Kluge made it possible to speak, without any trace of nostalgia or fatalism, about what might have been
By the 1990s, there were even times when a channel surfer, perhaps startled by the abrasive industrial techno opening sequence of Kluge’s show 10 vor 11, might have clicked away, only to land on another even more puzzling Kluge production. Kluge didn’t mind that his shows occasionally aired at the same time; on the contrary, he saw it as an opportunity for channel flippers to participate in the production process by creating montages of their own.
The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someone; if someone feels rejected, it is because the group needs a scapegoat to hold everyone’s feelings of shame. If you act out or say something inflammatory, it’s because you’ve been unconsciously mobilized by others. Everything means something: if you close a window, you are trying to protect the group. If you’re sleepy, it’s because the group is making you sleepy. You do not have food poisoning; you have group poisoning.
It’s convenient enough to judge the present by the standard of culture and assume a response of reflexive pessimism
So, pessimism of the intellect, pessimism of and about intellectuals. Pessimism may be where intellect, left to its own devices, tends to gravitate. But in “Intellectual Identities,” a chapter in the new book, Mulhern sees pessimism as a professional deformation. Intellectuals idealize culture as something that they possess and as a possession that is all the more valuable to them because the society around them ignores it—and it is this self-serving idealization of culture that gives rise to pessimism.
This is how Amel is remembered today: charismatic, courageous, defiant. Walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, you’ll likely encounter a stenciled image of Amel’s face, looking out with a beaming smile, with graffiti urging passersby to read his work. As a friend once remarked to me, the combination of Amel’s martyrdom and his difficult prose makes him a perfect object for cultish fervor. But the renewed interest in his work — in the streets, in movement spaces, in academia — is real and widespread.
The concrete dilemmas which Amel faced and the answers he tried to articulate continue to provide models for a unity of revolutionary thought and action. Like his other formulations, Amel’s “colonial mode of production” is an artifact of struggle, developed at a time of worsening defeat, from the 1967 Naksa to the expulsion of the Palestinian resistance and the left during the Lebanese Civil War. It is an ambitious but practical theoretical apparatus, meant to link the battles of far-flung societies and their toiling classes, in and after the crucible of national independence.
Is psychoanalysis a path to change, or a way of avoiding it?
It is significant that conversion, in its extremist form, comes on the scene when frustration is no longer bearable, as a failure of tolerance—the preeminent virtue of political liberalism. Phillips’s other watchwords are the familiar liberal ones of sympathy, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. “Liberals,” he says in On Wanting to Change, “prefer conversation to rote learning, multiple perspectives to exclusive explanation, [and] dissent to conformity.” For those reasons, “Liberalism is by definition not something one is converted to.”
I’m interested in how words with particular identities and backgrounds—“spirit,” “God,” “thought,” “tranquility”—take part, without comment, and perhaps without full knowledge, in a metamorphosis, a movement across meanings that leads not so much from the “West” to the “East” as, subtly and suggestively, away from the Enlightenment to a new emergence and sense of the “literary.”
