Christopher Higgs

Call For Papers: Deleuze and Modernism

2011-12-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

A colleague and I are putting together a proposed themed panel for the 5th International Deleuze Studies Conference, hosted by Tulane University. Consider submitting something!

We seek papers that examine the ways Deleuze’s reading of modernist literature influenced his philosophy...

How to Become a Monster

2011-09-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

He who fights with monsters
should look to it
that he himself
does not become a monster.
And when you gaze long
into an abyss, the abyss
gazes also into you.

--Nietzsche Family Circus

The quote comes from Beyond Good & Evil, Aphorism 146

Paul Jacobs Conjures The Inhuman via Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Music

2011-07-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

Paul Jacobs - Arnold Schoenberg: Piano Music

In his 1968 book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey wrote:

“In the desert I am reminded of something quite different — the bleak, thin-textured work of men like Berg, Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Webern and the American, Elliott Carter. Quite by accident, no doubt, although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert. Like certain aspects of this music, the desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time — another paradox — both agonized and deeply still.”
(page 285)

In his 1989 book Schoenberg and the new music, Carl Dahlhaus paraphrases the thesis of Hanns Eisler's 1935 manifesto "Some Observations on the Behaviour of Worker Singers and Musicians in Germany" by saying:

"That it expresses an inhuman state of affairs is its merit, because it conceals nothing; and at the same time this is its misfortune, for by being a mirror of inhumanity it becomes inhuman itself."

And then goes on to say:

"Eisler's thesis was challenged by Adorno's counter-thesis which proposed that music is human precisely because it speaks of inhumanity and resists it. And it performs -- contrary to Eisler's verdict -- a critical function in that it does not transfigure or obscure what exists but calls it by name"
(page 28)

Adorno said, in his 1947 book Philosophy of Modern Music :

"The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the humane. Works of art attempt to solve the riddles designed by the world to devour man. The world is a sphynx, the artist is blinded Oedipus, and it is works of art of the type resembling his wise answer which plunged the sphynx into the abyss. Thus all art stands in opposition to mythology. In the elemental 'material' of art, the 'answer'—the only possible and correct answer is ever present, but not yet defined. To give this answer, to express what is there, and to fulfill the commandment of ambiguity through a singularity which has always been present in the commandment, is at the same time the new which extends beyond the old, precisely by virtue of being sufficient to it. For this reason the total seriousness of artistic technique lies in continually designing schemata of the familiar for that which has already existed. This seriousness is today so much greater, since the alienation present in the consistency of artistic technique forms the very substance of the work of art. The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty. No one wishes to become involved with art—individuals as little as collectives. It dies away unheard, without even an echo. If time crystallizes around that music which has been heard, revealing its radiant quintessence, music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. Modern music spontaneously aims towards this last experience, evidenced hourly in mechanical music. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."
(page 132)

"It is the human that is the alien"

2011-07-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
as those are: as light, for all its motion, is,

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

--Wallace Stevens
Transport to Summer (1947)
in The Collected Poems (pg. 327-28)

Also...

Some thoughts on the intersection of Art, Crime, Beauty and Murder -- beware, NSFW!!!

And some thoughts on the Inhuman and the Avant-Garde

"But we can no longer be human. We have got to have that book."

2011-07-18T20:10:00.000-07:00

"A Human is a being halfway between an alligator and a bird who wants to be a bird. The ancient books say there are ways humans can become something else. The most important book on human transformation is hidden with the corpse Catullus in the Saba Pacha Cemetery in Alexandria because all books were written by dead people."

--Kathy Acker
Blood and Guts in High School (pg. 147)

Beastly humanity

2011-07-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

“There is nothing appealing in what you say but on the contrary the poems are positively repellent. They are heartless, cruel, they make fun of humanity. What in God’s name do you mean? Are you a pagan? Have you no tolerance for human frailty? Rhyme you may perhaps take away but rhythm! Why there is none in your work whatever. Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns! It is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing.”

--William Carlos Williams
(pg. 88 in Imaginations)

Burroughs on Beckett: "quite literally inhuman"

2011-07-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

"Some people are undoubtedly more conerned with interpsychic data than others. We can see it in a spectrum with various degrees of attention. And it seems to me that Proust and Beckett are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Proust is principally concerned with time. Beckett is virtually timeless. Proust is concerned with minute descriptions of objects and characters with their sets. What do the characters, if they could be so called in Beckett, even look like, beside being awkward and not young And the sets? What sets? His writing can be taking place anywhere.

...I am very much closer to Proust than to Beckett. I am concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can say that this is my principal preoccupation.

...There is no time in Beckett.

...There is no memory in Beckett.

...Beckett is quite literally inhuman. You will look in vain for human motivations of jealousy, hate, or love. Even fear is absent. Nothing remains of human emotions except weariness and distress, tinged with remote sadness.

(page 183)

-- William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

Vampires & Vorticism

2011-06-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

"Deadness is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses."

-- Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (1918) (pg. 299-300)

Art, for the Vorticist, is pure surface?

Reminds me of Wilde "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." (preface to Picture of Dorian Gray)

Vorticism as 21st century aestheticism?

Came across that Lewis quote on page 124 of Daniel Tiffany's Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Just before dropping the Lewis quote, Tiffany writes, "Imagism emphasizes 'technique,' and is therefore 'impersonal,' according to Pound."

Technique isn't personal?

Eliot calls the progress of an artist "a continual extinction of personality." ("Tradition and the Individual Talent" )

Image. Surface. Non-human?

The human implies depth?

To be alive, the human is a body. To be dead, the human is a corpse. The difference between a body and a corpse is that the body has depth, something underneath, some inside. A corpse is merely surface.

Art is both alive and dead: the living dead. Art is inherently vampiric?

The Vorticist Manifest opens with a nod in this direction:

VICTORIAN VAMPIRE, the LONDON cloud sucks
the TOWN'S heart.

(Lines 4-5)

Makes me think of Marx: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." (from Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 10)

Mark Neocleous writes about the current of blood and horror running through Capital, in his essay "The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx's Vampires."

So...if deadness is the first condition of art, and capital is dead labor, then what's to stop the argument that art is synonymous with capital? In this equation, both come into being through death or by death.

2011-06-23T18:48:00.001-07:00

Devilfish (Le Poulpe)

Squirting his ink to the sky,
Sucking his lovers’ blood,
Finding the taste of it good,
This inhuman monster is I.

--Guillaume Apollinaire

from The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus
(John Hopkins University Press, 2011)
translated by X. J. Kennedy

The Avant-Garde <--> Modernism

2011-06-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Stan Manoukian (aka Grograou) - "Diary of Inhuman Species"

Over at Montevidayo, Josef Horáček posed the question: "What is the Avant-Garde?"

I jumped into the comment section and offered up an idea I'm currently trying to puzzle out regarding the relationship between the avant-garde and a desire to become unhuman.

As I continue to study the period and practice of Modernism, I am eternally returning to this idea with more confidence.

Note to self: must acquire Gerald Bruns's new book On Ceasing to Be Human. I've read one of the essays included in the book: the one about Deleuze & Guattari's concept of Becoming Animal. It kicked ass. And I love that the Stanford University Press description begins with:

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, "Can a human being be free of human nature?"

That question seems to me to be at the heart of avant-garde literature, in direct contrast with the impulse of Modernism to attempt to make literature more human.

Newly Remodeled

2011-06-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

After a year of dormancy, I decided to give this puppy a makeover.

At present, I'm studying for my comprehensive preliminary doctoral examinations, which represent the next step toward earning my Ph.D.

Basically, it's a three day written exam (a four hour block of writing each day) and a one day oral defense of the written portion. With any luck, I'll prove proficiency in the field of Post-1900 American Literature and Culture--with an emphasis on experimental literature, as well as International Modernism--with an emphasis on the avant-garde.

I'm both confident and skeptical that I will achieve a mastery of the material in time for the exams, scheduled for late fall. Even granting the vast but necessary omissions, the reading list is daunting. (I intend to post the list at htmlgiant shortly.)

As a means of motivation and accountability, I've decided to commit myself to a daily posting of something from my reading.

To kick things off, here's three things:

“The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape – not its picture – is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”

--from Clement Greenberg's “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”

As a sidenote: Johannes Göransson has some interesting things to say about the Greenberg essay and the idea of kitsch.

"But before we begin, one last recapitulation of what it means for a novel to be modern. It means facing the problems and possibilities of modernity -- the technological wonders, the social disorder, the psychological mysteries, the pattern of change -- and make them fiction's main challenge and inspiration. It means facing modernity in new experimental forms of writing, and it tends to mean doing so with faith that aesthetic forms can make a difference to the way people see, think, and live." (13)

--from Jesse Matz's The Modern Novel

“How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.” (176)

--from Virginia Woolf's The Waves

My First Book is Now Available!!!

2010-02-17T03:14:00.000-08:00

I am super thrilled to announce that my novel The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is now available directly from the publisher (Sator Press) at a discounted price, for a limited time.

This is a “pre-official release” sale. The “official” release date is 10/5/10.

But you can get it right now in a variety of formats: the actual book ($12, which includes shipping), the e-book for your Kindle or Nook or whatever format you have ($4), and the complete audio book – which, unlike a normal audio book where the author or some actor quietly reads the text, is a wild sound collage incorporating all kinds of location recordings, sound effects, robotic interfacing, found sounds, landscape background ambient layerings ($6).

If you are interested in reviewing it or conducting an interview, please email me!

And please feel free to spread the word widely!

Contest/Giveaway!!!

To celebrate, I have five copies to give away, and here’s how I’m gonna do it:

In the spirit of our promotional videos --

-- make a video of two or more people reading page 243 of the book (pasted below), post that video on your blog/website, along with a link to Sator Press, then email me or leave a comment. The first five entries win a free signed copy.

Page 243

Do you read upside down on the couch with your feet in the air and chocolate milk there by your side? Can you say the Czech alphabet backwards while juggling eggs over a thirty story balcony? Have you ever hotwired a car in downtown Berlin with a safety pin, a screwdriver, and a metal emory board, with the heat encroaching? Are you the sort of person who folds while holding a royal flush just to give the other person a win? Would you ever purposefully misappropriate syntax? Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets? Have you ever not paid your taxes? Do you ever obsess over numbers? Ever set your alarm clock to an even number? What kind of deodorant do you wear? Is it masculine? Can you name a city in France you haven’t been? Are there places in the north of Spain that you have never seen? Have you ever planted a tree? Have you ever forgotten a friend’s birthday? Ever been caught in a lie and forgot what version of the truth you previously spilled? Have you ever raced across the countryside on a horse in complete rhythm? Ever challenged an anteater to a duel? Ever made your loved one go running? Ever parked on the wrong side of the road? When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket? Watched television? Bought clothes from a thrift store, a shopping mall, or on eBay? Would you even recognize the secret password when it mattered most? Would you leave town? Would you try to dig a tunnel to Japan?

News

2010-02-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

My "Remix of Harold Pinter’s The Dwarfs" is in the new issue of Pear Noir!

News

2010-01-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

I share my notes on the first part of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 over at As It Ought To Be.

News

2009-11-27T19:19:00.000-08:00

I have a prose piece titled "Parents Being We Are Wrongly" in the inaugural issue of We Are Champion.

News

2009-11-08T06:24:00.000-08:00

I interviewed Kristina Born about her new book One Hour Of Television for The Faster Times.