Excessively universal
Sep. 21st, 2008 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThere's been a particularly good series of The Essay running this week on BBC Radio 3. Psychotherapist Adam Phillips, author of books like On Flirtation, On Monogamy, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (which I devoured in the 90s, and recommended from my website) has been thinking about excess.
The programmes, in 15 minute chunks, remain on the clunky Radio 3 website for a few more days, but, to spare you the classical music overruns, the ads for other programmes, the expiry dates and the fiddling with RealPlayer windows every fifteen minutes, I've put the whole thing into an mp3 file, because I think this was an exceptionally interesting series of ruminations. The file contains all five chapters, In Excess, Enough is Enough, Sex Mad, On Being Too Much for Ourselves, The Rule of Not Too Much:
Adam Phillips On Excess (mono mp3 file, 31.5MB, 68 mins 47 secs)
I couldn't possibly do commentary on everything Phillips raises here, so I want to focus on one rather narrow thing that troubles me slightly: his use of the first person plural. I want to know who Adam Phillips' "we" is, and I want to know why he leaves the category so vague. This question is in my mind, undoubtedly, because I'm writing The Book of Scotlands, and my technique is to write about Scotland by not-writing about Scotland; to write about other places then pretend they're Scotland, and observe the oddities and absurdities that result, and learn something about Scotland by that observation, or get a fresh glimpse of what Scotland might be by lying about what it is.
Phillips is also very interested in fresh glimpses, and to achieve them he climbs inside the machinery of socialisation -- one of the things that "we" is short for is the machinery of Western, or British, or English, or modern, socialisation -- and dismantles bits of it. Phillips uses a voice which reminds me of poetry (think of late Auden, which always had something of the anglican sermon about it), but which also shades into therapy speak, ethics, religious broadcasting, the cultural essay, philosophy, radical psychoanalysis...
I think what disturbs me about the "we" is its universalizing ambition, and although Phillips picks apart a lot, he never picks that universality apart. It's essential to his effects.
I certainly don't feel addressed by every one of his "we"s, but I do feel addressed by some of them, and I find his questions provocative enough that I'll let the others go. His style is slightly soft-focus and poetic; "It is as though we have two choices," he says, hedging reductiveness with metaphor. If I want to ask who he's talking about, and where, and when, I have to make do with answers like "we", and "in our world of weights and measures" and "in the age of diagnosis".
I can see what tradition he's in (Freud, R.D. Laing, Liam Hudson, Lacan, with a bit of Adam Curtis in there too -- the men are sure to be either friends or small-differences enemies) and I can see the emotional effect he produces (for some reason I feel that his ideal listener is a woman). But I think I'm more comfortable with a traditional which universalises and sermonises rather less. With sociology, and with cultural histories of ideas which show ideologies as something more mutable, local and mortal.
In the sex episode of his talk, Phillips quotes Robert Stoller: "The construction of erotic excitement -- the way each of us gets sexually excited -- is every bit as subtle, complex, inspired, profound, tidal, fascinating, awesome, problematic, unconscious-soaked and genius-haunted as the creation of dreams or art." Phillips -- rather cautiously, since he's being very English and avoiding excesses -- agrees. We should talk about people's erotic life the way art critics talk about art, he tells us.
But when you listen to art critics talking about art, they tend to do much less humanist universalizing -- certainly these days. I've been listening to a podcast on the Frieze website, Cultural Cartography: Does Art Travel?, a panel discussion chaired by Philippe Vergne at last year's Frieze Art Fair. I found something Russian curator Ekaterina Degot said an interesting counterpoint to Adam Phillips' perspective. She's talking about the limits of inclusiveness.
Soviet art, Degot says, is rarely included in exhibitions and rarely travels. Because it's considered propaganda, because it's realistic, and realism is not included in our current picture of diversity, which has mostly an ethnic character. (Degot's "our" means the art world's picture of the world, so this is a critique by a curator of curators' habits.)
Realism, she says, like Marx's proletariat, has no fatherland. In other words, it aspires to universality (just as psychoanalysis did). Degot calls Soviet art "differently different", because it's not ethnically different but economically different; its difference is rooted in a different economy, one which we don't have in our interconnected globalised world any more. Its non-ethnic, generalising character makes Soviet art threatening to a curatorial model of diversity and inclusiveness which has its own arrangement of the particular (the ethnic local) and the universal (the capitalistic global). Nevertheless -- or for this very reason -- Degot says Soviet art's "rusted critical machine is still working, and maybe we should still use it".
When Phillips says we should look at sexual desire the way art critics look at art, I think he means that we should dignify it with a humanistic analysis of how it produces meaning, and perhaps how the universality of sexual desire unites the human spirit just as the universality of art does. This may once have been true, but when you look at what art critics are actually doing now, it tends to be rather more interesting, or perhaps just rather more meta. They tend to be looking at -- and making visible -- the specific ideological and cultural underpinnings of things, playing around with "rusted critical machines" which can generate interesting perspectives. They're not talking about "the universality of the human spirit". I think it would be a bit depressing if they were, because under that worldview lies the idea that we're at the mercy of laws. Whereas behind the curators' games with "rusted critical machines" is the idea that universality is an illusion, locally-created. That semantic systems, like the specific societies they model, aren't written on tablets of stone but are radically open, fallible, rusty, renewable, writable, rewritable. I think that's what I miss in Phillips (but do find in Adam Curtis): the subversive sense that things have specific origins and therefore can never become undefeatably universal.
The programmes, in 15 minute chunks, remain on the clunky Radio 3 website for a few more days, but, to spare you the classical music overruns, the ads for other programmes, the expiry dates and the fiddling with RealPlayer windows every fifteen minutes, I've put the whole thing into an mp3 file, because I think this was an exceptionally interesting series of ruminations. The file contains all five chapters, In Excess, Enough is Enough, Sex Mad, On Being Too Much for Ourselves, The Rule of Not Too Much:
Adam Phillips On Excess (mono mp3 file, 31.5MB, 68 mins 47 secs)
I couldn't possibly do commentary on everything Phillips raises here, so I want to focus on one rather narrow thing that troubles me slightly: his use of the first person plural. I want to know who Adam Phillips' "we" is, and I want to know why he leaves the category so vague. This question is in my mind, undoubtedly, because I'm writing The Book of Scotlands, and my technique is to write about Scotland by not-writing about Scotland; to write about other places then pretend they're Scotland, and observe the oddities and absurdities that result, and learn something about Scotland by that observation, or get a fresh glimpse of what Scotland might be by lying about what it is.
Phillips is also very interested in fresh glimpses, and to achieve them he climbs inside the machinery of socialisation -- one of the things that "we" is short for is the machinery of Western, or British, or English, or modern, socialisation -- and dismantles bits of it. Phillips uses a voice which reminds me of poetry (think of late Auden, which always had something of the anglican sermon about it), but which also shades into therapy speak, ethics, religious broadcasting, the cultural essay, philosophy, radical psychoanalysis...
I think what disturbs me about the "we" is its universalizing ambition, and although Phillips picks apart a lot, he never picks that universality apart. It's essential to his effects.
I certainly don't feel addressed by every one of his "we"s, but I do feel addressed by some of them, and I find his questions provocative enough that I'll let the others go. His style is slightly soft-focus and poetic; "It is as though we have two choices," he says, hedging reductiveness with metaphor. If I want to ask who he's talking about, and where, and when, I have to make do with answers like "we", and "in our world of weights and measures" and "in the age of diagnosis".
I can see what tradition he's in (Freud, R.D. Laing, Liam Hudson, Lacan, with a bit of Adam Curtis in there too -- the men are sure to be either friends or small-differences enemies) and I can see the emotional effect he produces (for some reason I feel that his ideal listener is a woman). But I think I'm more comfortable with a traditional which universalises and sermonises rather less. With sociology, and with cultural histories of ideas which show ideologies as something more mutable, local and mortal.
In the sex episode of his talk, Phillips quotes Robert Stoller: "The construction of erotic excitement -- the way each of us gets sexually excited -- is every bit as subtle, complex, inspired, profound, tidal, fascinating, awesome, problematic, unconscious-soaked and genius-haunted as the creation of dreams or art." Phillips -- rather cautiously, since he's being very English and avoiding excesses -- agrees. We should talk about people's erotic life the way art critics talk about art, he tells us.
But when you listen to art critics talking about art, they tend to do much less humanist universalizing -- certainly these days. I've been listening to a podcast on the Frieze website, Cultural Cartography: Does Art Travel?, a panel discussion chaired by Philippe Vergne at last year's Frieze Art Fair. I found something Russian curator Ekaterina Degot said an interesting counterpoint to Adam Phillips' perspective. She's talking about the limits of inclusiveness.
Soviet art, Degot says, is rarely included in exhibitions and rarely travels. Because it's considered propaganda, because it's realistic, and realism is not included in our current picture of diversity, which has mostly an ethnic character. (Degot's "our" means the art world's picture of the world, so this is a critique by a curator of curators' habits.)
Realism, she says, like Marx's proletariat, has no fatherland. In other words, it aspires to universality (just as psychoanalysis did). Degot calls Soviet art "differently different", because it's not ethnically different but economically different; its difference is rooted in a different economy, one which we don't have in our interconnected globalised world any more. Its non-ethnic, generalising character makes Soviet art threatening to a curatorial model of diversity and inclusiveness which has its own arrangement of the particular (the ethnic local) and the universal (the capitalistic global). Nevertheless -- or for this very reason -- Degot says Soviet art's "rusted critical machine is still working, and maybe we should still use it".
When Phillips says we should look at sexual desire the way art critics look at art, I think he means that we should dignify it with a humanistic analysis of how it produces meaning, and perhaps how the universality of sexual desire unites the human spirit just as the universality of art does. This may once have been true, but when you look at what art critics are actually doing now, it tends to be rather more interesting, or perhaps just rather more meta. They tend to be looking at -- and making visible -- the specific ideological and cultural underpinnings of things, playing around with "rusted critical machines" which can generate interesting perspectives. They're not talking about "the universality of the human spirit". I think it would be a bit depressing if they were, because under that worldview lies the idea that we're at the mercy of laws. Whereas behind the curators' games with "rusted critical machines" is the idea that universality is an illusion, locally-created. That semantic systems, like the specific societies they model, aren't written on tablets of stone but are radically open, fallible, rusty, renewable, writable, rewritable. I think that's what I miss in Phillips (but do find in Adam Curtis): the subversive sense that things have specific origins and therefore can never become undefeatably universal.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 12:04 pm (UTC)My extremely horrifying flatmate in York had the most amazing crush on him. And then he came to do two lectures there. And he was so boring and cross-eyed and dressed like a piece of moss and had horrible hair. And she signed up for all his lectures and tried to make him sleep with her but she failed. lol seriously, look at him, you'd think not even she could have failed to seduce that thing, but there you are. He's probably one of those people who thinks he has a right to only sleep with pretty girls.
All I know is I'm definitely not listening to anything he has to say about sexual desires. Or anything else.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 12:12 pm (UTC)HAHAHA yeah, but that doesn't extend to fat chicks in your philosophy, does it, Adam?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 12:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 01:01 pm (UTC)But at least if he had slept with her he'd be a boring old bastard who is a slave to his fangirls, so that would be a point in his favour.
Thanks for the mp3 edit
Date: 2008-09-21 12:17 pm (UTC)shell shock
Date: 2008-09-21 02:38 pm (UTC)The latter was always my hope in the days when digital amateurs like myself played with soundscaping.
Do you know Gregory Whitehead? I am intrigued just now by surreal radioplays and incidental sound.
I suppose this is nothing new with Dada, The War of The Worlds, Cocteau's strange resistance radio in Orphee and the contemporanity of The Goons with Pierre Schaeffer.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 02:23 pm (UTC)I like how you call this series "particularly" good at the beginning.
I spent a brain crushing ten minutes last night contemplating abstract particulars and concrete universals. The wiki serach was inspired by an idea I had about Zizek's Eastern Post-Marxism. In a sense the curation of the curators.
The wiki search went thus: Post-Marxism, Postmodern philosophy, Ontology, Particularism and Universality concluding with abjuration. Back to Barthes.
I ended up having a dream about a joke about not telling a joke. Something so ridiculous that contemplating telling it before ridiculous people held me paralysed in mirth which crippled those I came in contact with.
My early sex urges led to dictionaries for wordings. If I could word it, I might get it. No rocking horse winner for me. I then found a lurid copy of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge in my uncle's shoe cupboard and forced myself to speed read it for titillation. Thats when I discovered strap on dildo's. I was 9 I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 02:37 pm (UTC)aren't you supposed to be writing a book????
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 03:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 02:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 02:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 03:34 pm (UTC)So his "we" is mostly late 20th century British people (men with a fear of commitment, etc) in the same way that Freud's is late 19th century Viennese people. And from these over-particular empirical (not to mention imperial) bases we go -- a little too quickly, it must be said -- straight to universalities (via, in Freud's case, Greek and Biblical mythology: Oedipus, Elektra, Moses).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 03:59 pm (UTC)"I will be using made-up illustrations from my own work as a psychoanalyist in these talks".
That's slightly strange: an appeal to authority which simultaneously proclaims itself fictive.
1. I work as a psychoanalyst, so I know what I'm talking about.
2. Nevertheless, it would be a betrayal of my patients' trust and privacy if I told you specifics about their conditions.
3. Therefore I will make up the specific examples I give you to back up my more general, abstract claims.
4. Please understand that these examples -- although they are invented -- lend weight to the universals by being, if not the specific specifics my universals are based on, potential and parallel specifics my universals could have been based on, had they been real.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-21 04:13 pm (UTC)What would cause some critical doubt for one to interpret all behavioral pattern (of excess or whatever) would be the ease in categorically naming, labeling, and applying it universally to a defined or undefined populous, staking out an “empirical” Truth, (and as you said, imperial, because it colonizes and labels everyone), which then leads to its “universality”. My apprehension of universals, and statements of all encompassing inclusiveness, is not so much the homogenization of the local and the dissolution of difference (to Western epistemology), but its ultimate reductive, exclusionary teleological implications; the erasing of possible futures that haven’t even happened.
radio 3
Date: 2008-09-21 04:59 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00df62c/
Re: radio 3
Date: 2008-09-21 05:26 pm (UTC)re: Radio 3
Date: 2008-09-21 07:28 pm (UTC)Oops. Didn't realise there was a full 90 seconds extraneous prattle before the essay on the iplayer.
Re: Radio 3
Date: 2008-09-21 07:47 pm (UTC)A couple of years ago the BBC had a radical study recommending letting users help stream their content. They never implemented that, but it's something I still do from time to time.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 12:07 am (UTC)The problem I have with philips is he seems to waver back and forth between sociological musings and psychoanalytical ones. He treats the two subjects like they're interchangeable quite a lot during his talks.
For example, to paraphrase Phillips:
"Being able to define excess is reassuring, because in defining excess we discover our limits. Therefore, a child throwing a tantrum (an excess of anger) is trying to discover the limits to reassure himself."
Defining excess is about defining who we want to be, therein lies the reassuring aspect. We have a goal to strive for, a purpose.
The problem is, I don't believe a child sees this far ahead. When a child throws a tantrum, he's not embarking on a flight of self discovery but expressing frustration that a desire or need isn't being met, much like a baby cries.
Needless to say, I'm not that impressed by Phillips. He is very easy on the ears, although part of his charm is his willingness to use poetic license which at times creates style over substance.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 12:20 am (UTC)I have a friend who is a surgeon, and discussing this once, he said that he never prescribed percodan, because he had seen it cause addiction in too many people, across a complete range of patients, and the other pain control drug he switched to (can't remember the name) was just as effective but much less troublesome.
As a thought experiment, if we were to take say a group of people, and split them up and confine them for a week, and give group 1 alcohol three times a day, group 2 heroin three times a day, group three cocaine etc, etc... what would the results be? I'm sure a small percentage of the first group would begin to show alcoholic tendencies, but the groups exposed to the hard drugs? I'm betting you would have addiction rates exceeding 80- 90%. What bothers me is that we are wasting money trying to rehab people using outmoded psychotherapy techniques when we are obviously dealing with a medical condition. To me this is as infuriating as faith healers and snake-oil salesman.
Also, I saw on Discovery last week, a show about a British woman and her son who were extremely overweight, and agreed to have their genes examined after a recent discovery about the hormone grehlin and its link to obesity. Grehlin it seems, triggers the satiety response in the brain, and people with certain genetic defects either don't produce it, or don't produce the receptors in the brain that sense it. Turns out that she and her son both had the genetic defect! In the same way that someone is color blind, they were "grehlin blind." Now if Adam Philips had his way with them, he would trace their obesity back to the way their mothers treated them or some psychological response to early trauma. Completely missing the physiological factor, much in the same way that therapists blamed "refrigerator" mothers for their child's autism in the '50s and '60s.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 01:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 12:07 pm (UTC)Moonage Day Ream!!!
as a commentor puts it "you deffffnitly have a bit of David in you. IF "
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 12:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 03:26 pm (UTC)Check out Fame aka
"Fay-ay-ya-uhmm..uuh"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-22 07:32 am (UTC)No doubt different men in different cultures will have different attitudes to taking Viagra. But the physiological effects are essentially the same.
Beware of the Genetic Fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy). The whole universe had a very specific origin - the big bang. It is still undefeatably universal.
things have specific origins
Date: 2008-09-22 02:56 pm (UTC)Re: things have specific origins
Date: 2008-09-23 01:13 am (UTC)Maybe I'm a woman after all, and worse, a somewhat drunken woman who's dated several philosophy majors, but I won't slog through his whatever 'til I know he acknowledges his facial deformity and its effect on his thinking.
I'm not afraid to use a bunch of commas, either.
So.. does he ever talk about his strabismus?
-eyenonymous
Re: things have specific origins
Date: 2008-09-23 04:35 am (UTC)Generally people regret that individuality.