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, for example, motivated by such feelings of desolation? And do you think that the difference between, say, the Occupy protests and the Tea party is largely to do with the sense of desuetude that the Tea Party lot seem to miss?

GF: No. I was trying to throw some light on what is bad about the damage, or neglect, or abuse of things. I was trying to specify the moral hue of that particular kind of badness. Maybe ‘moral’ is the wrong word to describe this. There are many varieties of badness and of human wrongs. Human life is reticulated by the things that surround them. Each of these things calls to be treated in a certain way, and accordingly can be treated well or badly. In that sense all living beings have a certain fellowship with things. If one sees things merely as property one loses sight of that fellowship. I was trying to say what the fellowship consisted in, and, at the same time, to explain why almost no philosophers or social scientists appear to find such questions worthy of philosophical interest. I don’t think I succeeded. I only managed to provide an initial orientation for an unfinished philosophical inquiry.

As for the Tea Party, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, I’d be wary of making connections between my philosophical first thoughts about the value of things, even when more properly developed, and these difficult terrains. These are political topics which require expert knowledge I don’t possess. Of course I have opinions, worked up from my selective intake of news reports etc.. But these are not direct applications of my philosophical views.

One thing I will say is that the Arab Spring, and Occupy are genuine political movements, based on real grievances and a proper sense of injustice. The Tea Party, so far as I can tell is an entirely astro-turfed lobbying organization for far right interests, in hock to the NRA and other such organisations. I note that it is campaigning against Dianne Feinstein’s to my mind sensible bill to halt the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity weaponry. The Tea Party’s self-declared mission is to campaign on any issue that threatens “the security…or domestic tranquillity of our beloved nation.” They argue that the proposed partial gun control – limiting access to semi-automatic firearms and military assault weapons – jeopardizes their beloved domestic security and tranquillity, and that what is needed in order to protect it is for more people to carry such weapons, including armed guards in schools! What can you say to such a preposterous view? It goes beyond reactionary. The recently deceased A. O. Hirschman pointed out that perversity arguments, like the argument that the proposed measure will achieve the contrary result to the one intended, are the favoured rhetorical techniques of reactionaries. Here we have The Tea Party putting forward a perversity argument that is a reductio ad absurdum of all perversity arguments. You don’t need a philosopher, historian or sociologist to point out what is wrong with it. Rather you need a social psychologist to explain why some people are inclined to believe it in the first place. That is the kind of question that ideology criticism and later the critical theory of society was supposed to answer.

3:AM: You find Habermas enormously important in liberal political theory. Can you say something about Habermas and why he’s so important?

GF: Yes. That’s easy. First let me say that Habermas is an important political theorist, but whether he is a liberal political theorist or not is another question. He’s recently stated that he considers himself a “left-liberal”. But what the means in Germany is rather different from what it means in the UK or the US. Let me explain what I mean. There are obvious senses in which Habermas is anything but liberal. He does not begin from the assumption that the political system is there chiefly to protect private interests, and to safeguard the negative freedom of individual persons to pursue those interests (compatibly with everyone else’s freedom to do likewise) unhindered by the state or other citizens. He offers a critique of that kind of liberal political theory for bowdlerizing political reality, ignoring the social complexity and social differentiation of modern political associations. And he has quite a lot to say about the role of the state, as the seat of a political system the function of which is to produce legitimate law, and to safeguard the free flow of discourses in which public opinion and democratic opinions can form. He is no advocate of the small state, even if he acknowledges the decline in its reach.

In neither of those very common ways of understanding the term ‘liberal’ can Habermas properly be called a liberal political theorist. Nor does he think that the job of the state is merely to facilitate the free market. So he is not a liberal in that third sense either. Finally, although he argues that the liberal idea of individual human rights and the republican idea of popular sovereignty are equiprimordial and mutually complementary, it is clear that ultimately it is popular sovereignty – albeit under modern, post-conventional conditions – that is to use Austin’s politically incorrect phrase, the trouser concept, and this is true of Habermas’s understanding of democratic legitimacy, and his ideal of good functioning of the political system, his conception of the open ended, constitution, and of his interpretation of German constitutional law. In his conception of liberal democracy, it is democracy that has the upper hand.

That said, he does defend the idea of individual rights and the rule of law, in his own manner, and he also argues that a liberal political culture in which citizens are free to make up their own minds and voice their opinions is both desirable in itself and a functional prerequisite of democratic politics. So there are important components of liberal political theory that are built-in to his theory of democratic legitimacy. He has therefore always adopted a very defensive position on the rule of law, which he thinks must be preserved, albeit not at the expense of the democratic process, which replenishes the source of legitimacy on which legality depends. I guess that this is what most inclines him against Marxist theories that sees law and legitimacy as the expressions of class interests of the bourgeoisie that are bound to the capitalist relations of production. Generally speaking Habermas is accused of being a liberal by Marxists. Liberals in any of the three senses outlined above – defenders of a small state, of a free market, and believers in the pre-political rights of individuals – probably view him as a radical social democrat.
So, to answer your question, Habermas is an important social and political theorist for several reasons.

First, there is the richness and suggestiveness of his account in Theory of Communicative Action of how communication and discourse facilitate social integration and provide social cohesion in modern societies, an account which dovetails with his diagnosis of the pathologies of modern societies. One of his most important ideas is that of the colonisation of the lifeworld, and the erosion of freedom and the concomitant depoliticisation of social life at the hands of the market, and the various arms of the state.

Second, he is one of few political theorists to have has made a contribution to moral theory. In the 1980s he developed the idea for a Discourse Ethics, a discourse theory of morality, which is an intersubjective cousin of Kantian deontology, influenced by Apel, Mead and Kohlberg and others.

Third, he puts forward an extended argument for the very ambitious thesis that the modern constitutional state and the rule of law are not to be had without radical democracy, or a recognizable version of popular sovereignty that is compatible with modern, mass, complex and differentiated, multicultural societies, and a state whose reach and power, in relation to the global economy, has declined.

Fourth, he developed albeit in phases from the 1970’s onwards, a theory of deliberative democracy, long before such ideas took hold in the various traditions of analytic political philosophy. He really was a deliberative democrat avant la lettre.
There are many other reasons why Habermas has (and deserves to have) such a high cultural, intellectual and academic profile especially, but not only, in Germany and Europe.

Consider the range of his influence. His work on the public sphere, his Habilitation thesis – Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – was and still is a seminal text in 18th Century and Enlightenment studies. In the 1970s he inherited the mantle of Frankfurt School critical theory, and proposed nothing less than a transformation of historical materialism.

One of his nicer insights was that the flawed assumption that changes in the socio-economic infrastructure would automatically bring about transformations in the superstructure, (which would then bring about individual and collective well-being), was common both to historical materialism, and to the technocratic governance of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 50s and 60s, where political ‘decisions’ were reinterpreted as the management of the effects of steering-mechanisms, implementing strategies to deliver low-inflation, economic growth, and full-employment. In Habermas’s eyes Marxist theory and neo-conservative politicians conspired to occlude, and to eviscerate what was left of, the democratic basis of political legitimacy, and thus unwittingly weakened the rule of law, and the freedoms it protected.

He has a rich and comprehensive theory of modernity which brings to light the various ways in which the process of rationalisation puts itself in jeopardy, and which has a bearing on work in an array of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Habermas’s work is taken seriously by academics currently working in Sociology departments, English Departments, Cultural Theory departments, Political Science, Law departments and Philosophy departments. Few theorists in any discipline command such wide appeal. That is a good mark of his significance.

In addition to that, for the last few decades Habermas has been one of Germany’s and Europe’s foremost public intellectuals. One can easily forgets that he started off as a journalist and that at least half of his work consists in articles and published interviews intended for a public readership in newspapers, weekly magazines, and other non-academic written media. In 2008 his Kleine Politische Schriften, by no means all of his occasional writing, amounted to 11 volumes. I cannot keep up with them all. And if they were his only contribution to posterity, they would be more than enough for a lifetime’s work. Habermas takes his role as a public intellectual extremely seriously.

I think he saw himself as a kind of agent provocateur on behalf of democracy and the rule of law, smoking out forces of reaction and complacency wherever he found them. In 1953 he published an excoriating article on Heidegger in the FAZ. Heidegger had just republished a speech he made in 1935 in which he talked of “the inner truth and greatness of this movement.” Habermas took that to be an allusion to National Socialism, and a sign that Heidegger had failed or simply refused to acknowledge and to deal with his association with the Nazi regime. Just 24 at the time, Habermas was criticized for undue moralism and alarmism and for wanting to persecute the greatest philosopher of the age.

In the mid-1960s during the student protests he was equally vocal in his denunciation of Police violence against the students (which culminated in the fatal shooting of a student by a plain clothes policeman in West-Berlin) as he was of the blind activism and revolutionary violence of the students. On both sides, he saw a threat to an incipient, but still fragile, democratic state and liberal democratic culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. He did not play to the radical student gallery. He was not afraid of making enemies on the political Right and the Left. It has recently been claimed by Matthew Specter, in my view justifiably, that one of Habermas’s great achievement as a (West)-German citizen was to sensitize the left to “an appreciation for the normative and institutional value of a liberal constitutional order”.

Thirdly, Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

3:AM: A key discussion in contemporary liberal theory of ethics and politics is the relationship and differences between Habermas and Rawls. Can you say something about what you take the main points of dispute are and where you stand on this?

GF: Sure. In my view, despite the amount of ink that has been spilt on Habermas and Rawls in their respective fields, relatively little attention has been paid to the dispute between them. This is largely because influential commentators and critics were quick to judge their exchange in the Journal of Philosophy a damp squib.

This was in part because expectations ran high, at the time, because two of the greatest social and political theorists of the 20th century, although working in different traditions, roughly analytic political philosophy and German Social theory had engaged each other in debate. It was also because in truth neither thinker was sufficiently well apprised of the detail of the others theory – unsurprisingly really, since they worked in very different traditions and each had just spent the last few years writing their own major work of political theory. Finally, everyone at the time, including the disputants themselves, were seduced by the assumption that the salient point of comparison between their respective theories was Habermas’s principle (U) and his conception of the moral standpoint, and Rawls’s argument that the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by a rational and reasonable persons in the Original Position. Almost everyone who has written on Habermas and Rawls makes that particular mistake.

My take on that is straightforward. The debate between them concerns their respective political theories. It is basically a dispute between Rawls’s theory of Political Liberalism, and Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law. It is not primarily a dispute between Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Habermas Discourse Ethics. Principle (U) is the central idea in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics, which is a moral theory, not a theory of law or of democratic legitimacy, while the argument from the Original Position takes a back seat in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. People who interpret the Habermas Rawls dispute in the light of the contrast between Habermas’s principle (U) and Rawls’s Original Position, are looking at the wrong thing and so miss the real points of dispute.

What people should have been asking is this. What are the central organizing ideas of their respective political theories, and on what significant points do these ideas conflict? To my mind the real point of dispute concerns their different conception of the political and of democratic legitimacy. According to Rawls “ the liberal principle of legitimacy” implies that legitimate laws, laws whose enforcement is properly justified to those who must live under them, may not appeal to principles and ideas insofar as they form part of any comprehensive philosophical or moral doctrine, but only insofar as they form part of an overlapping consensus of all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. For various reasons, Habermas has to deny this. For one thing, he maintains that morality, that is principle (U) and the norms it validates, constrain what can count as legitimate law. Habermas claims at various places that that legitimate laws must “harmonize with the universal principles of justice and solidarity”. More precisely he writes that “a legal order can be legitimate only if it does not contradict basic moral principles.” Whatever way you look at it Habermas’s conception of morality (and his theory of Discourse Ethics) is what Rawls would call comprehensive moral (or philosophical) doctrines. The fact that Habermas calls his theory ‘proceduralist’ is irrelevant. After all he claims that substantive moral norms, namely all those norms that are validated by the procedure – namely discourse in conformity to (U) – constrain legitimate laws on pain of giving rise to cognitive dissonance (between moral and legal demands). There are other important differences too. Habermas allows that conceptions of the good may be germane to the justification of legitimate law, a claim that Rawls again, must deny. Finally, Rawls is right to claim that Habermas’s conception of legitimacy is comprehensive, at least in one obvious sense: it presupposes that a controversial philosophical theory is true, namely discourse ethics.

3:AM: You ask whether Hegel’s Critique of Kant applies to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Kant, Hegel and Habermas are all philosophers people may have heard of but perhaps not really understood why they are significant for contemporary political and ethical thought. Can you say something about why we should be interested in these three figures and how you answer your question?

GF: Do you think it is the case that people have not understood why Kant is important to contemporary ethical and political thought? I’d be surprised if that were true. After all nearly every contemporary moral philosopher takes a position for or against Kant. Think of the animus of Bernard Williams’s ethical theory against “morality the peculiar institution” as he calls it: in other words, the moral standpoint as Kant conceived it. Some theorists, Habermas, George Herbert Mead, Lawrence Kohlberg, think that Kantian conception of morality is embedded deep in our moral consciousness. That may or may not be true. But it cannot be denied that Kant, in contrast to, say, Mill, whose influence has waned, has remained stubbornly central to the canon of Western moral philosophy.
In political philosophy Kant’s influence – surprisingly perhaps the influence of Kant’s moral theory rather than of his political theory, which is poorly understood – is, if anything even stronger. This is probably due to Rawls, who for one reason or another became central to modern political philosophy. He called his approach Kantian constructivism.

With Hegel the case is different. I’d say that he is the philosopher who gave not the only, but the most focused, systematic and insightful, diagnosis of the failures of the modern world, and of the habitus of modern subjects, and the most vigorous defense of its achievements. And while he undoubtedly tended to overemphasize the power of reason and the reach of philosophy, he did in the main refrain from dispensing remedies.
He also was the first political philosopher to recognize that the task of political philosophy is to render intelligible the bases and the structure of modern ethical life, both its institutions, and its non-institutional prerequisites. He realized that philosophy should leave the task of the actual politics of the moment to those whose business it was.

Hegel also has a number of very telling criticisms of Kantianism. And given the enduring importance of Kant, these are of lasting significance. In retrospect it is obvious that some very prominent debates in political philosophy, for example the communitarian criticism of Rawls in the 1980s and 90s, and some of the current discussion about the merits of ideal and real theory, are after echoes of Hegel’s criticism of Kant.

My argument that Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s moral theory also applies to discourse ethics, is an indirect way of showing the enduring relevance of Hegel’s philosophy. Habermas often claimed that his theory of Discourse Ethics reconstructs the moral standpoint in a way that is immune from Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s moral standpoint. In an article I wrote long time ago now, I showed that it depended how one interpreted Hegel’s criticism of Kant. Hegel claims that Kant’s conception of the Categorical Imperative, as the Formula of the Universal Law, is an empty formalism because any maxim can be reformulated so as to pass the test. But that of course is an easy criticism for Kantians to rebut: they just have to show that there is at least one maxim that fails the test of universalizability contained in the Categorical Imperative. On my interpretation Hegel objects to Kant’s account of the way in which form is given to content – the very idea of maxim testing. On its own, without the institutional basis of law – Recht – and without the uninstitutionalized sense of social order, the behavioural attitudes, values and sense of propriety that people possess as citizens, without, that is, ethical life, morality as the external effect of pure reason is not in a position to regulate social actions.

[photo from www.citelighter.com]

On the face of it Habermas thinks of morality very unlike Kant as a social medium by which modern moral agents coordinate their interactions by way of communication and discourse without the need for external mechanisms or coercion. However, Habermas’s conception of the moral standpoint – discourse in accordance with principle (U) involves a similar idea to Kant’s .

Principle (U) states that: “a norm is valid if and only if the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be freely accepted jointly by all concerned.”
Candidate norms are fed in from situation in the lifeworld into the procedure of moral discourse, in which norms are filtered out if they cannot be welcomed from the perspective of the interest and values conceptions of everyone affected by the(counterfactual) implementation of the norm. That is a very severe condition for a candidate norm to have to meet, especially when you consider how wide the constituency of “all affected” is. Habermas admits that as a consequence very few norms pass the test successfully. But that means that there are very few valid moral norms, in which case morality and moral discourse is not fit play the central social role of action-coordination and social integration that Habermas assigns it. So it seems that Habermas’s discourse Ethics is after all vulnerable Hegel’s argument against Kant’s moral standpoint.

3:AM: Habermas takes a cognitivist perspective to morality. He’s debated this with Hilary Putnam and thinks that it is a crucial component of his ethical thinking because his discourse ethics has got to be able to provide a justification of the moral standpoint that a rational moral skeptic will find convincing. Can you say something about what you make of this and does it survive the Frege-Geach challenge that you discuss?

JF: This point is point is of interest only to those who think that Habermas’s theory of language can be made to work, or who want to make it work. I think we need to detach the question of whether there can be a philosophical justification of the moral standpoint, and whether there needs to be, from the question of whether one is a cognitivist about morality, and if so in what sense. I believe, along with quite a few others, such as Konrad Ott, Christoph Lumer, and Joseph Heath to name a few, that Habermas does not succeed in justifying the moral standpoint, but I also think that this is not essential to his programme of Discourse Ethics.

As for Habermas’s cognitivism that is tricky. The term “cognitivist” is used in many different ways. Habermas uses it to mean that moral statements are rational, and hence reason sensitive, and that morality is learning process. That said, because of his peculiar pragmatic theory of language he denies that moral statements – or to use his terminology – statements that make validity claims to rightness, are in the running for truth, and that any are literally true. He has to deny this because on his view moral statements operate in a different validity dimension: they make validity claims to rightness, which are, he claims only analogous to validity claims to truth. This feature of his theory puts him in the same basket as emotivists, and projectivists and expressivists, who are often referred to for that very reason as non-cognitivist. (Whether or not they accept that designation is another matter.)

The Frege-Geach problem is directed at theorists who think that the meaning of moral statements is different in kind from the meaning of descriptive terms. At the time I wrote that paper I was working with a fairly restricted view of what the Frege-Geach problem was. I looked at only one part of the much larger problem, which is how the moral non-cognitivist can explain, say, why the moral modus ponens argument is valid, while denying that moral statements have truth-conditional meaning.

1. If murder is wrong, then attempted murder is wrong.
2. Murder is wrong
3. Attempted murder is wrong
This is a problem for Habermas, because it appears he must hold that while 1. makes a validity claim to truth, 2 and 3 make validity claims to rightness. What then licenses the conclusion? How does the truth claim in 1, cooperate with the rightness claim in 2. to warrant the conclusion 3?
Now the Frege-Geach problem may be more wider-ranging and complex than I assumed. Non-cognitivists typically claim that the meaning of ordinary descriptive terms like ‘red’ is different in kind from moral terms like ‘wrong’. The trouble is that in natural languages moral terms and ordinary descriptive terms play the same kind of semantic role in every complex linguistic construction. Non-cognitivists have to explain the meaning of those complex moral sentences, and indeed mixed sentences that conjoin moral and descriptive elements. They also have to produce a compositional semantics, a semantics which explains how the meaning of a complex linguistic construction is a function of the atomic meaning of their parts, and explain why ordinary descriptive terms function in exactly the same way as moral ones even though the meaning of the former is allegedly different in kind from that of the latter.

That said, the narrow problem is enough to convict Habermas, just because he insists that moral judgments make validity claims to rightness, and that these are different in kind to validity claims to truth, he is in the same boat as the non-cognitivists. On his view, it is puzzling why moral argumentation is (formally) valid, and why the patterms of inference are homologous in the practical and theoretical domains. Blithely asserting , as Habermas does, that rightness is analogous with truth, won’t wash. It merely begs the various questions against the non-cognitivist that arise from the problem Geach poses.

3:AM: A Nietzschean skeptic like Brian Leiter will argue that claims of morality are all false (although some are better than others for flourishing nonetheless.) He’ll claim that the sort of ethical accounts given by Habermas that make a certain kind of rational agency central are fantasies. What do you say to this?

GF: What I would say to him partly depends on Brian’s reasons for saying what he does: and on whether his position is that all moral judgments are literally false, or that they are not even in the running for truth. Suppose he’s an error theorist. John Mackie also thinks that although all moral statements aspire to truth, they are nonetheless all sweepingly false. I’m not convinced by error theory. In Mackie’s case it is a very clever way of marrying a certain naturalistic ontology with a fairly common sense view of the semantics of moral statements.

Moral statements must be false, Mackie thinks, because there are no queer, i.e. intrinsically motivating, properties to which they refer. But that is a fairly drastic position to take. Do we have to believe that only the existence of a queer property can make a moral statement true? No. We can make a cleaner division between our semantic theory and our metaphysics and separate out our account of what it is for a statement to be true or false, from our account of what there is. Then we have no need to invoke the metaphysical bogeyman of queer properties, even if we think that moral judgments are in the running for truth and that some are true.

What I don’t like about the position is the view that all our moral judgments are false and that, notwithstanding this, we keep believing them anyway. Why does the ordinary forensic process of experience, whereby falsehoods are eventually discovered, overturned and, when all goes well, replaced by truths, not function in this case? Skeptics about ‘morality’ owe an explanation for the fact that morality as a whole (not in part) has proven to be pretty durable and that people have continued to hold their moral beliefs, with as much certainty as their ordinary epistemic beliefs.

Marxists, most of whom are probably not error theorists, although they could be – also sometimes hold that morality is a kind of illusion, the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Their explanation for its adhesiveness is that morality is an ideology, a false belief which is functionally necessary to the existence of reproduction of the institutions of bourgeois life, in which co-operative virtues, propriety and private property are particularly highly prized. That explanation, if true, would undermine and destabilize the moral views and practice of those who held it, since it is not compatible with their continuing to be moralists or indeed to be moral. That materialist view of morality as ideology not only threatens certain philosophical views of the world, and certain approaches to law and political philosophy – theoretical moralisms – it threatens actually existing morality too, the kind of morality that Brian Leiter among others has quite a lot of.

3:AM: Talking of Nietzsche, (as an aside) you have interesting things to say about Hegel’s notion of tragedy that contradicts Goethe’s 1824 statement that ‘everything tragic rests on irresolvable opposition. As soon as resolution enters or becomes possible the tragic vanishes.’ Can you say something about this?

GF: This refers to what was my first published paper, “Conflict and Reconciliation in Hegel’s Theory of the Tragic.” Most people believe, like Goethe, that irresolvable conflict is essential to tragedy, such that genuine tragedy is inimical to resolution. Hegel does not. He holds something more like the view that a tragic conflict is a clash between two powers, two equal rights, that remains intractable at the level of the outlooks and self-conceptions of the protagonists (subjective spirit), but which can eventually be resolved at the level of objective spirit.

The most vehement critics of Hegel reject dismiss his conception of the tragic. In particular they reject his curious reading of the Antigone, which he reads as a clash of two equally righteous ethical powers represented by Creon and Antigone respectively. “Creon is not a tyrant, but an ethical power just as much as Antigone.” Hegel argues that each of these figures contains within them the force to which they think they are opposed. Antigone is not only beholden to Creon as a citizen and protegée of the Theban polis, she is also the daughter of Oedipus and Haemon’s fiancée. She is thus and should have recognized his authority, both political and familial, and obeyed his edict. Conversely, Creon is not only the ruler and protector of Thebes, but a father and husband, and more importantly an uncle to Antigone, his niece and daughter-in-law to be. So he should have respected the sanctity of familial relations and not condemned Antigone to be entombed.

Thus there is immanent to both Antigone and Creon exactly that against which each turns, so that each is gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own sphere of existence. (15, 549)
There is a lot of textual evidence that I won’t go into here to suggest that Hegel’s reading of the play downplays Creon’s and exaggerates Antigone’s failings, in order to make it fit Hegel’s conception of the tragic. It is also quite difficult to see where the moment of reconciliation is in this story, although Hegel insists that it is there and arises from the moment of Enlightenment where by both protagonists recognize and acknowledge their error, and thus transcend their one-sided ness. It can look as if Hegel is shoehorning the plot of Antigone in order to make it fit into his theory of the tragic, and that he does so because otherwise, without such interpretative violence, his thesis that the Antigone is “the absolute exemplum of tragedy” would convict his own theory of the tragic.

This is particularly so if one thinks of an Hegelian Aufhebung as a resolution in the musical sense as a movement from dissonance to consonance, and as a return to the tonic.
It struck me that although that there was something odd about Hegel’s interpretation of the Antigone, there was something plausible about his conception of the tragic. By no means is it the case that all tragedies end badly, with no hint of reconciliation or transfiguration: think of the endings of Sophocles, Philoctetes, Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus, and especially the last of the Oresteian Trilogy, the Eumenides.

I think that the crucial point about Hegel’s theory is that it is a theory of the tragic, rather than a theory about tragedies, and, Hegel being Hegel it is an attempt at a unified theory of the tragic on the basis of a fragmented, sparse and somewhat contradictory basis of evidence.

More interesting than the fact that Hegel’s view inclines him to a somewhat tendentious reading of the Antigone, is that however much he may exalt that drama, his model of the tragic, and its place in ethical life, is Aeschylus’s Eumenides, which ends with the founding of the court of the Areopagus and a triumphal procession whereby the Erinyes are led to their position as “venerable gods” within the new lawful order. Insofar as that is a resolution it is not one in the musical sense: dissonance conflict does not vanish. It is transfigured and preserved. That is a resolution in exactly the sense of an Hegelian Aufhebung as I understand it.

I also try to show that Hegel’s account of the truly tragic fits nicely with what Aristotle writes in the Poetics about what features the most tragic plots have, particularly his account of the ‘peripiteia’: a reversal of an intentional act into its unintended opposite, precipitated by some error of judgment.

My argument against the many critics of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is that Hegel’s theory is more nuanced than his many critics appreciate, and that it is better supported by the available evidence – extant ancient tragic dramas, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in the Poetics. I’m afraid I might disappoint you here. There is no dramatic conclusion about a tragic sense of life, of the kind one finds in Unamuno or the young Nietzsche. I just present an interpretation Hegel’s theory of the tragic, and defend it from its detractors.

3:AM: You are an expert the Frankfurt School theorists. Could you say something about this and why it is still a significant force, especially when discussing politics, art and ethics in modernity? In particular can you explain its relationship with Marxist and Liberal theories because where often they are seen as opposing theories they kind of come together at points in this school don’t they?

GF: I think I have answered the second of your questions in respect to Habermas’s conception of the political. And you are dead right, in Habermas elements of Marxism and Liberalism come together. As a matter of fact, I don’t consider Habermas a member of the Frankfurt School. I think the whole idea that there is a first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, comprising Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse among others, and a second generation comprising Habermas and some of his pupils, and then a Third generation, is although it can be a convenient label, factually inaccurate and theoretically misconceived. Habermas was for a very short period the assistant to Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He was then levered out of the institute by Horkheimer who considered him a dangerous Marxist and went to Marburg to complete his Habilitation. Although he went back to Frankfurt in 1964 he refused the offer to become director of the Institute. He left in 1971 with several of his pupils as research assistants to become director of the Max Plank Institute in Starnberg. So it would me more accurate, and much less misleading to think of Habermas as a first generation Starnberg Theorist.

The Frankfurt school label applies much more readily to Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse, and their colleagues at the Institute of Social Research, although if anything these were the second wave of theorists. And they were not really a school. There was no shared doctrine. According to Habermas, when he was there, “there was no Critical Theory, no coherent doctrine” just a certain loose commitment to Hegelian Marxism. However, Adorno and Horkheimer collaborated very closely in the 1940s and co-wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Why should we still read the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? We should read them because there is something very compelling about their diagnoses of the age. However much things have moved on historically and culturally, the problems facing us have remained stubbornly unsolved since the end of the Second World War. Technology and science develop and improve, but people’s lives don’t. Productivity increases and still poverty, inequality, and misery exist. Wealth increase, but general well-being does not. Our lives are regimented with technological devices that supposedly save time and labour, and yet people seem to be busier and have less time than ever before.

Another reason why they are of interest is that they are not shy of attempting to connect up all the various different areas of social and cultural life. This is a feature of their philosophy that they inherit from Hegel and German Idealism. They are purveyors of theory on a grand scale. Framed within wide intellectual and cultural horizons their work has a great richness and interest. Much contemporary philosophy works within narrow compartments on increasingly specialized material.

At the same time, we need to read these authors critically. Too many followers take what they say at face value. In Adorno’s case that is dangerous. What Adorno says of works of art, that what they say “is not what their words say” is true also of his own writings. The ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ Myth become Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to Myth taken at face value looks like a simple-minded perversity argument, that the process of enlightenment produces the very opposite aim of the one it intended. But of course enlightenment is not a simple, monolithic process with a unitary aim. One can tell from the way he writes that he does not intend his readers to take everything he writes literally. He is continually provoking and challenging his readers to think for themselves.

The relation to Marxism and Liberalism is complicated. For one thing the members of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’, even if one confines this to an inner circle and excludes outliers like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, do not speak with one voice. And in each case their relation to Marxism and Liberalism is far from straightforward. I’ve talked a little bit about Habermas’s relation to liberalism and to Rawls’s political philosophy above. So let us take Adorno as an example.

He does help himself to some ideas of Marx, for example the notion of the commodity fetish and of ideology. But they become something very different in his hands, tools of analysis and criticism, detached from their original context in Marx. At the same time he is fiercely critical of productivism, the view that the increase of productive forces, once freed from capitalist relations of production, will bring about social happiness; and he is dismissive of the vulgar Marxist reduction of the cultural, intellectual and spiritual aspects of society to mere expressions of an economic infrastructure.

As for liberalism, Adorno is scathing of the liberal picture of society as a cooperative association between individuals all pursuing their private interests. At the same time he is almost pathologically allergic to anything that smacks of collectivism, and his conception of practice tends to be limited to his encouraging individuals to develop capacities to resist assimilation in the prevailing. In his hostility towards conceptions of positive freedom, where freedom is construed as the participation of individuals in forms of collective self-rule, he is on the side of the arch liberals, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper.

3:AM: A question haunting the Frankfurt School is whether social and political theories claiming to be critical can be normative. Habermas addressed this when he looked at Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment but there are difficulties with this approach aren’t there? Can you say what these are?

GF: Yes, Habermas’s objection to the problem of the normative grounds of Adorno (and Horkheimer’s) Critical Theory has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later variants of it. And the objection on face value is a simple and devastating one. No critical theory worth its salt can refrain from making normative claims about the society it critcizes, claims that are either implicit or explicit, the existing society its practices and institutions are bad and ought to be changed or something like that. The trouble is that Adorno and Horkheimer for various reasons don’t think of their critical theory like that.

Actually, what Habermas says is rather more complex and obscure than this. He states that critical theory has problems in “giving an account of its own normative foundations”. I asked, what would it be for a critical theory to ‘give an account of its own normative foundations’, according to Habermas?

One answer is that what critical theory requires is a normative moral theory in the basement. The corollary of this is that discourse ethics, in the case of Habermas critical theory of society, supplies the normative foundations (the normative moral theory) that Habermas thinks is missing from Adorno’s. Axel Honneth (along with Albrecht Wellmer, Seyla Benhabib and various others) appear to endorse this view of Habermas. Honneth wrote that it is with “communicative ethics” — i.e. with a moral theory — that “Habermas . . . has attempted to justify the normative claims of a critical social theory.” Honneth rightly thinks that an unpromising strategy, which is why, I surmise, in his own work he tries to ground critical theory on something less than a full blown moral theory, a kind of thin (but nonetheless sufficiently normatively rich) anthropology.

A second and different answer would be that what critical theory lacks and needs are normative moral reasons, rather than a fully blown moral theory. This is the interpretation of the remark I favour, because it seems odd to claim critical social theory requires a normative moral theory to justify its conclusions.

In either case discourse ethics would not do the job of providing the putatively missing normative foundations, because it is not the kind of normative moral theory that determines valid norms, or answers the question of what ought to be done and why. Discourse Ethics does not yield first personal, normative reasons for action, of the kind that might support the normative conclusions of critical theory. This is not bad news for Habermas. In my view, the very idea that Habermas wants to set critical theory on sure moral foundations, and that this explains the place of Discourse Ethics in his theory, is completely wrong. You can tell by looking at it that Habermas’s philosophy is not an attempt to underpin the edifice of Marxism with a Kantian moral foundation. Habermas is not like the Marburg neo-Kantian Karl Vorländer, or the Austro-Marxists Max Adler and Otto Bauer, or more recently, G.A. Cohen, all of whom have attempted to provide a Kantian Moral foundation to socialism. You’d be surprised how many people think that this is what he is doing.

In my view, which I develop in articles in Telos and Constellations, he’s doing something very different both in approach and aim to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and from Kantian Marxism. And ironically, despite his criticism of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for its failure to give an account of its own normative, Habermas also omits to give a proper account of the normative grounds of his own social theory.

The other argument Habermas advances against Adorno and Horkheimer, is that in respect of its normative grounds, and in respect of its claim to be true, the Dialectic of Enlightenment is self-undermining, and incoherent. This is because, according to Habermas, as a meaningful theory, understood as a body of justified assertions about the social world, it (Dialectic of Enlightenment) must claim to be true, and yet the substance of the theory is that any theoretical claim is a disguised power claim, an attempt to gain mastery over internal and external nature. Basically, he says, the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is incoherent. The trouble is that Habermas ties this objection in to his very controversial pragmatic theory of meaning, according to which the meaningfulness of any theory depends on its making validity-claims to truth and rightness, which the authors of the theory are implicitly committed to supporting by good reasons, on pain of incoherence. This is to take a needless hostage to theoretical fortune. Habermas makes what is a powerful objection to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory depend upon the truth of his own highly controversial account of meaning.

3:AM: You propose that we can retrace the discussion and rethink and reanalyze the issue don’t you? Can you say something about your approach and why you think it helpful?

GF: Yes I think it is helpful to disentangle Habermas’s good objection to Adorno’s critical theory from the complexities of his own controversial theory of pragmatic meaning. Then we get something like the following view. A critical theory of society worth its salt must at least give an account of what is ‘wrong’ with the social world, or show that it is in some way ‘bad’ or that it ‘ought not’ to be like it is. The terms ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ ‘ought not’ and their like are moral terms. I mean that in the broadest possible sense. They express important values that shape our lives. If that is right, then critical theory has, and cannot but have, in that same broad sense moral aims or conclusions. Now social theories with moral aims or conclusions require moral grounds. In that case, if a critical theory does not have broadly moral grounds, its normative conclusions are unwarranted. (OK I’m assuming that you cannot reach the level or degree of normativity required here, by configuring together normative or evaluative elements that are less than moral – rational or logical requirements or whatever. In other words doing critical theory not like baking a cake where I can make something edible and delicious by combining elements none of which are delicious on their own – like baking powder, sugar, margarine and flour.)

Adorno’s critical theory of society is, now implicitly now explicitly, redolent with such broadly moral judgements. He thinks that the social world is pervasively evil and ought not to be as it is. The interesting problem arises, and begins to reflect what is distinctive (and distinctively problematic) about Frankfurt School critical social theory, when we realise that, for all its moral aims and conclusions, critical theory does not, and in some respects had better not, avail itself of any broadly moral standard, be this a thick conception of good, bad, or thinner ideas of right, or wrong.

So why is this? Well for a whole variety of different reasons. One of these is that Adorno believed that the whole ensemble of abhorrent events he called ‘Auschwitz’ manifested the failure of an entire culture, and with it morality. Not only does he think that nothing remains unaffected by Auschwitz, he believes that everything is complicit with it. This is a key motivation for Adorno’s negativism, his interpretation of the significance of the “ban on images.” There is “no right living in the false life” there is “nothing innocent left”. There are no reliable or worthwhile ideals or values to provide the standard of criticism. One cannot picture or represent a reconciled society, or a good life, indeed on cannot so much as conceive of it, without disfiguring and devaluing it. Another reason is that Adorno and Horkheimer sometimes think of bourgeois morality as Marx did, namely as the ideological expression of bourgeois interests. Finally, they follow Hegel in arguing that the task of philosophy is to explain the way the world is and not to lecture it on how it ought to be. (Insofar as he maintains this, Adorno, for reasons given above, is being inconsistent.) Anyway for all these reasons and others besides Adorno’s (and to an extent also Horkheimer’s) critical theory must eschew any broadly moral or ethical standard of criticism, and this gives rise to a dilemma: either critical theory relies on broadly moral premises (or broadly moral considerations) and is therefore self-contradictory, or it does not, in which case its conclusions are unsupported. This is what Habermas’s objection to first generation critical theory amounts to, once it is divested of his controversial theoretical assumptions.

3:AM: You argue that Adorno had a minimal normative ethics. It was a negative ethics of resistance. But then the question is how can philosophical negativism and normative ethics be consistent? We ask whether Adorno’s aporetic philosophy lead to irrationalism and mysticism. You answer that this is not the case, and draw on a comparison with negative theology to defend this view. Can you say more?

GF: There are two related questions here. Let’s assume I’m right that Adorno has a normative ethics, which, incidentally, many people deny. There is a life that one should live, namely one of active and self-conscious resistance to prevailing norms, values and practices.

How does this fit with the interpretation I have just given of Adorno’s philosophical negativism, which we can call austere negativism? Austere negativism is the view that when he says that there is “no right living in the false life” and there is “nothing innocent left” he means it literally. The social world has been entirely denuded of no reliable and intrinsically worthwhile ideals or values. There is only the system of instrumental value, where everything is valued as a means to the promotion of some other end, however there are no intrinsically worthwhile ends to put value into the system. In that case, the task of criticism cannot be, as he sometimes claims it is, to confront existing reality with its own unrealized standards. There are no worthwhile or reliable standards of criticism to which the social critic can appeal. As he puts it in Minima Moralia “there is no crevice in the cliff of the established order into which the (critic GF) might hook a fingernail.”

(If Adorno does not subscribe to austere negativism, but to partial negativism, that allows, say, that there are some worthwhile values and ideals, which are not entirely complicit with the otherwise corrupt social world, then immanent criticism can resume business as usual, criticizing social reality in the light of its own worthwhile standards to which, however, it fails to live up. Modern society may be inimical to a good life, but a good life can be lived on the basis of whatever remains of uncontaminated ethical life there happens to be.)

At the time when I wrote ‘Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable’ I thought that a coherent overall position had better be available to Adorno, and that the job of a philosophical interpretation of his work was to provide him with one, even if that meant reconstructing his views. That is why I came up with my characterization of Adorno’s ethics, according to which three ‘virtues’ of Mündigkeit, humility and love are required by a life of vigilance and resistance to the totally administerd society. I try to show how these are the practical counterpart of the paradoxical task that Adorno sets philosophy in his Negative Dialectics, namely to think what is non-identical to thought. The view I end up with is quite baroque, but does capture important elements of Adorno’s ethical views.
Nowadays I’ve given up on that kind of reconstruction. Adorno just is inconsistent. Really, he does not try very hard to work his thoughts up into a stable and coherent theory. He espouses different views on different occasions, and in different contexts. I’ve given up trying to make it all hang together. Adorno is not one of those thinkers who accepts that the best theory is the most consistent one, and that tensions and contradictions between the different positions he takes up are a sure indication that his theory cannot be true. On the contrary, he eschews that kind of formal theorising. He gives various different reasons for this, not all of them convincing. Anyway the upshot is that he is a thinker who prizes depth of insight, and the elegance and acuity with which those insights are expressed above the philosophical values of consistency, soundness and logical validity. That being so it is far from than obvious that the best philosophical interpretation of his work is one that attributes the most coherent position, defensible by contemporary standards of philosophy rather than his own. The best interpretation might be one that simply allows his work to be inconsistent, to bring these inconsistencies to light and to explain why he holds the views he does.

So now I’m inclined to point out that Adorno does not consistently embrace austere negativism, although he does endorse it most of the time, and that it is just difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Adorno’s criticism is, albeit in an unconventional sense, nevertheless deeply moral.

On the second question, it always struck me as funny that many of Adorno’s otherwise most insightful critics, who observe that some of his more paradoxical claims resemble the kind of paradoxes one finds in apophatic theology, or what is sometimes called negative theology, think that this is a good argument against them. Again, some big beasts of German philosophy make this claim, for example Habermas, Wellmer, Schnädelbach, and where they go others inevitably follow. They are right there are genuine parallels, although with the conspicuous exception of Michael Theunissen and Michael Pauen none of these commentators deigns to elaborate them.

The ontological question if what God’s essence or being consists in, poses peculiar difficulties when God is supposed to be wholly transcendent and therefore unknowable and ineffable. Apophatic (or negative) theology is the strategy of responding to these peculiar difficulties through negation or denial, the so-called negative way. Now one way of reading Adorno’s notion of non-identity is as the figure of what is absolutely and wholly other to thought. And in Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that the “true interest of philosophy” lies “in what is non-conceptual” and that the task of philosophy is to think the non-identical , or to go beyond the concept by means of it. Both then, in different ways and for different reasons, attempt to think through the prima facie paradoxical attempt to think what cannot be thought.

Adorno’s detractors maintain that since there is a resemblance between Adorno’s philosophy and the ideas of some negative theologians and mystics, this is, without further ado, a powerful objection to it. Then, of course, Adorno’s defenders pile in from the other side and deny that there is a parallel between Adorno’s thought and negative theology. Curiously, neither Adorno’s detractors nor his defenders spend any time setting out what the supposed analogy between Adorno and negative theology is. To do that you actually have to examine what certain theologians say with care and attention. If one does not do that one runs the risk of falling foul of various misconceptions about negative theology, for example that it works by approaching the question of the divine essence through negations rather than through affirmations. That is actually not true. Apophatic theology must eschew both negation and affirmation equally, along with all finite categorization. To that extent, the labels ‘negative theology’ and the ‘via negativa’ are misnomers. It is kind of ironic that many Adornos most stringent critics and ardent defenders who respectively assert or reject the idea that there is a strong parallel between Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity and negative theology, both do so on the basis of not-knowing what negative theology is.

By contrast, I suppose because I find apophatic theology philosophically interesting, I try to show with the help of examples, first, Nicholas of Cusa, and later with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart the extent to which there is or is not an illuminating parallel with Adorno. The chief difference is that aphophatic theology is chiefly concerned with our inability to capture, know, or even conceive of the divine essence, because of its ultimate concern with divine transcendence, whereas Adorno is primarily concerned to transcend existing forms of thought and action for the sake of redeeming and transforming existing social reality.

Having said that, it is not clear how much negative theology Adorno knew, and it is unlikely that there was any direct influence, even though he studied briefly under Paul Tillich. The Messianic and Theological dimension to Adorno’s work seems to something he picked up from Walter Benjamin and immediately presses into the service of his own project of developing a negative dialectic through a critical engagement with Hegel.

3:AM: Does Adorno face a similar challenge when we consider his claims that art inhabits an autonomous region and yet at the same time he wants critical theory to apply? Is this a case of having your cake and eating it which is what some have accused his ethics of being? Is his art theory another version of his thought comparable to the apophasis theology you discuss above?

GF: Yes, some people say, I think Wellmer does, that Adorno’s aesthetic theory is a negative theology of art. But he does not really explain what he means. He just joins in the refrain. And the same difficulties with Adorno’s thinking crop up everywhere. It is not the case that Adorno has a general view that only really makes sense in the aesthetic domain. Art works, in Adorno’s eyes are mute, and aesthetic experience calls for philosophical interpretation. But philosophical interpretation attempts to makes sense not of the content of art, of what art works say, but only of the way their content is manifested in their sensuous form. There is a lot to say about artworks and what Adorno calls their promise of happiness, the various way in which they point beyond themselves and transcend the social conditions of their existence. But there is not a single, coherent theory of art that would, say, that would evince general conclusions about standards of judgment, or ideas of beauty. What Adorno gives us is an ensemble of analyses and essays about works of art, mainly about individual pieces of music, that do not and are not supposed to add up to a single coherent overall theory.

3:AM: Is the clash between the nihilism claims of Critchley and the Stalinism of Zizek anything more than showbiz for people wanting to avoid genuine political issues without admitting it?

GF: Hmm. I guessing that is what you think. I’m sure that is what Brian Leiter thinks. I know where you are coming from, but in truth I haven’t read enough of the recent work of either of these thinkers, so I ‘m not in a position to way whether either indulges in political grandstanding.

It is very easy to think that one’s work has more political significance than it does. Both journalists and academics tend to be walled up in their own worlds. I’m often made very aware of this. It is tempting to think that if one works on Adorno and critical theory, one is doing critical theory. That would be wrong. A critical theory of society is meant to understand, explain and criticise the society in which it is written. To write a book on Adorno or critical theory is not to do that. It is to do something else, philosophical interpretation or intellectual history. That is not to say it is not worthwhile to approach his work as a philosophically informed intellectual historian of 20th Century German thought or something. It is very worthwhile. But doing that is not doing critical theory. To do that you have to be a social critic, and that means criticising today’s society.

Much of what Adorno wrote was relevant to his era, but is not straightforwardly applicable to ours. For example his critique of the culture industry presupposes something like a Fordist conception of mass production and consumption. Things have changed. Yes some of what Adorno wrote about his world is still very much applicable to ours, but where it is, it is so mutatis mutandis. I don’t find applied Adorno very fruitful or appealing. As I often try to show my students to merely emulate his thinking, or repackage it in a new form is to betray the animus of his work. To be true to Adorno is to think for oneself, and to criticise existing society where appropriate.

I admire Habermas’s way of going about things. He has two distinct careers as a journalist and as an academic and he writes in two different genres. In his political writings in newspapers and interviews he gets engaged in real politics. His academic writing rarely reflects his own substantive political and moral views. This has the advantage that his political interventions reach the right audience, not just an audience of philosophers, and that his political writings are not merely an academic exercise largely ignored by fellow citizens. Other people, like Joe Heath do something similar.

3:AM: You’re working in a university but you are concerned about Universities aren’t you? You take university to be an institution that fulfills what Cardinal Newman said it should be doing: forming the individual’s intellect and developing and transmitting culture in all its dimensions. Can you say more about what you think is so good and necessary about this idea of a university?

GF: Well I think that Universities still should, as Cardinal Newman said in 1858, aim at “the perfection or virtue of the intellect” which is an old fashioned way of saying that they should educate well. The idea of excellence in education is not – as Bill Readings has argued – vacuous and part of an outdated ideology.

However, Newman thought of universities as primarily teaching institutions, whereas I think that they should also be research institutions, and that teaching and research should go hand in hand, because they are mutually enhancing. To that extent Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea of the university was more up to date than Newman’s which was old fashioned for Victorian times. The reason is that philosophers who also research generally make better teachers. It keeps them fresh. I mean, you would not employ a piano teacher who only taught piano, but did not actually play the piano. I think it works the other way round too. One’s research in philosophy benefits from teaching, in various different ways.

It seems a truism to say that the purpose of a university should be to educate well, and to that extent to perfect the intellect of students (and teachers). It also can seem, rather quaint. Funding bodies and Government Higher Education ministers don’t want to hear about the intrinsic value of a education, and are not impressed by the argument that educated minds are a public (not just a private and individual) good. One of the stated justification of the recent reforms of university funding in England and Wales is that University is a private benefit to the individual who acquires it and hence should be paid for by those individuals, not by the public purse (which raises the question of why the Government undertakes to heavily subsidize student loans.)

Anyway, the direction of HE policy over the last 15 years has been to dismantle the autonomy of the Universities, and make their teaching and research serve the perceived interests of the business sector, and the UK economy. Whether this aim is a good one, and whether the reforms undertaken will even succeed in realizing this aim, are debatable questions. For it was not as if universities served the intrinsic goods of educating well, perfecting the intellect, and producing excellent research across a range of disciplines, instead of the instrumental good of serving the economy and the business sector. On the contrary, teaching students to think for themselves, which is what philosophy does, is to equip them with arguably the most important transferable skill all. This means that the recent attempt to transform Universities into training programmes for the acquisition of transferable skills, which involves the dangerous game of second guessing which disciplines will do this most effectively, (the game is currently skewed against humanities disciplines and in favour of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, so-called STEM subjects) might end up shooting itself in the foot, because it turns out that traditional autonomous Universities geared towards the goal of educating well do this rather better after all, than the reformed institutions.

Anyway, I think that we are in the midst of a very dangerous experiment. Universities in this country have not been allowed to adapt and change organically. They have been dragooned into rapid unplanned expansions, thoroughgoing restructuring of their administrative and management systems along corporate lines. University faculties and departments have been bundled up (in many cases arbirtarily) into schools or clusters, which function as autonomous budget holding entities that purchase and sell services to one another, and are evaluated in terms of the profit and loss they generate.

Vice chancellors have become like CEOs behaving as if they have large equity holdings in the companies they direct. University councils are populated with representatives from the business sector, and tend to rubber stamp decisions taken by small-scale management teams around the Vice Chancellor. Their powers are almost unlimited. Senates, the academic bodies which oversee University management, on which traditionally there have been a majority of academics, have been drastically downsized, filled with people with management positions, with the result that academics have been largely cut out of the decision making process. As a consequence there few, if any, academic constraints on the measures that University managements can implement.

Both nationally, and locally within Universities, institutional change is being brought in at breakneck speed. ‘Experiment’ is the wrong word here. Experiments are conducted under controlled conditions. Causes are isolated and their effects closely monitored. This is, as Andrew McGettigan puts it, not so much and experiment as “The Great University Gamble” whose odds are too difficult to reckon, conducted in the blind hope that creating a market in Higher Education, and reforming Universities along business lines, will magically produce more employable graduates, make universities both more economically useful and more ‘accountable’ to their Government paymasters and their clients (students), save money, as well as promote the excellence of research and teaching. Whether or not any of these aims are actually achieved is a completely open question, and the Governments of Blair, Brown and Cameron who introduced the policies, anyway won’t be around to monitor and evaluate the consequences.

Meanwhile, the best Universities in the world, the big private and public Universities in the US have seen nothing like this degree of policy induced change. According to Jonathan R. Cole’s analysis of the rise of the Great American University is due mainly to the way in which they, have been allowed to adapt and change organically, as autonomous and more or less democratic institutions, run by academics, with the academic values of excellence in teaching and research as the guiding aim of their organisation. Cole, a Professor of Sociology, who went on to be Provost and Dean of Columbia University, writes: “research universities should not attempt to imitate corporations in their organizational structure. The hierarchical culture of the corporate world would not further the other important aims of the university.”

Finally, there is an even more sinister scenario taking shape. Large private companies are hovering to buy up the HE institutions lower down the food chain which will be crippled by the current funding reforms. They are attracted by the huge income streams made available due by heavily subsidized Government backed student loans. At the moment the title of University and its degree awarding powers is protected by legislation, and most Universities are charities. The Government is consulting with these corporations to lower the eligibility criteria for that protected title, in order, eventually, to allow for profit companies to buy into Universities. If successful, this will allow companies to bleed money out of institutions in terms of dividends and profits, which up to now, has not been legally possible. The trouble with that is, as is evidenced by the for profit sector in the US, corporate aim of maximising profits and dividends is incompatible with the academic aim of excellence in teaching and research. As John Sperling, founder of Apollo Group, put it brutally and revealingly: “This is a corporation… Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop [students’] value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.” It is no surprise that such organisations are teaching only institutions that tend to put more time and effort into recruiting students, than to teaching them well, and that offer very poor terms of employment. Since 2008 the Apollo Group has faced numerous investigations into its unfair and deceitful recruitment practices. Apollo Group are of course eager to expand into British market as soon as it is opened up, and are in prime position to do so as the parent Company, since 2009, of BPP, which runs law and accountancy colleges in England, and which has been among the firms intensively lobbying the Higher Education minister, David Willetts, to make the necessary changes in legislation, that would allow them to compete with publicly funded UK institutions.

3:AM: What’s gone wrong? Is the future bleak, not just for Universities but given the mass inequalities, the wars, the reactionary politics that seems to be dominant, for all areas of life?

GF: Quite a lot. And yes it is, but there are also signs of hope.

3:AM: You write poetry don’t you? What are the books, films, artists that have inspired you? What’s the role for art and culture in all this? Are you sympathetic to Adorno on this, or is he, as Roger Scruton asks (in relation to his theories concerning music), a dead duck?

GF: Funnily enough, I don’t write poetry any more. The last one I wrote was a very long time ago. I did recently publish a poem I wrote long ago in my early twenties, at the invitation of my friend and colleague Keston Sutherland, who is a poet and critical theorist.

Oh dear. Such questions are hard to answer. I can say that, as a graduate student, when I read books like Raymond Geuss’s The Idea of Critical Theory, Onora O’Neill’s Constructions of Reason, I was inspired, and that more recently when I read A.D. Smith’s Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, I realized that these were wonderful examples of how to write about the philosophers I was interested in, examples that I still give to my own students.
As for books that have inspired me, there are far too many to list. I can name some books off the top of my head that I have in recent memory recommended to others, because I found them particularly good. For example, Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal; Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities; The Infinite by Adrian Moore; Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot; Agape and Eros, by Anders Nygren; The Darkness of God, by Denys Turner; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Hans-Friedrich Fulda.

It is hard to say with paintings. Every time I visit friends and family in Brussels, I find myself sneaking into the Musée des Beaux Arts, and looking again at David’s The Death of Marat and Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I was captivated by Domenichino’s, Diana and Acteon, when I visited the Villa Borghese in Rome, some years ago. But I’m not pictorially literate enough to have much of interest to say.

Am I sympathetic to Adorno, or is he a dead duck? Well, I could be both. But obviously I find Adorno’s work rewarding, otherwise I would not still be reading, writing about, and teaching his work to students. I certainly do not agree with all of what he says, but who could. Last Summer I spoke at a Music and Philosophy conference at KCL where Roger gave his ‘dead duck’ talk. As I remember, he thinks Adorno is a dead duck, primarily because he was a Marxist, and because in Scruton’s view Marxism is “crap”. His word not mine! He seems to arrive at this view by modus ponens: All Marxism is crap. Adorno is a Marxist . Therefore, Adorno’s work is crap.

Scruton is a clever man. But he is far from a reliable judge of Adorno. His allergic response to Marxism, and left-wing politics, impair his judgement. Somewhat uncomfortably Scruton finds himself in agreement with all those aspects of Adorno’s critique of the Culture Industry that he shares with conservative critics of culture. He deals with this by claiming that nothing that Adorno said on those issues was particularly new, and said better by the conservative critics of culture he identifies with. (Actually, one can say something very similar about Scruton’s views on Marxism and Leszek Kolakowski).

Adorno was primarily a music critic, and also a philosopher. He did not have a philosophy of music or a philosophical theory of music of the kind that Scruton does. He certainly was not interested in sideways on accounts of what music is. He is not interested in general aesthetic theories, or theories of music, which would provide general criteria for successful works of art. Also to say that Adorno is “the critic of tonality and advocate of the New Music” is to vastly oversimplify what he says. If that is what makes him a dead duck, it is easy to show that he is not.

The best way to evaluate Adorno’s writing on music is to look at what he says about each individual composer, and their compositions. If Scruton can find nothing of interest in what Adorno says about Wagner, Mahler, Beethoven, Berg, and their works, then so much the worse for him. There were many musicologists, musicians and philosophers at the conference of a discerning, erudite, well-informed, and critical cast of mind who still found Adorno’s musical writings intriguing, interesting and engaging. Had they not been there, of course, Scruton’s talk would have utterly failed to provoke. I’m sure he wished things had been otherwise, but in fact, in that context and to that audience, Adorno sat among the canonised, establishment figures, whose work had become the target for Scruton, the critical theorist.

3:AM: And finally, are there 5 books that you could recommend to the readers here at 3am that would help them delve further into the issues you’ve discussed here?

GF: It is hard to nominate only five, but here are five good books of relevance to this interview.
Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot.
The Politics of Aristotle, by W. L. Newman.
The Idea of a Critical Theory, by Raymond Geuss.
The Darkness of God, Denys Turner.
The Great University Gamble, by Andrew McGettigan.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

The president’s coma had taken a turn for the worse: she was dead. The VP shot himself before they could do the oath. Whoever came next in line met the void, called the wars off and undid the draft. Those of us in the last week of boot woke at dawn, synchronized, to find the top brass had already split.

First thing we did was whoop it up. Then we showered and set out for the women’s barracks to get it on. The women had had the same idea. We collided over the mortar range, which was dry and pockmarked and not ideal for fucking, but in the party that ensued we all got laid except Taylor, who despite running fifteen miles a day could just not stop being fat.

Taylor’s fatness was a joke at first, when he couldn’t keep up, but soon the joke became myth. We punched him on the pretext that he couldn’t feel. A lady soldier half-wearing my cameo rode me in the hot dead grass, and I saw Taylor taking shade under the only tree, massaging feet that must have hurt like hell under all that weight.

The party depressed me after two days. By then I honestly couldn’t believe I was me. I hiked to the airbase and hitched a plane to Jersey. Except it was resupply to Jersey the goddamn island. I got to London and fit a southy crew that mugged tourists in the Elephant & Castle pedways. Other gangs raped down there; we mugged. We’d rip cams and phones from helpless fingers to fence in Camden for hash. I beat up an Italian for his hat.

Hash didn’t go far. Kyle burned through it so quick that we had to keep pace to smoke our share. My name is Kyle too, so they called me Kyle The American. Didn’t like sharing my name, not with a gobshite who smelled of rotting vegetables. When the hash went, a game began: first to say “Morely’s,” the name of the foul kebab stand, had to walk down there and buy kebabs for all.

“Cah need another hit,” Aliza was explaining. “Sorely.”

“Ap!” Vernon pointed, and the rest of us shouted also, except Kyle The Englishman, who’d pushed a drunk banker in front of the Jubilee that day, fled into the two o’clock drizzle, all of it on CCTV.

“What,” Aliza said. She wrote poetry that I read when she’d gone, because I am a sensitive monster. It was okay. The whole U.K. was okay, except for a low and troubling drone in my head. Anything not loud was a whisper.

“You said … it,” I said.

“I didn’t say Morely’s!” she cried.

O, we howled. We howled more when she returned with kebabs. It plays in the mind like I was howling at this weeks later, well after the gang dissolved, when I got tackled and hooded in Paddington by two men I never saw. I thrashed and screamed it was just panhandling, but the hood was soaked in fumes and it was a purple bloom that answered.

“You’re awake,” I was told. I tasted my snot and spat. It hung inside the hood with me. The bustle of Paddington had silenced. Ears felt pressure: we were in the air.

“Son, relax. Not so bad as that. Just there’s protocol for recovering property. You ain’t the first, and it’s worse if we don’t scuttle.”

“Not your prop, Yankee cunt.”

“Oh Jesus,” the other man laughed. “You didn’t pay for that accent coach I hope.”

“Son,” said the nice one. Son. Didn’t load me up or push me out and I don’t like the ones who did. My sister was into the money machine, she was set. I had a cousin who played the pro tennis circuit. Me, I was swimming in my own skull, no idea who to blame. “Face it. The company trained you. They own what’s there, see? Invested.”

I decided I wouldn’t speak. We landed and shuttled to a camp that from smell I’d say was downwind of Philly. Looked around and if I looked as sorry as this lot I was sad: everyone had a black eye or slung arm. None could meet another’s gaze.

A drill sergeant came into the tent and told us we were deserters, degenerates and subhuman retards for supposing the military disbanded in peacetime. A deserter with some teeth knocked out said he’d been discharged for self-harm. They hauled him off and told us to wave goodbye for good.

We were too tired not to.

The weird passed again into normalcy. There were meals. The exercise was good; body was juiced at the lack of dope. I shared a triple bunk with Wilt and Johns, who were always together and much alike, so I never clicked who was who—we were pals. After we’d got some shape back they fitted us for flamethrowers. It was fun torching the straw men, but our fuelpacks weighed a motherfucking ton.

Job was to penetrate some pines and flush out the ferals who lived there. Halfway through, the officers stopped calling them “ferals” and said “mud-eaters.” The mud-eaters, inbred trash that went into the swamp a century back and walked on all fours, had killed a resource exploration crew. With rocks.

The story made us mad. Wilt or Johns said they gave us something in the food as well, a dose of giddy insomnia. Johns or Wilt disagreed with Wilt or Johns, said they put a hard drive in every head they buzzed. I had to admit, that barber had nicked me bad. An elsehood had driven me since, some cloud of simple demands.

We slogged through muck with flamethrowers and chased whatever ran. The muddies didn’t eat mud; they were covered in it, camouflaged. Wilt and Johns, walking shoulder to shoulder, had a snakepit open under their feet. By the time we got a rope down, the bodies lay together, puffed with poison.

A fox shadowed me for a whole day’s march. Except that was back in London … the animal had trotted soundlessly along a low stone wall that bordered the gardens up to Borough High, perfectly happy to stroll at my side. The sun was the sun the day we got my brother to Canada, so bright and close it went through the leaves. We flipped a coin and it rolled into a storm drain, so I told him to hop in the trunk.

It’s true I was beyond sleep, but this was a bit much.

Adults couldn’t be taken alive. The kids were claimed by a TV show. We saw a taping as reward for abundant kills and captures. Behind the waxen flesh-colored host sat a wall of acrylic glass. Behind that: adolescent savages fought spiky predators and extreme artificial weather as though their lives depended on it.

A female unit was the other half of the audience, so the hour was seized by handjobs and clit-rubbing. At one point a girl I’d yanked from a tree—receiving a kick in the larynx—ignored the fire-making tools and stood there in her frosted chamber, gazing over the moany lot.

I went around bleacher seats to the rear control room. The man and woman inside didn’t notice. They weren’t even talking about what my mud-eater was doing, down on the stage. The woman worked the panel while the man just watched.

“Thought we could offset the cost of short-life organic LEDs with energy savings,” she said. “They’re efficient but decay fucks it up.”

“You say organic?” the man wanted to know.

“Next-gen won’t rely on polyanilines in the conducting layer.”

God, I could have strangled them for saying these things, but I blacked the fuck out somehow. Rebooted while choking on an oxygen tube they were trying to shove in.

“Hello, never mind,” said one of the doctors. The tube slid out. I rasped and retched a bit and rolled over on my side. The room was silver. I glitched out again.

The world underneath me tilted. A boat. Some boys were huddled off at a porthole, discussing where the boat was pointed. South, they mainly agreed.

“Word banged round the muddies had a natural cancer defense, insurance lobby said wipe out.”

“Christ. Extinction duty.”

“How far you bolt, Saul?”

“Vancouver. It was beautiful. I did a hooker and she came in three languages. They caught me at the zoo watching penguins.”

“Look who’s up.”

“Ey,” I said. “Real penguins?”

“Real enough, buddy.”

Destination we heard topside: Nicaragua. Vessel a destroyer, the USS Spangled. Here to dismantle the Zero Cartel with local cooperation. Commanding officer touched his face, hid beyond it. He dreamt of a classical democracy that worked, that was not crippled by its weak. If he could strike us from history, fine.

First run was a classic botch. Signal flew; we opened fire on a salvage tub and killed four civilians, one pregnant. They were trying to smuggle themselves up the Mosquito Coast—we waded through their sorry possessions.

“They shouldn’t’ve,” the commander began, confused. He never told us his name or rank, paranoid even for the kind of man he was. “Insurgents.” He had us heave the bodies overboard.

“Sir?” I said. “There’s a war?”

“Agitators in the wild, that’s all.”

Plain old rogue economy, working places the capital couldn’t. And the villagers were loyal. When we landed in a port, it was to explode their illegal spiny lobster fishery.

“I don’t think so,” said Saul before he swallowed the charge that splattered the deck with his self. Almost did the same but for some alien snag in my action. It was curious, now: whatever I saw or touched—ocean spray, my own hands—I sensed a simulation.
Cargo flowed out of the rain forest in canoes, shielded by triple-canopy that satellites couldn’t pierce, to open water. Mainly we floated at jungle’s edge in a skimcraft, hoping couriers were dumb enough to blunder at us. Finally some wake. We thought the fins were sharks. Dolphins, it turned out.

“Been getting aggressive,” our captain said. They began to breach as gray liquid missiles, knocking men into the water with their tails so that others could drag them down to expire beneath the waves. One landed square on the deck and flipped about, snapping her nubby white teeth.

No, this never happened. I was gone.

Wrong: I was here, reaching for a white preserver. They pulled me out of a life, they must have, though nothing about that life would assemble. I was crushed under the weight of things or falling through their total absence.

You’ll stay, a distant quarter of me said. You’ll steer out. You do not want for courage. I crawled around the kamikaze dolphin and up to the dash. I threw the accelerator, and soon we slammed into beach, where two or three of us climbed over the prow and lay breathing on the sand.

It was tropical night when one of us spoke.

“I’m for disappearing.”

Waited for my own agreement, but I was disappointed.

“Your call,” said the disappearing man. The jungle swallowed him. The stars: how I hated them. A star doesn’t have to know itself.

That far-away part of me spoke again, a subzero voice that echoed down the spine. It said I had rested enough, and to run. Back toward some rendezvous, an outpost—the loving arms of the company. But what did this voice imagine running to be? Did it really suppose I could run?

We wouldn’t ask if you couldn’t, it said.

You do magnificent work.

You are one of a kind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miles Klee is the author of Ivyland (OR Books 2012), a finalist in The Morning News‘ 2013 Tournament of Books that The Wall Street Journal described as “J.G. Ballard zapped with a thousand volts of electricity.” He contributes to Vanity Fair, Lapham’s Quarterly, BlackBook and The Awl.

The Moon’s Jaw, Rauan Klassnik, Black Ocean 2013

We’re in the concentration camps, where the evils are always banal. And we have the usual itching from the usual twinset: the doting colluder, the wrung out opportunist. I turn and almost every page takes its lead from Catullus, loving and hating all at once, where every bit of tenderness will border on cruelty, its intent ambiguous, industrial – them white noise dogshit pigments of Klassnik’s gnawing cadences. For here, as in Holy Land, the rat has become the brain, and the asshole the cunt, and this is pornography, this is Artaud’s “overheated factory” beneath the skin, this is The Moon’s Jaw – hanging off. We know how ethics sours our goodness with its one thought too many, and it’s Klassnik’s method too, when he ruins a saint or dirties an innocent – all his limping vestiges of beauty, uglified. The snake’s jaw dislocates to accommodate a calf, and like this the moon will open, a hole inside a hole, back to kill us as it talks us out of death.

All sincerity is deviant, and The Moon’s Jaw knows this, and celebrates it and suffers it. In my hands there’s this bodily rejection of self-censorship, this ejaculation of fetters. And I was wrong: I thought Guyotat had dibs on this much cum. But I’m getting there, where the pain’s in the waiting, where the pleasure is, in the woods with my top as she takes a cheese wire to my gleam. But I’m being slowed down: the dashes and slashes and ellipses and colons and proliferating periods choking my orgasm like pictures of nun’s cunts weeping gleet over the ruffled heads of birds. His dashes like sutures on a skeleton, keeping together what’s already gone. And for all the cum and blood, there’s no sex and violence here, only sex-violence: a self-neutralising amalgam that’s the antithesis of titillation. Like the rat and his maze, the two have simply grown together. All opportunity for frisson done with, neutered.

In Vegas—Lilacs, boiling, cool, & dark—You begin to eat my ass:
Wiping yr mouth, from time to time—& glaring up at me: Like a
Vampire, a Lion, a Shaman—Swaying, bubbling, seething: Down
into every nerve. . . Cold white shores swaying… Till—At last—
You slide in a finger… Then two. Fist! Elbow! Shoulder! Head!
. . . & you’re inside me: & yr breasts are my breasts. Yr cunt—My
cunt. Yr slow dark heaving mouth—My slow dark heaving mouth.

These appetites are sick, and terminally so; they’ve crawled up inside other things and are dying there. And the softnesses here are those of the broken down hooker, the jaded porn star, who when she eviscerates herself does it cunt-first, exorcising the pleasure centre with a talon, with the heavy undercarriage of what we thought of once as made entirely of flying. Contaminated miscreations these, these “Chirping Gargoyles”, these “Dolphins moaning in gangrene.” And yet regenerations continue, the new creatures feeling themselves out, teething their cavities and bleeding gums on the need to be anything at all: anomalous creatures that have “learned to die. & not to.”

And again with the slowing down. As we drag out the death to the death, prolonging the half-blind horror of our interminable decay, until the only distraction left is that of fucking the shit out of it, cumming inside it and breeding siblings to it, gestating its mutated fetuses in vats of the stuff, and we drink it all down and we puke it all up – self-witnessing – and drink it again until the appetites that keep us here die. But they don’t die, so bury us this day in a river of tongues. For the appetite ignores us, like the cosmos we stabbed that didn’t even flinch. We’re barely the steam off its piss on a cold day. But I’m reminded he’s kindly, that there’s love in him that’s ferocious to leave, but still can’t get past the breath off the page, the way it smells like Dennis Nilsen’s drains. And I recall he was always just scragging himself, and that he found a way to hang around afterwards, to sample his own company. And he had sweetness in him, and light and tenderness, and what weakness, what need – I’ll “pour his ashes on my head in the healing sun.” And there, out the corner of my eye, those Sad Sketches of wardrobe interiors, their folded dead men – men no longer men, but concepts of what men do: externalisations, then, of that Mr Nilsen’s trauma.

You did up my hair—Holding it tight like I liked—& even tighter
as I cried out suddenly: Glancing over at a fetus in a jar. As though
it could save me—Crawl back into me—& fill me w/ milk.
Children, hands locked, dancing all round my gleaming body. You
painted me: & jeweled me. Posed me in bed: Dead, but reaching up
still. Lips parted slightly. Shining blue.

The world returns like a scene from a halal abattoir, our own materials fed back to us tasting of fear, our faeces gilded in opulent metals, in rubberised gold, in “cathedral meat.” And now it’s a choice, and you can blindsight gore or you can fuck it and eat it out, make origami storks and flowers from its skin, put your tongue down its throat and into its belly and lick clean the babies you put there. You can clean it all unrecognisable with the blackness inside your mouth. But when everything’s refulgent, there will still be pretty girls, their faces framed in roses, viewing themselves through two-way mirrors; a child killer cranking out one last sneer of semen into the metal of a death row latrine, there on the other side. And out the jaws of his keeper’s zipper, wilted and misshapen, a child’s sucked thumb. And there’s another mirror, with an Austrian man in it, and he’s washing his cock after visiting a son he borrowed and never gave back. And yet people still mean well. And then the shutters are gone, and the locked doors left open, and in the new light, “There’s no way out. But we don’t stop trying.”

Trakl tried and gave us twilights and poppies and celestial vaccines, and those toothless angels, poisoned, their useless wombs reconstructed from blue space and bloated with rats. And Klassnik? And Klassnik?… He’s here now to reiterate that having your cake is eating your cake, and that the cake is made from cum and from blood and from shit and from urine and from all manner of excruciations, but that still the cake gets baked, and that therein lies the flaw, and therein lies the dream of us, and of love, and soft grass and flowers and a moon’s silence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary J. Shipley is the author of six books of various sizes. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in literary magazines such as The Black Herald, Gargoyle, Paragraphiti, nthposition, elimae, and >kill author, and in philosophy/theory journals such as continent and Glossator. More details can be found here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Kelly is an artist living in London, working in the modernist tradition. He has collaborated with and visually translated numerous writers and poets including David Berridge, Daniele Pantano and Dylan Nyoukis. His works have been published in books such as Gilles de Rais (Like This Press 2013), The Primarchs (Bear Press 2012) and Saint Augustine of Hippo (Kitt Press). He was the Saison Poetry Library’s artist in residence for the 2012 Poetry Parnassus. He is currently creating work for group and solo exhibitions this year, 2013.

By Nicky Charlish.

It isn’t often that a British film which has flopped on its home territory is resuscitated by American enthusiasm. That’s what happened with Croupier (1998, dir. Mike Hodges). But more of that in a moment, let’s go over the plot before we get to the jackpot. Or rather, Jack’s plot. The film’s protagonist is Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a would-be novelist whose father, Jack Sr. (Nicholas Ball) a gambling South African-based con-man, arranges for Jack to work as a croupier in a London casino. (Jack has already worked as one in South Africa). Suffering from writer’s block, he takes the job. Then, after some experiences at work encourage him to follow the old dictum of ‘write about what you know’, he starts writing a novel whose subject is – a croupier (called Jake). Meanwhile, he is inveigled by Jani (Alex Kingston) – a gambler at the casino – to take part in a robbery there which some gangsters are setting-up (she owes them money – big-time). Unwilling at first, he eventually goes along with her – he could make good use of the money. He receives advance payment, but his girlfriend, Marion (Gina McKee) – a former policewoman turned store detective – finds this money and also intercepts a ‘phone message to him from Jani. The heist – during which Jack is attacked by one of the gangsters – fails, but Marion (who has put two and two together) tells him to leave the casino or she will turn him in. Jack returns to his novel but, shortly afterwards, Marion is killed by a hit-and-run driver. He publishes his novel, I, Croupier, anonymously, but gets a phone call from Jani, now in South Africa. She is due to get married – to his father. Jack has been played all along.

At first this seems a straightforward caper film, but it can be seen to operate on a number of different levels, for closer examination shows that it deals us a hand from several different packs. First, it has an element of noir. Jack has been emotionally emptied by family break-up – Jack’s life is a high-grade illustration of Philip Larkin’s statement about what parents do to you. Yet, although we’re led to believe that it was his father’s gambling which caused this family split, Jack somehow regards the casino as a family, a home-from-home which cannot be betrayed. At his interview for the London casino job he says to himself ‘Welcome back Jack… to the house of addiction’, but you feel it’s not just the punters who he regards as addicts – he needs the place too, and he eventually starts travelling to work in his croupier’s uniform of black tie.

Second, it gives us a picture of Blair’s Britain which is, refreshingly, less than flattering. Britannia is unremittingly icy, not cool. Crime-based films have long shown London at various stages of its history and Croupier is no exception. The Long Good Friday captured London on the eve of the East End’s transformation from dead docklands to financial hub whilst Mona Lisa portrayed Soho on the verge of change, post-Groucho Club new sophistication, pre-rainbow-flagged gay village gentrification, and with old-style gangsters still around. Here, Croupier shows a London of shouting drunks, workers who are seemingly either dissatisfied with their jobs or on some sort of fiddle as in the case of, respectively, Bella (Kate Hardie) and Matt (Paul Reynolds), two of Jack’s fellow croupiers, and dingy hotels (when Jack visits the one where Jani is staying to finalise his involvement with the heist, we can just overhear a family row occurring in another room). This is a London for which modern politicians and their image-makers have no interest and don’t want to know about.

Third, it can be taken as an investigation of numerology used as a sort of unconsciously-adopted belief-system, now that mainstream Western ones – both sacred and secular – seem to have run out of steam (inertia rather than zeal seems to be the hallmark of modern Western Christianity, whilst politics offers nothing except different solutions to getting rich quick). Linked with this is the idea of coincidence: does chance have an element of probability?. For instance, is it coincidental that Marion’s death at the hands of a motorist occurs after her threat to grass-up Jack? And he uses a system of odds to determine whether his scam payment money is counterfeit or not. Given the fragmented nature of his early life and his experience of the unreliability of people as bases for trust, it’s understandable that Jack seeks security and solace in probability – for him there really is safety in numbers.

Fourth, it is an examination of writing – the motives of writers, and the practicalities of how to create stuff for the page. The film’s voiceovers, although all delivered by Jack’s voice, reflect the activities of two people – Jack the writer and Jake the croupier (although that croupier is Jack). To what extent do writers identify with their characters, and how do they relate? At one point, Jack wonders whether writing is work – he reaches no conclusion, although some might be tempted to agree with Truman Capote’s view – stated in the preface to his collection of short stories, Music for Chameleons – that writing is a God-given gift but that that gift is also a whip ‘intended solely for self-flagellation’. (In that preface, Capote goes on to draw a parallel between writers and professional card-players.) In the case of I, Croupier, for the writer to identify with its protagonist is a dangerous game indeed, given the robbery that’s being planned. How much of himself – in this case, the dangerous part that is risking prison or worse – can the writer employ? (One thinks of crime novelist Derek Raymond whose early novels must have been written not only with brio but, given his own underworld involvement at the time of their composition, with caution too, and the toll such a balancing act might, must, require of a writer.)

One might think that, given this wealth of material, Croupier would have been a film destined for immediate success in its native land. In addition, it also has excellent casting – including the bit-parts – evokes the menace and magic of night-time London, and maintains a high level of tension. But this was not to be, at first. Originally released in 1999, for some reason it was not given a major UK release by Film Four (under whose aegis it was conceived), and it was, at the behest of the British Film Institute, given a series of joint screenings with a re-release of director Mike Hodges’ earlier film, Get Carter – but even being linked with that sure-fire cinematic attraction didn’t help much. However, on receiving screenings in the United States its reputation gathered momentum until its budget
was more than recouped. This is surprising, especially given that the film is offbeat, doesn’t have an optimistic view of life – since the eighties, America hasn’t seemed the sort of place
where similar dark offerings, such as Chinatown or The French Connection, would be made, let alone British noir given any critical house room. Perhaps it was its very non-conformist quirkiness that did the trick. Following this encouraging scenario, Croupier was then re-issued in this country, with a heavy-duty media campaign, and was a hit. The fifteenth anniversary of its creation gives us an opportunity to reflect on the strange ways of artistic success – and the role within it of luck.

At the film’s conclusion Jack, having had his novel published at last, realises that he is a one-book writer, and has quit while he’s ahead – like a successful gambler. Also, he has made some money with the robbery, and we suspect that the police consider the matter closed. He has ended-up living with Bella (earlier in the film she’d been sacked from the casino for failing a drugs test) and continues to work as a croupier. But is Jack a winner? On the face of things, yes. He’s got the satisfaction of literary fame without its accompanying public hassle (we glimpse him in a tube train watching someone reading his novel), a steady job, money, and a relationship. Yet his victory is pyrrhic. Emotionally cold, he can have no deep relationship with Bella (who, we learn earlier in the film, was a prostitute specialising in S&M before becoming a croupier and has, presumably, been emotionally damaged by this experience, assuming she wasn’t before). The only pleasure left to him is being at the still centre of the spinning wheel of misfortune where he no longer hears the sound of the ball – he is master of the game whose object is making you lose. (Clive Owen, when the over-dubbing was completed, was asked his view of Jack’s state of mind at the end of the film. His reply was simple: “He’s mad.”) Perhaps Jack’s mental state will provide a form of lifelong insulation against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Then again, it may be that, unless his damaged personality is repaired, it’s only a matter oftime before the roulette wheel of his mind loses its moorings in enjoying other people’s bad luck and Jack spins off into full-blown breakdown – or suicide. It all turns on luck – maybe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicky Charlish is a freelance writer and proofreader who has contributed to, among other publications, Melody Maker, Record Mirror, Midweek, Penpusher and the Culture Wars reviews of the Institute of Ideas.

When I show up to the canvas it happens,

And when I show up to the brush, out it bleeds

Or when I glance out from the upstairs window

To see him planting trellises

For verdant green grapes in ninety nine degree heat

Waves in an earthquake-laden summer

The fragility of life calls it forward as well.

This is a time of friends who disown me

Because I disown the role of keeping them constantly entertained

Or seeding their penchant for dramatic overture

In a life that’s half over and not worth the effort,

Instead valuing the downward spiral

Of going inwards to that place where the underworld fox breathes,

Holding up palms full of red currant berries

And secrets that make the blood thicken.

And I kick myself for waiting this late

For biding so much time within parts unaccounted for

In the grandiose scheme of all that is meaningful

And it’s not lonely here although I am more alone than ever.

Looking is birthed from another bone than seeing.

Seeing requires a slow pulsing patience.

It’s the Persian sign on the main street hotel

Where little boys dressed up for a wedding giggle over a balcony

At all the bosom tops they spy from their elevated advantage,

Or the boy in front of the laundromat

Reading the Count of Monte Christo

At four p.m. on Monday

Across the street from the Japanese man throwing seeds

On the library lawn that will soon sprout

Strawberries and my neighbor yells

Shrilling things at the homeless man asleep beneath my fencepost

While I discreetly wish him sweet dreams.

My poetic panic is gone, my political unease.

It’s not that I still don’t activate often,

It’s merely that life has slowed down to accompany the breeze

Seen now through the lens of a large spanning arc,

Between the old sparks of ignition

And the mellowness that folds in beneath the skin

When one gives in to choosing one’s battles carefully

And with keen discernment.

Walking alone in the San Fernando Valley I notice new trees,

Hispanic men pruning their prized blood orange groves

While trained pit bulls protect backyards full of machinery

And the world breaks into a thousand shards of colorful strata.

It happens when I show up to the keyboard, too

When in blinding moments I am broadsided by grace

And by the soft yet guttural realization

That my muse is, and always has been,

Love, and I embrace it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Cooper Nichols is an artist, writer and social anthropologist living in Venice Beach, California. She has been exhibiting for over a decade as a conceptual artist in the United States and is the author of the book of literary short fiction Mad Anatomy. She also serves as editor for the socially progressive journal Newtopia. She is a contributing editor to 3:AM where her serial poetry column Naked in Front of Strangers appears regularly. She is currently at work on her second book Neptune’s Journey as well as a 22-piece conceptual art project titled FOOL.

The many identities of Fernando Pessoa. * Rare 1952 William Faulkner documentary. * The London nobody sings. * Kindergarde. * The Academy of Modern Ruins is turning an abandoned petrol station on Route 66 into The Philosopher’s Library. * Nostalgia for the Net. * Rhys Tranter‘s fascinating interview with Rick Cluchey. * 3:AM‘s Anna Aslanyan on the Christine Brooke-Rose symposium in the LRB blog. More by Michael Caines over at the TLS blog: “It appears that a ‘new genealogy’ of English post-war fiction, hoped for by [Tom] McCarthy, is already with us, if only we have eyes to see it”. * On Christine Brooke-Rose‘s Textermination and Xorandor. * An interview with translator Kate Briggs apropos of Roland Barthes‘s The Preparation of the Novel. * Paul Celan reads “Todesfuge“. * Thoughts on a sentence by Robert Walser. * Stephen Sparks on Alfred Starr Hamilton: “Can we see Hamilton as New Jersey’s answer to Robert Walser?” * Tzara vs. Burroughs / Gysin. * “Terrence Malick has legendary status for two things: the movies he has made, and the movies he has not made.” * Best translated books awards. * The invention of David Bowie. * Deborah Levy at Faber Academy: “What is the elephant in your novel?” * Tim Parks on reading it wrong. * “The Carmen Horse“, suite et fin: “The image that cannot–must not–be shown. Every narrative conceals a secret, no matter how small”. * Modernist magazines. * Freud’s couch needs £5,000 restoration job. * Christopher Turner on Freud‘s couch. * Lars Iyer‘s Exodus reviewed in The Literateur, as well as by 3:AM‘s David Winters. * Zazie in the Metro (full film). * On techno-primitivism. * Gavin James Bower on Claude Cahun. * Raymond Carver edited by Gordon Lish. * Sheila Rock‘s wonderful photographs chronicling punk‘s evolution from “individual creativity” to “collective identity”. * Jonathan Ross’s London punk demi-monde polaroids. * A rare Joe Stevens picture of Chrissie Hynde and Kate Simon wearing the iconic naked boy T-shirt from McLaren and Westwood‘s Sex (early 1976). * Paul Gorman‘s archaeology of the Anarchy shirt. * Bryan Waterman reviews Richard Hell’s autobiography. * Richard Hell‘s matutinal routine. * The Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City, 1979. * Jello Biafra on Oprah, 1990. * The current Chinese punk scene. * Punk and Situationism. * On the many failures of the Met’s punk exhibition. More here. * The new Mods. * The Electric Circus (the NYC club, not the Manchester punk venue). * Celebrating the bicentenary of Kierkegaard‘s birth. * Will Self on Modernism, pessimism, WG Sebald, post-industial landscapes and the British psyche, and Thatcher’s funeral. * Desert silence. * Why does the world exist? * Proust‘s illustrated poems. * Ray Harryhausen R.I.P. * Finnish headgear. * Tracey Emin‘s photo album. * John Waters documentary, 1993. * John Cale and Jonathan Richman on Aussie TV, 1983. * Spolia. * London fictions. * James Joyce guitar hero, 1915. * New Yorker handwrites King James Bible. * A guide to imaginary relationships. * [Out of Nothing]. * On Gogol: Dead Souls “is all the better for remaining unfinished”. * Bartleby in the University of California. * Alan McGee launches new label. * Lynne Tillman on the life and death of images (video). * On David Lynch. * HP Lovecraft‘s stories. * Taylor Mead R.I.P. * Andy Warhol shopping for Campbell’s soup, 1965. * Beach beauties. * The footed void. * Krasznahorkai on Bookworm. * Grammar rules everyone should adhere to. * John Berger: drawing is discovery. * Nicholas Lezard on Dante. * On marginalia. * Jack Kerouac‘s restless odyssey. * Retro couples. * Stuart Evers reviews Knausgaard‘s A Man in Love. * Applying neuroscience to literature. * Alex Niven interviewed. * John Cooper Clarke: top 10 poems.

I’ve been taking photos quite seriously for a couple of years now, both digitally and on 35 and 120mm film.

Some of these photographs formed part of my mood board as I was writing Black Bread White Beer.

Taking photographs, thinking about them, was an integral part of the writing.

Everything from these images were absorbed into the book.

Electronic Voice Phenomena on tour.

By Niven Govinden.

By Niven Govinden.

Edouard Machery is a killer cool philosopher working on the cutting edge of interfaces between analytic philosophy, psychology, xphi and cognitive science. He’s a continental doing analytic philosophy who thinks philosophy without science is blind. He’s always investigating social phenomena like racism and the ‘integration challenge’, alongside the nature of concepts and whether they are the same as perceptual representation. This month he’ll be going head to head with the chillin’ blue-haired philosopher Jesse Prinz in Latvia on this very issue. He thinks concepts aren’t a natural kind and kind of thinks that studying them is like studying a science of Tuesdays. He’s also brooding on what the folk think and whether experts have judgements that can be trusted, suggesting that philosophy needs to be humble. Everything he does goes to the heart of how we think about ourselves and all in all is one hell of a badass groove. Shakin’.

3:AM: How did you become a philosopher? Were you always thinking about philosophical stuff or were there experiences that brought you to the subject?

Edouard Machery: I am French, I grew up in France, and I did most of my studies in France (at the École Normale Supérieure—where Sartre, Merleay-Ponty, and Foucault studied and where Althusser taught—and at the Sorbonne). In France, philosophy is taught during the last year of high school. In high school, I was very much into math, and I wanted to become a mathematician. When I encountered philosophy, I discovered a form of rigor that was distinct from mathematical rigor, but that was nonetheless genuinely rigorous. It was also harder than math, more precisely than the kind of math we were taught in high school, and it had a broader significance. In brief, I fell for it, and I specialized in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.

I became somewhat disappointed with philosophy as it was taught in France, which was way too historical for my taste. American philosophers sometimes think French students are taught a huge amount of so-called continental philosophy, but in fact Derrida, Deleuze, and others are not central to the teaching of philosophy in French departments of philosophy. Fortunately, I think. Phenomenology and history of philosophy are the bread and butter of a French philosophical education. In any case, philosophy felt stale, and I was longing for the energy that was animating the French philosophy of the first decades of the 20th century or the debates between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

By accident, I discovered analytic philosophy, which rekindled my philosophical desire. The rigor as well as the commitment to clarity and argumentation that attracted me to philosophy in the first place are central to much (if not all) of analytic philosophy. I was lucky to get involved with the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, where some of the best French analytic philosophers were already working, and I was also lucky to meet Steve Stich, who invited me to visit Rutgers and who exerted an extraordinary influence on my thinking and my approach to philosophy.

3:AM: I think one way that we can immediately see the importance of your approach to philosophy and cognitive science is by discussing your work on racism. Racism has traditionally been thought of as either a question of nature – roughly, the thought that we’re born to think in racial terms– or nurture – roughly, our culture, upbringing, environment constructs races, and that they don’t exist in nature. You took the two research traditions, the nature tradition and the nurture tradition, and combined them. Can you say something about why you thought this combined approach was important at the time and what difference such an approach has made on research into this? Has it been an approach that has been well received by those in the previously opposing camps?

EM: Many social phenomena, such as racism, have been studied by, one the one hand, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, and on the other hand, by biologists and by evolutionary-minded behavioral scientists (anthropologists and psychologists). Sadly, these two traditions have failed to engage with one another, and, as a result, our understanding of many social phenomena remains incomplete. In my opinion, it is uncontroversial that social and psychological phenomena like racism or morality result from evolved cognitive structures, whose understanding requires an evolutionary perspective, but that many of their properties are the product of contingent historical trajectories. Integrating the two explanatory traditions is what I called the “integration challenge.” In my view, the theory of cultural evolution provides a framework for this integration.

[Photo of Gil-White from his home page.]

Racism is a case in point. As I have argued, following in part Gil-White’s groundbreaking work, we have evolved a sensitivity to “ethnic markers” (roughly, to markers such as clothes, accent, etc., that indicate what cultural group one belongs to) and a motivation to interact preferentially with members of own our cultural group. Racism is a by-product of this evolved sensitivity and motivation, and it emerges when skin color and other physical properties trigger our sensitivity to ethnic markers.

This hypothesis is useful to understand the unity of a large range of social and psychological phenomena, whose fundamental identity has often been ignored, or even denied, by historians and cultural anthropologists. On the other hand, research in history and cultural anthropology is needed to understand the peculiarities of racism in different historical contexts.

This hypothesis and this integrative approach have been overall well received, and some anthropologists such as Ray Scupin have been looking for evidence of the universality of our sensitivity to cultural markers.

3:AM: So this willingness to merge different research programmes is very much part of your approach to philosophy. You are a well known member of what has been labeled xphi. Were you always looking to do interdisciplinary work, blending psychology and cognitive science with philosophy, or was it something else that got you into it, maybe the feeling that sticking to one discipline was too limiting for the questions you were raising?

EM: I got into a naturalistic approach to philosophy when I was writing my dissertation on concepts. I felt that philosophers of mind such as Peacocke and Fodor had misunderstood the point of the psychology of concepts, and had failed to say interesting things about it. I also thought, and I still think, that the debate about concept individuation in philosophy had reached an impasse, and I found in the psychology of concepts a way to broaden the range of issues of interest.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, my philosophical orientation was very much influenced by Steve Stich. I can’t express my views on this matter better than him: “There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.”

3:AM: Now the big idea that you’re thinking about is the concept of ‘concept.’ It’s a particularly important area of research because concepts are usually thought of as the things or vehicles of our thought. The idea is that we can’t think without concepts, conceived in some way. Now you are not happy with that, but before we get to your ideas, I think it’ll be useful if the topography of the domain is mapped out for us. You wrote a seminal piece, ‘Two Dogmas of Neo-Empiricism’ that actually does that. So could you summarise the general options that you discuss there so that non-specialists get what the various positions are between different conceptions of concepts?

One of the most interesting questions about concepts is whether concepts and perceptual representations are of the same kind, as traditional empiricists such as Hume and neo-empiricists such as psychologist Larry Barsalou and Jesse Prinz would have it, or whether they form two fundamentally distinct kinds, as Fodor has argued. The first option has become influential in philosophy and in psychology, but I have expressed skepticism about it in a few places. Incidentally, this is one of the questions that will be debated in a conference that Prinz and I are organizing in Latvia in May.

3:AM: I guess that most of the sassy readers at 3ammagazine will have read Pinker but the big names on the divide between the neo-empiricists and those that oppose it are Jerry Fodor and Jesse Prinz. They both think concepts are required, but disagree in fundamental ways. Could you flesh out the schema you gave in the last question by saying what the big divide is between these. Can you give examples as to how differently they’d answer the same question? I ask this because when we look at your approach these two figures are interesting points of contrast.

EM: We can illustrate the contrast between neo-empiricists and proponents of amodal cognition such as Fodor by focusing on categorization. Suppose that you see a dog, and that you judge that it is a dog: you are then categorizing the object of your perception as a dog. According to amodal theorists, to do so you retrieve from memory a concept of dog, which is a representation that has nothing to do with the perceptual representation of the dog you are perceiving. It may be something like a word. According to Prinz and Barsalou, the concept of dog you are retrieving from memory is itself a set of perceptual representations of dogs, and you match these perceptual representations (consciously or unconsciously) to your current perceptual representation of a dog. So, for neo-empiricists, but not for amodal theorists, entertaining a concept is a form of imagining or simulating. Jesse Prinz and I discuss this issue in our Philosophy TV dialogue.

3:AM: Now all that is by way of throat clearing for your own theory. You depart from both these approaches in a subtle way. You deny that concepts are a natural kind. Your book ‘Doing Without Concepts’ elaborates this idea. You argue that we should do away with talk about concepts, which is really very radical. Some might say you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater and the bath as well! Can you explain your idea?

EM: It IS a fairly radical idea! And not one everybody is happy with!
In any case, psychologists and philosophers of psychology often assume that concepts share many scientifically important properties, and that the goal of a theory of concepts is to identify these properties. In philosophical jargon, concepts are supposed to form “a natural kind.” So, psychologists and philosophers of psychology have developed various theories of concepts, and have defended their pet theories by undermining the competing theories. The take-home message of Doing without Concepts is that this “natural kind” assumption is fundamentally misguided, and that as a result many debates between psychologists and philosophers about what the right theory of concepts is are empty.

To make that claim, I review in great detail and I assess the psychology of concepts of the last 40 years. Many good responses have been written in response to this idea and to the evidence I put forward, but I still find my views compelling.

3:AM: I asked about Fodor and Prinz because in a way these two are representative of different approaches to concepts that your position challenges. In a way you say Fodor is talking about something orthogonal to your concerns, but Prinz is being directly contradicted by your view. Is that right? Can you say something about this and the general significance for philosophy of mind that your approach brings to the table.

EM: This is correct. The question Fodor is asking, viz. “In virtue of what are we able to think about the objects of our thoughts as such (e.g., about dogs as such, about water as such),” is orthogonal to the question I am asking, which focuses on the bodies of information that determine the course of cognitive processes such as the processes underlying categorization or induction. In contrast, Prinz’s views are at odds with mine, since Prinz’s neo-empiricism amounts to an empirical hypothesis about the nature of these bodies of information. Prinz has a great discussion of the contrast between our views in Can Concept Empiricism Forestall Eliminativism?.

On my view, the mind turned out to be much more complicated and to have a much more baroque structure than philosophers of mind traditionally assume. We typically have many distinct ways, partly disconnected, to think about the same thing (dogs, water, presidents, visit to the dentist), and many words turn out to be polysemous, even if we are not aware of their polysemy. I have tried to provide some empirical evidence for this latter claim with Selja Seppälä in an essay Against hybrid theories of concepts, and Josh Knobe and Sandy Presada have a recent paper in Cognition Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation that fits with the gist of my views.

3:AM: Now when we talk of natural kinds we contrast them with non-natural kinds. So water is a natural kind and science can investigate it, but Tuesday isn’t. So we are used to thinking that there can’t be a science of Tuesdays. But you’re saying concepts are like Tuesday. So could there be a science of Tuesdays, just as there is of concepts? I guess what I’m wondering is whether your approach to concepts really does change how we think about how we think in pretty significant ways.

EM: Yes, that’s a nice way to put my views. A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

3:AM: As with many of the xphi community you are interested in investigating folk theories of various phenomena. In a paper with Jonathan Livengood you give a couple of reasons for this interest: firstly, ‘folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism,’ and secondly ‘folk metaphysics ought to be studied , because metaphysicians often assume without evidence that they know what the folk think, and these assumptions are sometimes wrong in important ways.’ In that paper you were looking at causation by absence. So can you give examples of some of the things you have done to find out what the folk are thinking and how it isn’t what we think they do?

EM: For a large part of philosophy (e.g., for the kind of questions about concepts we just discussed or for whether human nature exists—one of my research interests), lay opinions or folk theories do not matter at all. But for other parts of philosophy, they do, in part because philosophers appeal to them.

Examining folk theories or judgments empirically may turn out to be surprising in more than one way. Sometimes, we find that philosophers just don’t have that good a grasp of what lay people think. This is what the paper with Jonathan Livengood tried to establish. We show that some claims made by David Lewis and by Helen Beebee about lay people’s understanding of causation by absence are mistaken (but see Dunaway, Edmonds, & Manley, The Folk Probably Do Think What you Think They Think for an empirical criticism of our work).

In other cases, philosophers assume that judgments about philosophical cases or thought experiments (what is often called, misleadingly, “intuitions”) are likely to be true or reliable. A huge amount of work in experimental philosophy casts doubt on this view, by showing that these judgments are influenced by irrelevant variables such as culture, age, order of presentation of cases, and so on. My 2004 paper in Cognition, “Semantics Cross-Cultural Style” (with Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich), illustrates this approach. We presented participants in the USA and in Hong-Kong with cases inspired by Kripke’s famous Gödel case, and, as we had predicted, we found that Americans tend to have Kripkean intuitions (“Gödel” refers to the man originally called “Gödel”), while Chinese tend to have descriptivist intuitions (“Gödel” refers to the man originally called “Schmidt”)! This finding has now been replicated several times, including in Japan (by Jonathan Livengood and Justin Sytsma), My collaborators and I have also used various formulations of the cases to address some concerns with my original work. To give another example, David Colaço (a grad student at Pitt, HPS), Was Buckwalter, Steve Stich and I have recently shown that some important epistemological judgments (for the aficionado: judgments about fake barn cases) vary with age: Older people are much less likely to ascribe knowledge to an agent when she could easily have formed a false belief instead of the true belief she did form.

It is common to respond that findings on the vagaries of lay people’s judgments say little about experts’ judgments such as philosophers’ judgments (a response known as “the Expertise Defense”). This response has now been challenged experimentally. I have shown that intuitions about reference of linguists and philosophers are influenced by their theoretical commitments (Michael Devitt and I have been discussing this issue in a recent exchange in Theoria): Semanticists and philosophers of language, who are likely to have read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, are more likely to have Kripkean intuitions than linguists who pay attention to the descriptions associated with words such as (sociolinguists, terminologists, anthropological linguists, etc.). Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman (Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non‐Philosophers as well as Kevin Tobia, Wes Buckwalter, and Steve Stich in Moral intuitions: Are philosophers experts? have shown that philosophers’ judgments about trolley case and other moral cases are influenced by various biases. In brief, philosophers’ and other experts’ judgments too are influenced by irrelevant variables.

To be honest, we do not yet know how often judgments about cases of philosophical interest are influenced by irrelevant variables. To address this question, Steve Stich and I have recently been awarded a large grant by the Fuller Theological Seminary / Thrive Center in concert with the John Templeton Foundation for a project on “Intellectual Humility and Cultural Diversity in Philosophy: An examination of the extent and implications of cultural diversity in philosophical intuition.” The goal of this grant is to run the first large-scale, systematic empirical study of the diversity of intuitions and to assess the implications of this diversity for the practice of philosophy.

3:AM: So can you say something about the general significance of this work. For instance, do you think that the new ways of understanding who we are is leading to a pretty radical new view of what people are. Is our self image changing because of this philosophical work?

EM: Some of this work is surely changing our self-image, or at least it should! Many philosophers of mind such as Dave Chalmers and Ned Block are convinced that phenomenal consciousness is a real phenomenon in part (perhaps in large part) because its reality strikes them as introspectively obvious. Well, if phenomenal consciousness is really obvious, as Justin Sytsma and I have argued in Two conceptions of subjective experience, then lay people should have a concept of phenomenal consciousness: They should draw a sharp distinction between mental states that have a phenomenal character and those that do not. But we have shown experimentally that they don’t, which suggests that they do not have a concept of phenomenal consciousness. We take this to suggest that phenomenal consciousness is not obvious at all, and, if it is not, why would we believe it is a real phenomenon at all? If our argument is convincing (and there are many responses one could make—we discuss them in our paper), then we need to revise our view of the mind dramatically! There may be no qualia, there may be no phenomenal consciousness.

In addition, the project “Intellectual Humility and Cultural Diversity in Philosophy” may lead us to advocate for a greater humility in philosophy. The methods commonly used in contemporary philosophy may be challenged by the diversity we expect to find. So, for example, how should we investigate moral permissibility if judgments about permissibility vary dramatically across cultures? Why should we care about what philosophers call “knowledge” if billions of people in other cultures don’t value this particular epistemological condition? That’s the type of question that philosophers would have to face if our project is successful.

3:AM: Are there some things that from this new perspective that we should be thinking about more seriously than perhaps we have done. I’m thinking about the tv show ‘Fringe’ which imagines that research on the fringe of science (or pseudo-science!) into things like ESP, life after death and stuff like that has borne fruit! This stuff is often characterized as being nutty, because it is in conflict with what proper science tells us, but given that this is probably just a folk intuition, isn’t there a possibility that the belief that nutty pseudo science is nutty is just another bias of our cognition and so should be revisited?

EM: Mmmh. There must be room for mavericks and heretics in science, a point highlighted by recent research on the social structure of science (for instance in Ryan Muldoon and Michael Weisberg’s work). After all, Darwin’s views were once marginal. On the other hand, the difference between Darwin and ESP advocates is that the former made a compelling case for evolution, while decades of research done by the latter have failed to produce even vaguely suggestive evidence.

3:AM: Do you find yourself having difficulty with people now that you know that so much mental life is kind of strange? And doesn’t it make you worry that much of what we are is mysterious given that you argue that much of the important conceptual work is not open to introspection?

EM: One of the things psychology has taught me is that we are sometimes poor at predicting how we would behave, and I often express skepticism at my friends’ and acquaintances’ assured predictions about how they would behave in such and such situations. When I predict my behavior, I tend to assume that I would behave like most people, and I often try to determine what psychological research predicts about the relevant type of behavior. This sometimes leads me to predict that I will behave in particular way, while I feel, with great confidence, that *I*, in contrast to other people, will behave differently. Weird mind split.

3:AM: Looking forward, where are your investigations going next? You’re working in a very exciting field with some very smart people. If you were to predict the state of play in say a decade, what do you think we’ll know then that we don’t know now? And who are the people to watch out for (alongside yourself of course!)

EM: I am working on several projects at the same time in addition to the project on philosophical humility I mentioned earlier.

For a few years now, I have been involved in a very lively debate about how human nature should be reconceptualized in light of progress in biology, genetics, and psychology. Steve Downes and I have just published a reader on this question, Arguing about Human Nature , and we hope that an increasing number of philosophers will turn their attention to this question. I have further ideas about this question, which I hope to write in the coming years.

I am slowly writing a new book about the foundations of statistics and about methodology in psychology and the behavioral sciences. I am defending classical statistics (the type of statistics developed by R.A. Fisher and Neyman and Pearson) against various criticisms, arguing for what I take to be the only consistent interpretation of classical statistics,a nd proposing various inferential norms for scientists. The book mixes fairly abstract arguments and concrete proposals about particular norms of inference. I hope it will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists alike.

Somewhat related, I am also working on the methodology of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, and I have recently published several papers on the topic.

In the philosophy of psychology, I have developed fairly heterodox views about what is known as “implicit bias,” and I am turning the talk I have been giving into an essay for a fantastic volume edited by Jenny Saul and Michael Brownstein.

In moral psychology, I have interest about whether the concept of morality is a universal or whether it is, as I suspect, a cultural invention. I am doing some empirical work to try to get at this question, and I hope to be able to tell a broadly Nietzschean story about the invention of morality. I have already argued in detail with Ron Mallon that, while our sense of norms evolved, morality itself as a distinct kind of norms is probably a cultural invention (see the chapter on the evolution of morality in John Doris’s fantastic Moral Psychology Handbook with OUP).

As for the people that you should keep an eye on, I’d like to put a plug for my former and current graduate students. Justin Sytsma is one of the most interesting experimental philosophers, and his work on consciousness is extremely influential. Jonah Schupbach has done some groundbreaking work on explanatory power and on inference to the best explanation, and he brings together formal and experimental methods in the philosophy of science. Elizabeth O’Neill, who is finishing her PhD with me, is doing some really exciting work in moral epistemology, Greg Gandenberger, another of my PhD students, is working on incredibly difficult issues on the foundations of statistics, and has developed a new proof of the likelihood principle, and Joe McCaffrey, who is just starting his dissertation, is scrutinizing the project of localizing cognitive functions in the brain, which is at the core of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. All these research projects are incredibly exciting.

3:AM: And finally, are there any books you’ve read whilst engaged in this fascinating work that have been illuminating for you?

EM: The Fragmentation of Reason and Deconstructing the Mind by Steve Stich have been very influential for my intellectual formation. I am also a huge fan of Fodor’s early books, The Language of Thought and Representations, and of Dennett’s Brainstorms. I re-read these books regularly.

My work on concepts was very much influenced by Paul Griffiths’s book on emotions, What Emotions Really Are. This book illustrated how philosophy of psychology should be done. The same is true of Shaun Nichols’s, John Doris’s, and Jesse Prinz’s books.

Boyd and Richerson’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process as well as their collection of articles (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures) played a large role in my attempt to meet what I called earlier the integration challenge.

Nisbett’s work on cultural diversity, The Geography of Thought, woke me from my dogmatic slumber. I used to ignore the role of culture in shaping our thoughts, and Nisbett and his colleagues’ research led me to revise my views (although I am not entirely convinced by Nisbett’ historical explanation of the differences his book reviews).

Finally, E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature is a fantastic, though often erroneous, read. It has convinced me of the legitimacy of viewing human beings as one would view any other species, by identifying the modal, stable patterns of behavior or of thought. This remains a very provocative read.

3:AM: And finally, finally, the smart set at 3:AM always like a reading list. So can you give us your Top 5 books that we should be reading to understand better your field?

EM: I recommend the books I cited earlier in this article, but here are a few additional suggestions (more than five, sorry!):

Stich’s collections of articles (Collected Papers I and II) is a great read.

Knobe and Nichols’s anthology, Experimental Philosophy, is a must read if one is interested in experimental philosophy.

Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the south by Nisbett and Cohen also illustrates the importance of culture.

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by Kruschke is the best introduction to Bayesian methods in statistics. Although I am skeptical of the call for statistical reform in psychology, psychologists should be better acquainted with Bayesian methods.

Finally, two fantastic handbooks: The Moral Psychology Handbook by John Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Steve Stich.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

By Niven Govinden.

By Niven Govinden.

Conventional wisdom would suggest when a poet leaves their country of birth at a young age, for a new nation, they might bring to bear both traditions upon their writing. Perhaps it is possible, though arguably reductive, that the poet in question would be of neither nation truly – forever an immigrant in one and a stranger to another. What seems assured though, is that this sense of displacement, ambiguity of tradition and identity, this fundamental plurality of language and culture, would seem to find its proper place in the intangibility at the heart of a forceful and considered poetic, where such equivocality is not only welcome but perhaps necessary.

At the core of the last century’s European poetry tradition lies the notion of trace, of multiplicity, invention, migration and these are the defining characteristics of George Szirtes’ oeuvre. His body of work, 40 years in the making and prolific in that time, has carried across forms, mediums, language and tones. It is the poetry of a singular individual extolling individualism, a poet whose responsibilities towards generosity and openness of spirit seem gracefully self-imposed across writing, translating, teaching, editing and anthologising.

Moreover, it is the not the work of a man trapped between nations and histories, but one who has been emancipated by a lifetime’s fidelity to poetry, never bound by a national dualism, despite the complications of being explicitly Hungarian and implicitly English. Author of over 20 collections, winner of numerous prizes including the TS Eliot, the Cholmondeley, the Gold star of the Hungarian republic and the best translated book award, George Szirtes is an immense poet and undoubtedly the greatest translator of Hungarian into English of the last century, if ever. In an wide ranging and generous interview, we present the 96th edition of Maintenant.

3:AM: It seems you have often been asked to recount a sense of your identity through your nationality, and its dualism between your life in England, your entire adult life, and your childhood in Hungary. Inevitably, this question of nationality may be somewhat irrelevant, it simply is, but its invocation does involve a consistent calling back to your youth, and those experiences which have shaped your life. Do you feel that poetry has been a necessary medium for you in this specific context? in which you have explored your nationality as a Hungarian, and your experiences in Hungary as a child?

GS: The Jesuits thought the first seven years of a child’s life would determine the adult and Rudolf Steiner thought something similar. I am not always sure how and to what degree they are right but childhood is a vital formative period for everyone. Early childhood in particular provides us with a groundwork of reality, an instinctive sense of the dimensions of life. That dimensional sense is necessarily related to time, place, and language, and the people who share that time, place, and language with you may share it primarily on the basis of nationality, but there are many other potential bases for sharing, such as family, class, religion, cause, condition, nature, etc. This is a little long-winded but I want as far as possible to separate the nation-state as an idea in flag-bearing form from the far more complex sense of who or what we are. There is only one sequence of poems in which my own childhood has been the central concern, ‘Flesh: An Early Family History’ in Reel (2004). Specific memories occur in other poems as almost chance crystallisations of the dimensional sense but my actual memories of very early childhood are few. The ‘Flesh’ sequence begins with five poems on forgetting that warn the reader – and myself – that what follows is in essence the invention of memory.

That’s the personal side. As regards the Hungarian nation, the history of Hungary has meant essentially four dates for me: 1944 (the German army’s entry into Hungary and the beginning of the Hungarian Holocaust), 1956 (the year of the Uprising when we left), 1984 (the year I first returned to Hungary as a writer) and 1989 (when we spent most of the year in Hungary watching the state crumble around us). Unfortunately Hungary has been rushing as fast as it can back to the Thirties since then. Even in those poems, poems with what I think of as a historical sense, it is not so much the nation, more a set of instinctive personal dimensions that acts as the dynamic. I actively dislike nationalism in all its forms.

3:AM: Moreover, do you think the traditional interpretation of this ‘dual’ nationality, as being one of double exclusion, culturally and linguistically, is valid? To me, much of your work presents an opposite idea, that these complications of nationality have allowed you a greater sense of what is indelibly English and Hungarian?

GS: That is very hard for me to say. There is the whole of the collection titled An English Apocalypse (2001) of which the 26-section title poem refers to a great many experiences and events that I felt to be specifically English. The sequence consists of pastorals, grotesques, urban vignettes, memories of living in the North of England, the political climate of the 70s and 80s and the five apocalypses at the end.

I have, I suppose, my own distinct sense of being in England – and of being in Hungary. No doubt both are limited. It is as with memory – a good part of it is invention and imagination. In fact it’s all very dreamlike. Writing such dreams is like watching oneself dream. But I can’t help feeling ‘exclusion’ is too strong a word. I don’t think anything in particular is excluding me. I think there may instead be a delicate state of tension, a certain distancing, but that the distancing is mutual.

3:AM: Moreover, though I can’t speak of the latter (though your work as a translator from the Hungarian is arguably the most semantically important contribution to that field in modern history), but of the former, you do certainly seem to have an unusual sensitivity to the ironies and subtleties of English culture, whatever they may be. Do you feel you have developed a specific sensitivity in this regard?

GS: I hope I have but I would be the last person to know. The slightly odd thing is that nobody – with the exception of John Sears who wrote a whole book about my work (Reading George Szirtes, 2008) – treated An English Apocalypse as a serious depiction of England. Sean O’Brien refers to it briefly in his Bloodaxe lectures. The line seems to be that, as a foreigner, I can have no real perspective on England and that, despite the five apocalypses at the end, I have too rosy a view of it. They think I should leave the English to their guilt and let the Irish and the Scots address the issue for them. Well, tra-la. It may be that I speak as nobody else finds. I may be just a weirdo with a weird sense of England. I hope the sequence might at least be a set of glowing fragments within those dreamlike crypto-English dimensions of time, place and language I mentioned at the start.

3:AM: The Jewish tradition in Hungary and Romania and the Baltic is one of the most ebullient and overwhelming and fundamentally tragic in 19th and 20th century Europe – essentially an incredibly dense mixture of Hasidism, theatre, poetry, secularism, zionism – it really was the grounding for so much of the philosophy, literature and avant garde movements that resonate so completely today. Has your family a long history in this regard?

GS: Practically none as far as I know but the fact is I simply don’t know. The effect of the interwar period in Hungary which introduced the first anti-Jewish laws in 1920 following the Bolshevik revolution of 1919 (led by Jewish communists), was to discourage all such manifestations. Hungarian Jew were to assimilate as far as possible, to leave the professions – and later any employment – and to make themselves all but invisible. It didn’t help of course. My father’s people came, I believe, from Bohemia and Moravia (details lost), my mother’s from Transylvania. It was not until she had died that I was told – though I had guessed – her family were Jewish. She said they were Lutheran. The concentration camp experiences of 1944-45 were, according to her, on political grounds. She was partially educated middle-class, trained as a photographer, his fmily was urban working-class with lower middle class relatives, including in the arts. But none of these arts were Jewish. I grew up in ignorance of the whole tradition, no rituals, now festivals, no customs. To be introduced to it now would be interesting. Half of me would think I had come home, the other half would we wondering what I was doing among the Hottentots.

3:AM: Many Romanian Jewish writers really saw their identity as Jewish and not Romanian in the way we conceive of that nation (I’m thinking of Celan, but also Dan Pagis, and Tzara even) because the Romanian states they grew up in were Austro-Hungarian constructs like Bukovina that ended with the horrific fascism of the late 30s and early 40s and the actions of the Iron guard. From that point they were no longer Romanian, but Jewish writers from extinct Jewish communities. How much has your own sense of identity between being Hungarian and being Jewish been cohesive or conflicting?

GS: It is as conflicting as Hungary chooses to make it. My mother preferred to think of herself as Romanian in the 60s and we had a nunber invitations to cultural events at the Romanian embassy. I don’t know why or how. My mother, who was ethnic Hungarian but born after WW1 in post-Trianon Romanian territory, blamed the Hungarians rather than the Romanians for the extermination of her entire family because it happened during a period when her part of Transylvania was for a few years back under Hungarian jurisdiction. I myself felt no conflict in childhood, nor did I throughout the 80s and early 90s. It shocked me in 1995 to see blackshirts march through Budapest and the potential for conflict has steeply risen since then.

3:AM: Do you think there has been an acknowledgement or a consciousness in contemporary Hungarian society of the shame of complicity that ordinary Hungarians showed toward the holocaust, in light of the actions of country like Denmark during the same period?

GS: No, absolutely not. Like most countries under Soviet control they were told they were the good people and that all the bad ones – Nazis and Fascists – had fled to the Western side. In partial mitigation Hungary had suffered a series of catastrophic defeats since 1526, so having to bear guilt as well as defeat might be feared to be psychologically crushing, but it would be a great step forward if they could do it. I don’t anticipate any time soon, however. At the moment we are as far from it as we have ever been.

3:AM: The situation in obviously deeply complex but many have spoken about a rise of the right in Hungary, a return to explicit public anti-semitism and nationalism. Has this been perceptible to you? And has it been related to cultural or economic matters in your opinion?

GS: I have kept a pretty close eye on it, blogged on it, linked to it and engaged in an LSE debate about it. It is more than perceptible – it is downright shouting in your face. Over 60% of the Hungarian public, a recent survey says, take anti-Semitic and anti-Roma attitudes. The highest in Europe. Fascist writers are back on the school syllabus, statues of Horthy and others of his time have been rising. The history and culture of the nation is being forcefully rewritten. The vulnerable isolation of the Hungarian language is also a factor. I could write you half a book on the reasons for it, and yes, it is connected to cultural and economic matters but it has long historical roots, most specifically from the end of the 19th century onwards.

3:AM: Your prolificism seems to be a fundamental part of your essence as a writer – the notion of relentless activity, of an endless engagement of writing, commentating, producing. It is admirable. How do you conceive of your own energy of output?

GS: I don’t really know. At worst it’s an addiction, at best just a surplus of energy, I think fast, feel fast, tick over fast. I don’t think that indicates a lack of depth. Dive fast, dive deep is the principle. I love the feeling of language in my hands. I want to be where it is. I wouldn’t know what I thought or felt, or was, without it. It’s not that I am sure now, but I do at least feel I’m on the track.

3:AM: Moreover so much of your activity is interactive, contemporary and accessible, you seem to have made a concerted effort to embrace the online media of communication to produce a lot of poetry, reportage, commentary and to offer a cohesive view of your work as it is happening for those who would follow. Did this happen decisively or naturally? Do you take pleasure in this ‘public’ engagement?

GS: When possible I try to say yes to things. I am not a technophile as such. I am no good at understanding the mechanics, but once engaged I am immediately interested in the nature of the medium’s existence. I entered Facebook and Twitter at other people’s prompting. but once in I was aware of them as potentially literary spaces and locations. By literary I don’t mean necessarily bookish, I mean places that language can explore.

I was not drawn there by the ‘social’ side of ‘social media’. I’m far from a life-and-soul-of-the-party man. My main objection to the slam and performance scene, admirable though it is in many ways, is that it seems like an enormous party and, as I tell others, I started writing poetry to get away from parties not to go to more. I am quite solitary in many ways. The public element of writing blogs, facebook posts and tweets, works in two main ways for me: 1) I do actually make friends with real individual people, and 2) the awareness that whatever I write in such spaces is in the semi-public arena, however ephemeral, offers an editorial standard and discipiline. I can mumble what I like to myself at my desk, but once the utterance is in public space it must stand up for itself.

Dance, dart, dive as deep as you can, emerge. It’s the way life seems to have come at me. All the long sequences have been series of such actions. In that respect, the technology / media way of working seems perfectly natural. Blog, Facebook and Twitter are interesting locations for work. And, of course, each new location invites a new poetic, a new form. I think form is a kind of action, not a product. Give me a form, give me a line, and I’ll chase it like a dog chases the wind. Each new poetic opens another possibility. Each is a form.

3:AM: And having written over 15 collections, produced innumerable translations and edited many volumes in your over three decades of publishing, what is your relationship to the finished book? Is it dead upon delivery, as they say, or do you have a sense of its continued life in that it may never be completely finished in your eyes?

GS: The big 520pp New and Collected Poems appeared in 2008. The earliest poem there dates back to 1973, the last to 2007. It’s not in the least dead matter to me – I enjoy reading from it occasionally and am proud to have written much of it – but it is done. I don’t want to be trapped in it. I certainly wouldn’t want to rewrite it or write more of the same. Even as it was being planned I had a later book in preparation, The Burning of the Books (2009), that would do some new things. I want to see what else there is to be done – what it is in me to do – without closing the pre-2008 account.

3:AM: Do you think poetry has developed a notion that an excess of writing is somehow a lack? That there is a traditional, formal and constricting suspicion of writers who are effusive, as opposed to writers who are delicately withdrawn and lonesome in tone and manner? (It certainly seems that way in Britain)

GS: Excess can be perceived as lack, but if excess indicates frivolity, there is something earnest about paucity. Some people are productive, some less so. That isn’t a moral or artistic choice. It’s a matter of metabolism. Having got beyond the Collected I feel pleasantly and generously irresponsible. That book is there and won’t vanish. That means I feel less bound than ever by the expectations or standards of ‘important people’ or the literary ‘powers’. If work interests me I will do it. I want to run around and breathe new air and learn new manners. I couldn’t do that without excess.

Blake said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I don’t know about the wisdom, but I am enjoying the road.

3:AM: I’m interested in how you approach subjects for translation. There seems to be a remarkable depth of work in the Hungarian language, and your translations seem, objectively, to be responsible for the immense reputation of some Hungarian writers outside of Hungary. Is the process led by your reading and taste, or by publishers contacting you?

GS: There are between five and ten translators of Hungarian into English who do a very good job of trying to cover precisely that ‘depth of work’. They are mainly translators of fiction. In poetry Edwin Morgan and William Jay Smith were very important. Morgan’s translations of Attila József are still the best and it was his translation of Sándor Weöres’s ‘The Lost Parasol’ in the Penguin volume of two Hungarian poets, Weöres and Ferenc Juhász, that inspired me to think that translation is something I might do. The work of George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer, and of Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner is vital. Peter Zollman – hardly known in the UK, though he lives here – is of a high standard.

In terms of poetry I began with a series of commissions from the now defunct The Hungarian Quarterly (The New Hungarian Quarterly as it was then) whose demise is the result of one of the many attacks on independent thinking by the current Hungarian government that is determined to define what culture should be. The way it has generally worked since then is that I am commissioned by publishers to translate fiction, but it is up to me to propose poetry. I wish I had more time for poetry now: I translate individual poems but fiction takes up the majority of the time available.

I doubt that I am responsible for anything but a small part of the reputation of Hungarian writers. Being known, and having won prizes, as a poet probably draws attention to my work.

3:AM: Why do you think Sandor Márai, who was so prolific, and lived so long outside of Hungary, was only given critical and popular attention outside of Hungary in the last few decades, after his tragic death? Do you think it came down to chance, or perhaps the need for good English translations of his work?

GS: Márai’s is a tragic story. His work was banned in Hungary after the war and he could only publish in the Hungarian-language emigré press which is hardly ever noticed by anyone except other emigrés or by dissidents at home. He killed himself in San Diego at the age of 89, in 1989 just as the system that had banned him was falling apart. His discovery was down to chance. A few years after his death the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso was in Paris and borrowed Márai’s book, known in English as Embers, from a publisher’s list of forgotten classics. He loved it and made sure it received as much international attention as possible. It became a lauded best seller in many languages. This started the revival. Márai was one of those very prolific writer: in effect it was like pulling a string and finding a stash of potential gold at the other end. Everything is helped by a good translation. I have translated four novels by Márai – more may be translated but not by me. It may even be that the demand for his work is less than it was. I think he was a magnificent visionary but an erratic writer of passages rather than of fully formed novels. Embers – which I did not translate – was really a novella. as was Esther’s Inheritance (that I did). He was best as an observer (see his diaries) and a psychologist of motives and desires. His thought is heightened by brilliant sensory impressions. Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels and Portraits of a Marriage are marvellous, incomplete tours de force.

3:AM: Laszlo Krasznahorkai is another remarkably gifted novelist you have translated that seems to have gained immense respect outside of Hungary in the last decade. What is your relationship to his works as a translator? Are his novels unique challenges?

GS: László Krasznahorkai is, along with Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas, one of the three major writers of Hungarian prose fiction of the late 20th and early 21st century. Like Márai he is a visionary but his vision is more absolute and cosmological: it is essentially apocalyptic. Most Hungarian fiction tends to be translated into German before any other language and he was winning prizes there from the start. I have translated three books by him, the first of which, in terms of translation, The Melancholy of Resistance, became an object of what I think of as a cult – a small cult in terms of numbers but a potentially very influential one, a cult reinforced by the second in order of translation, War and War. His books fit very well into a world where high art literature may be represented by Thomas Bernhadt and W G Sebald. It only took one big spark to start the fire and that is what happened with the third of my translations, Satantango – his very first novel in Hungarian. Suddenly it was all blazing. I am delighted for him – he is a marvellous original writer.

He is very hard work indeed for a translator. His love of the paragraphless chapter and of the very long sentence presents obvious technical problems. It takes time to tune in and feel the timbre of the voice, to understand the nature of its darkness and humour and why those long sentences are the way they are. Hungarian syntax has to find a form in English syntax, and the effects of Hungarian syntax have to rediscover themselves in English syntax. The translator must learn the register and explore the dimensions of a vision that permeates everything. Speaking for myself, after the first working draft, I have to sit down and rewrite what is in front of me, guided only by what I hope are my best instincts.

I don’t work closely with him on the translations. I like him and respect him very much as a person but we don’t meet very often. On rare occasions I phone or email to ask him about some particular usage or term, but never about stylistic issues. I have sometimes got this or that detail wrong, but the web of the voice is the vital thing, because that is what the reader enters. It is the world the reader enters, its noise and mechanism, that is unique.

3:AM: Do you approach the translation of fiction and poetry in distinctly different ways?

GS: Poetry is more line-by-line work: it may be that the flow is from detail to whole rather than the other way, as it is in fiction. Hear the weight of the detail, find the precise chime of the workable voice made up out of such details – by which I mean not just lexicographical detail but rhythm, texture, shifting registers and manners of voice, including the voice’s relationship to formality and informality, and the hearing and locating, where possible, of English poetic echoes – no poetry works entirely out of itself, everything is born, apparently naked, out of echo – that may establish some related echo-chamber. Poetry is like listening all over the body. Fiction is like understanding a way of moving.

3:AM: You have advocated a collaborative energy throughout your writing career too, which is a greatly underappreciated notion in poetry, in my opinion. Did you always actively collaborate with peers in your early practise?

GS: I have worked with composers and visual artists from the beginning – much of the forthcoming book, Bad Machine, springs from direct collaboration with three specific visual artists – rather than with other writers although, through teaching, I have in effect collaborated in the making of new work. The poetry I most love assumes a solitary voice entering another solitary mind in a given solitary space. Given that notion of the solitary (‘In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night’, as Dylan Thomas wrote) it is not surprising that poets have been wary of collaborating with each other in a sustained and substantial way. But there are levels at which collaboration retains its solitary integrity while at the same time responding fully to another voice. The collaboration with Carol Watts has been the great recent disovery for me. It has been a marvellously energetic process and is still to complete. I am very grateful to you, Steven, for getting us together.

3:AM: The Hungarian tradition is littered with figures of great prolificism and great tragedy. Poets like Nagy, Weores, Faludy and Juhasz seem counterbalanced by powerfully romantic figures like Jozsef and Radnoti. Perhaps you are uniquely situated to try and make sense of such an immense and definitive tradition. How much do you think the Hungarian 20th century poetical tradition is defined by these notions, of tragedy and immense energy?

GS: The 20th century was a remarkable period in Hungarian poetry. There are a good number of poets I could add to your list who are of world or at least European stature. Agnes Nemes Nagy (I think you mean her, the name is effectively double-barelled) was not among the prolific, nor was János Pilinszky, a great poet translated most notably by Ted Hughes. I had hoped my translation of the selected poems of Nemes Nagy (The Night of Akhenaton, 2004) would give her a more central place but the great political moment of Eastern European poetry was lost in 1989 and she may have to wait. Agnes Lehoczky, whom you mention below, is a great admirer of Nemes Nagy and wrote – and has published – only the second English language study of her important work. Tragedy and energy are very good descriptors of Hungarian poetry. The national consciousness is certainly attuned to the tragic and a furious energy animates much of the culture. It is, in many cases, leavened by irony and playfulness.

3:AM: You have been instrumental in supporting the work of many contemporary Hungarian poets too, by translating them, if not literally supporting their work. Both Agnes Lehoczky and Andras Gerevich have featured in this series in fact. Do you feel you have a strong connection to a new generation of Hungarian poets?

GS: I don’t think it is as strong as it might be. They are simply younger than I am – all the older generation of poets I got to know in the Eighties are dead now – and, naturally enough their first contacts are likely to be of their own age group. However, I did edit New Order (2010) an anthology of younger poets translated by various people, including myself, for Arc. Getting to know them properly would need a more concentrated effort on my part, and much of my recent translation work has been concentrated on prose. Maybe next academic year, when I hope to have more time, I’ll be able to do something more for them. There are so few of us who can translate Hungarian poetry, I feel I should do it, though I am hoping that poets like Lehoczky – who writes in English after all – might take up some of the slack . She was of great help with New Order.

3:AM: Obviously within the bounds of your profession as teacher at UEA part of your responsibility is to help new writers, your students, with their work, yet it seems you are well known for being instrumental in supporting a wide variety of younger poets, always remaining accessible and energetic in the support of their work. Do you view this as a responsibility that many more established poets should undertake or just part of the specific nexus of your own practise?

GS: I try to support younger poets but I think it’s two-way in that I learn a good deal from them too. That’s not a piety: discussing work with them keeps me on my toes and has an effect on what I myself do. I will in fact be retiring from UEA soon but I don’t want to lose contact with my current students and ex-students. If it were a matter of just talking to students about poetry, and about their own poetry in particular, I would be happy to continue for a long time but there are a lot of institutional extras at universities that are of secondary interest to me. IOn the other hand I have no wish to seal myself off from external energies that sap but refresh. I can’t speak for other poets. It’s not an obligation or a moral stance. Each to his or her own. I would quite like to carry on meeting them informally in cafes and bars in town.

3:AM: Huge generalisations here, but how do you view poetry and its potential for personal change, for influence, for aesthetic revelation as it relates to the individual poet and reader? Do you conceive of it as something utterly personal, or impersonal, something that goes out into the world after being written and is thus detached from you and your intentions for it, or do you give it an ethical power, an agency for moving the individual that relates specifically to your force behind it?

GS: You are right – these are huge questions so the answer must be a little longer.

The human race has been composing, reciting and hearing poetry from the very start. The conclusion must be that it is of some use to us. It is useful in making sense of a world that is part memory, part imagination. It does so by giving that world a shape in language. It makes us realise things we didn’t know we knew. It utterly changed my life at 17 when I started reading and writing it. I thought the shapes it made were magical in that they held things together by transforming them. It humanised the world for me. It was a form of power., like magic

The poet is personal: the language is impersonal. Language is not a stable or static entity – it moves and crumbles and grows at the same time. The poet’s art lies in listening intently to the micro-movements of language while never forgetting the sense of the world as the pre-language – as instinct, apprehension, desire – that drove him or her to the threshold of language in the first place. Of course there are subjects and themes but that’s about as far as intention can go. As I see it is not a matter of wanting to say something, then finding the words to say it. You discover what you and the language have to say by entering the process of saying. The ethical power of poetry lies in its precise tension with language not in any broadly stated programme of doing good. The programme is advertisement. Technique, suggested Pound, is the test of sincerity. I think he was on to something.

The reader is as personal as the writer. Like the poet, the reader looks to reinvent himself / herself within a language shape that feels like the world. That shape is as impersonal to the reader as it is to the writer. Neither of them owns it. Reader and writer enter it at different angles, from different locations, with different baggage. But they share it. The solitary voice speaking to the solitary imagination is, paradoxically, the deepest shared experience. That sharing is the useful thing, the art that does some good: the ‘message’ is to be discovered not sent.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is a poet and artist living in London. Author of four poetry collections, including Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011), he has received commissions from the Tate, the Southbank centre, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and he is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a Phd student at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, University of London.

48.

see the leaves    what leaves?    the leaves
on the ground, the black hand flapping
the brown hand spread as if to grasp
grasp what?    a paving slab   a street   a sweep
of air    then some cruddy music    and leaf
leaf flattens, is pressed    is what?   is the body
as flat as this as brittle as surrendered   to what?
and some you burn and watch fly   and this
is    what?  an analogy as the mind makes it
of war perhaps    which war? dare we answer? dare
the body be its own dialogue? dare the
long, shall we say? rain beat down on us
and our music    is that the music? that cruddy
music you make in your bones and teeth?

who is asking the questions?    there are too
many and late and too soon and this answer
too is a question only you don’t see, no, you
don’t hear the question mark   – where?   – in the leaf
which leaf? that one there, that black-brown-green-
grey thing with its negligible weight, its music.

Muse

It was a woman’s face deep in the sea, self-constructed, as if one could make the moon out of flesh, bone, colour, reflection.

There was nothing there to touch. The sea was warm, the face gazed through it in its act of self-construction, that involved gazing.

This was it. The muse-face. The construction. The self-made moon on its seabed. The astonishing in its perpetual process of construction.

This was the face that could give and consume, made out of myth and moonlight, making itself, turning itself into gaze.

And I have seen her, said the words. That gaze constructs itself and the compulsive act. And a cold shiver ran down him. And more words.

Make me a poet, said the words of the poem. Undermine me, said the gaze. Be discontent, said the muse. For ever, said the moon in the words.

These are old tropes, said the muse. But you must keep opening them. The poem lies beyond the opening, at the origin of words.

But muse, said the poem, if I am not the construction I desire to be I will die. Be sceptical, said the muse. Believe, said the poem.

Sealed With a Kiss

We were always beautiful. always. When we wrote
each other it was our beauty we were committing
to paper, a beauty composed of forgetting.
It was beauty that caught us, that set us afloat
on the great painted sea of our disasters.
It was beauty that moved us against the tide
of dead water, that slowly pushed us aside
and beached us. Here we met the masters
of our fortunes: time, separation, space
with its inevitable music, the lost boys
of the movies, the sweatered girls, the slow
ring of dancers moving to white noise,
the simple sadness of the hand and face,
the loss of the sealed kiss, the long hard blow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Szirtes Poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T S Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books. In between, Bloodaxe published his New and Collected Poems (2008). His new book, Bad Machine (2013) is a PBS Choice. Salt published his poems for children In the Land of the Giants in 2012.

By Niven Govinden.

Taipei, Tao Lin, Canongate 2013.

Tao Lin’s last book was titled Richard Yates not so much to signify that it had anything much to do with the writer Richard Yates (it didn’t), but to draw attention to the haphazard and inadequate nature of book titles generally. In a similar vein, Lin has stated that his new novel, Taipei, might just as easily have been called MacBook. As it happens, MacBook would actually encapsulate some of the formal manoeuvring we will soon see at work, but the novel itself would be completely devoid of all narrative drive were it not for ‘Taipei’, that very definite point in geographical space which hangs over the entire work, letting the reader know that at some point Paul, the novel’s heavily narcotised main character, will finally cease falling asleep at every party he has just arrived at. At some point, says the title, somebody is going to go somewhere.

Taipei is an aimless, auto-fictional account of an arbitrarily framed period in Paul’s life. It begins several months before his book tour, when Paul breaks up with his girlfriend, Laura. He visits his parents in Taipei, after which he withdraws from the world for several months. Upon re-entering, Paul takes a lot of drugs, goes to a lot of parties, takes a lot of drugs, goes on his book tour, takes a lot of drugs, enjoys a fleetingly enthusiastic friendship with Daniel, takes a lot of drugs, finds a new girlfriend, Erin, with whom he takes a lot of drugs, marries in Las Vegas and takes a lot of drugs honeymooning in Taipei, before their relationship begins to turn sour and they take a lot of drugs. The novel is so dutifully monotonous that the reader comes to view the introduction of stimulants as a genuinely dramatic event in a narrative hitherto somnolent with benzodiazepine and other muscle relaxants.

Drugs serve a purpose within the narrative, as they do in most ostensibly serious writing they appear in. But, as with a lot of such writing, it is difficult to get away from the idea that so much conspicuous illicit consumption is included at least partly for the benefit of the author’s own image. Drug-use is cool, and always has been – especially if the user is in some way artistic. Rock stars are all but obliged to take drugs at some point in their career if they are to maintain any level of subcultural credit. Meanwhile, Rimbaud famously speaks of visionary transcendence coming as a result of ‘a long, deliberate derangement of all the senses’. Huxley quotes Blake to suggest in long-tired tones that, on mescaline, the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears ‘as it is, infinite’. Even weedy old Walter Benjamin wrote about the ‘magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold’ he experienced upon eating hashish in 1928. Those days are now gone, I think. It is no longer just the rock star, the artist and the romanticised down-and-out who take drugs; now everyone does it. Drugs have become democratised to the point where you can actually shop for them online. It has become a real contemporary issue. As a consequence of this, it would take a very naïve artist today to publically attach themselves to the idea of drug-discovered transcendence and truth. Tao Lin is about as far from naïve as you can get, and makes no such claims explicitly herein. Paul takes drugs with studied nonchalance and says he does so in order to feel ‘normal’. And yet, throughout Taipei, it always feels as if, by including so much drug-use, Lin is noncommittally drawing on a residual mythology to tacitly suggest that this, his cool new book, gets to the heart of timely and timeless truths at once.

In reference to the movie Eat, Pray, Love, which Paul and Erin watch on the flight to Taipei, we read of the movie’s ‘unacknowledged but knowing, it had seemed, usage of clichés’. That phrase – ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ – seems fit to describe the rather sly manner in which Lin draws on this residual mythology, which is itself a cliché. It feels designed to fit, in fact, like some sort of acknowledgement, so that the phrase ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ becomes self-cancelling and therefore ironic; what ‘unacknowledged, but knowing’ actually says is ‘knowing, and hereby obliquely acknowledged’. Not only is the phrase ironic in itself; it also ironizes Lin’s quiet (and, for me, problematic) appeal to the residual mythology of drug-use. Just as Lin is not naïve enough to explicitly endorse certain adolescent perceptions of drug-use, nor is he naïve enough let the text’s implicit statements about it go unironised. Lin, like his characters, is far too self-conscious for all that. ‘I’m doing it,’ says Paul. ‘I’m saying stereotypical things that people say while on mushrooms.’

The words ‘earnest’ and ‘earnestly’ appear over forty times in Taipei; that they have need to be called upon with such frequency gives you some idea as to default register of Lin’s narrative. This is a novel forever at work to ironise its own posturing, though careful never to dissemble it completely, since, I would hazard, this is precisely what will appeal most to many of Lin’s Vice-reading readers. The book is crawling with some truly execrable sentences. ‘Um, so, my debit card, either from cutting so much blow or being maxed out, isn’t working,’ says Daniel at one point ‘with an earnest expression’. Such authorial affect is usually undercut soon after. At a Q&A following a public discussion on the subject of ‘the hipster’, of all things, Paul is pleased to note that most of the questions are addressed to him, ‘although almost all were negative and partially rhetorical, including why he kept writing after the ‘excrement’ that was his previous book.’ And so we come to a point where, it seems, variations on the theme of posturing and ironic distancing will play themselves out at a comfortable, contrapuntal rhythm.

But don’t reach for your slippers yet. To read on from here, confident we’ve caught the novel’s tonal rhythm, would be to ignore those destabilising, dissonant movements where the use of irony is itself disavowed. At one point, Daniel is surprised to find Paul listening to Rilo Kiley, a band he thought Paul had only joked about liking. ‘Paul said he wouldn’t pretend he liked something, or make fun of liking something, or like something “ironically”.’ Later still, though, when he and Daniel are listening to music, Paul ‘clicked “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service and said “just kidding.” He clicked “The Peter Crisis Jazz” by Don Caballero. He clicked “pause.”’ The characters in Taipei exist in a milieu where a certain style of self-consciousness, irregularly expressed in a need to place ironic distance between themselves and their emotions or actions (‘just kidding’), has a crippling effect upon all social interaction. What I’m most put in mind of is an episode of The Simpsons, where a grungy teenager says that Homer, cast as Cannonball Guy, is cool. His check-shirted friend asks, ‘are you being sarcastic, dude?’, to which he morosely replies: “I don’t even know anymore.” That Taipei, a thematically modish novel, should so recall an episode of a gesturally subversive, but ultimately mainstream television show that was screened in 1996, the same year David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest, says a great deal about how far we haven’t come. (How long must a zeitgeist hang over us, I wonder, before it becomes just plain geist?) The characters in Taipei can’t listen to music together. They struggle even to accept a gift.

Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner – the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere.

As a consequence of all this, Lin’s characters are unable to maintain any level of true intimacy. The novel starts with Paul ending his relationship with Michelle. Following this, a nascent relationship with Laura is not allowed to develop properly. For no apparent reason, he stops being close friends with Daniel, who promptly exits stage left. When Paul marries Erin, it is in the shared expectation that their relationship won’t last another five months, an expectation that, by the end of the novel, seems still too optimistic. Even within the novel’s romantic relationships, the characters very rarely bring themselves to have sex, either because they are so fucked up on drugs or, perhaps, because sex is a singularly unironisable act. Taipei, it seems to me, is a critique of irony-used-as-shield which itself uses irony to shield its own self-indulgences. This is both appropriate and extremely frustrating.

The relationship between drugs and irony is not limited to the novel’s low-level libido. In Taipei, the characters use both as a way of distancing themselves from their own emotions and behaviour. Paul claims he takes drugs in order to feel ‘normal’ – that is, not so self-conscious. On drugs such as MDMA, then, he becomes less inhibited in his speech, more confident in his actions. And while he must first thank the actual chemical effects of MDMA for this psychological transformation, there’s another element of it, I think, that comes from having at least the option to later write off any expression of emotion as mere drug-talk. For Paul, drugs are another way of not quite meaning what he says. ‘The next two times they ingested ecstasy,’ says the narrator, ‘they both felt what they termed “overdrive,” which for Paul was a whirring, metallic, noise-like presence that induced catatonia and rendered experience toneless – nullifying humor, irony, sarcasm, intimacy, meaning.’

More importantly for Paul, though, drugs constitute a means of controlling an emotional existence which, occurring unassisted, he never trusts entirely. He knows that if he takes LSD, he will not feel bored. He knows that if he takes MDMA, he will feel energised and outgoing. He knows that if takes Xanax, he will feel carefree and vacant. In Paul’s dramatic character, then, we observe an insecure young man who takes comfort in the secure laws of cause and effect, to which he has grown deeply loyal. In the authorial techniques of Tao Lin, we see much the same loyalty.

Lin is never content to allow the behaviour of his protagonist to be presented without a cause. Every word that leaves Paul’s mouth comes with a detailed analysis of the thought-process leading up to it. In the first few pages, as his relationship with Michelle is about to end, we read that Paul, ‘stared dumbly at the gently convex curve of her back, thinking with theoretical detachment that he should console her and that maybe the discomfort of her forearms against the thin metal of the fence had created a location, accessible only to herself, toward which she could relocate, away from what she felt, in a kind of shrinking. “Do you–“ said Paul, and coughed twice with his mouth closed. “Do you want to eat dinner with me somewhere?”’ This unwillingness to let anything go unexplained is not limited to the minutiae of social interaction; it also operates on a much grander biographical scale. In the early stages of the novel, just as the reader is getting used to Paul’s withdrawn, apathetic attitude to the world, the narrative leaps back in time to present a chain of events in Paul’s early life. It begins in first grade, when a classmate beat him at chess and another said his breath smelled, develops through to his sophomore year, when he turned on his mother so that she might start disciplining him, and concludes with his final days in high school, by which point his only remaining friend, Hunter, is described as ‘like an overworked stepfather or sensitive uncle to Paul, the mentally disabled stepson or silent, troubling nephew’. Immediately thereafter, the narrative returns to the present with an account of a long night spent moving from one party to another in a fog of Ambien and alcohol. In this juxtaposition, Paul’s self-consciousness and subsequent drug-abuse are explained, rationalised and, if need be, ‘forgiven’.

As much as Paul’s memories ‘had increasingly occurred to him without context’, they occur to us in clear and complete context. Indeed, despite the copious amounts of drugs taken by its protagonist, the narrative itself never falls into disorder. The reader is never disoriented. While an Ambien-headed Paul struggles to comprehend what is happening at the parties, we resolutely do not. True, Lin stuffs the occasional sentence with clauses at unusual syntactical junctures, making things momentarily difficult to grasp in full detail. But on the level of paragraph, page and chapter – the level on which experience and memory take place – we experience no narrative equivalent of a freak-out. On this level, the relationship between form and content is non-existent. Where Paul keeps losing his memory, and therefore his identity, the reader gets a smooth linear narrative with occasional, well-signposted flashbacks called in to neatly explain or clarify something about the psychopathology of present-tense Paul. In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a group of synthesised images is described as ‘less deceptive’ because ‘at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images’. No such precaution is taken by the narrative voice of Taipei. The ability of language to convey thought in never called into question; in fact, the text often removes itself from free indirect style to directly quote Paul’s apparently verbalised thought-process. ‘Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura.”’ Taipei may well be a thematically modish novel, but formally it amounts to a near-anachronism: a unitary psychological novel, told by a reliable third-person narrator willing to spell every last detail out in neutral tones that affect an impossible objectivity. Taipei is not what you’d call a writerly text. Everything is included, processed, and diagnosed.

When Paul and Erin visit Taipei on their honeymoon, they smuggle a box full of ecstasy, MDMA, Ritalin and LSD through customs. On one of the first nights there, Paul and Erin drop two ecstasy pills and a tab of LSD, grab one of their ever-present MacBooks and set off to Ximending, an area of Taipei that Erin says ‘looks like Times Square’. After a long, dispassionate conversation about their respective relationship histories, and a quick trip home to take more drugs, they start using the MacBook to film a movie called Taiwan’s First McDonalds, in which the pair speak to each other at length in ‘the voice’, previously described as ‘an unspecific, aggregate parody of (1) the stereotypical “intellectual” (2) most people in movies (3) most people on TV with a focus on newscasters and National Geographic-style voice-overs’. This has all the hallmarks of a real-life in-joke developed in the midst of an extended binge. It is just one of several examples of a personal in-joke making its way into this very public narrative. It doesn’t come off at all.

A few days later, as Paul is walking through Taipei, the novel seems to bare its soul to us. ‘Technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life,’ Paul thinks, ‘by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer.’ In a global context, there is very probably some truth to this observation. On a bus moving through Taipei, Paul is said to feel ‘like he could almost sense the computerization that was happening in this area of the universe’. As far as Paul’s character is concerned, however, his observation is an indisputable fact. He spends his honeymoon using his MacBook to make films of himself on drugs; he and Erin decide that, even when they are in the same room together, they will use Gmail chat to have difficult conversations with one another; after Taipei, Paul, Erin and two other friends snort heroin before going to the cinema to live-tweet an X-Men movie. Paul is very attached to his MacBook, which becomes one of the novel’s most significant motifs. It is perhaps for this reason that Lin suggested Taipei could as easily have been called MacBook, but to me it seems as if the MacBook is more than a mere motif; instead, it seems like the novel’s very model.

Just as technology is said to ‘indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter’, so Lin indiscriminately converts experience, interesting or uninteresting, into novelised experience. Take, for example, ‘the voice’: what I’m guessing started as utter shit-talk while Lin himself was on drugs is somehow deemed worthy to be used as narrative content. The same goes for live-tweeting X-Men on heroin, and any number of other such events in the novel. Lin seems to novelise all his experiences, just as Paul and Erin computerise all of theirs.

Taipei, then, is a novel-as-computer. Its characters speak impersonally and rationally about issues we usually think of as personal and irrational. ‘Sweet,’ Erin tells Paul. ‘You seem to encompass major things of what I want, in ways I feel like only segments of other people… have.’ Here, the concluding ellipsis seems to mimic that moment at the end of a program installation, where the time between 99% and 100% extends disproportionately. If this computer-based simile is only implied, everywhere else such similes are made quite explicit. Narrative phenomena are variously described as being, ‘like a cursor on the screen of a computer that had become unresponsive’; ‘supernatural and comical as a mysterious creature on YouTube’; ’like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS’; ‘as if by unzipping a file – newsroom.zip – into a PDF’. ‘Memories,’ Paul realises at one point, ‘were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs maybe.’

Told in the language of file names and code, full of programmatic characters all wired up by drugs, Taipei is a computer, a processor, a troubleshoot report. Right down to its luminescent front cover, it is every inch the MacBook of its alternative title: slightly pretentious, somewhat too sure of itself, this ultra-modern social signifier seems to use a different version of Word, but doesn’t really. MacBook, in sum, runs altogether too smoothly to ever hack for the frozen sea within us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Breathnach is a recent graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied French and philosophy. His work has appeared in The New Inquiry, The Stinging Fly, the Quarterly Conversation and Totally Dublin.

By Niven Govinden.