aboulian - Tumblr blog

aboulian · 1 year

Text

Note on grammar

In 2015 Oliver Kamm gave us Accidence Will Happen, a guide to English usage. Whether by accident or by design, Kamm’s guide traces the steps of Wittgenstein’s conversion from the logical atomism of the Tractatus to the intricately piecemeal non-philosophy of the Investigations.

The parallel isn’t perfect, I know. Kamm is more of an empiricist than Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein more of a pessimist than Kamm. Both authors make appeals to the empirical, but Kamm’s appeal to the empirical has a statistical literalism that is alien to the Investigations. For Wittgenstein makes scant reference to any entity so literal as a statistic. The items that instantiate Wittgenstein’s doctrine that meaning is ‘use’ include custom, practice, circumstance, history, behaviour, the everyday, the ordinary, ‘form of life’ (Lebensform) and just the various things we’ve done. Any such appeal to the evidence as Kamm makes – an appeal that aspires also to be a citation of data – would have struck him as vulgar.

Kamm adopts the dispassionate attitude of a scholar; he shows little enthusiasm for speculative exploits. But – even so – his book reads like an allegorical play on Wittgenstein’s career. Where in Wittgenstein there are philosophical problems, there are, in Kamm, the well-known cruxes of English usage ('shibboleths', for Kamm). And in the place of philosophical practitioners there are the ‘grammarians’* – the authors of the prescriptive surveys of English usage, running from Fowler in 1926 to lesser lights such as Cochrane, Gwynne, Heffer and Humphrys in this century. Kamm calls these people ‘sticklers’, taking a disobliging delight in cutting them down to size in a compressed, aridly careful English style.

I remember when Kamm was a banker who blogged. He now works as a journalist, writing leaders for the London Times. But, until he got the Times job, he was a blogger. In 2006 or 2007, his must have been one of the first blogs I read. I remember what a sententious scold he was, and how quick he was to take other writers’ offences against good usage as proof of intellectual inadequacy.**

That was Kamm’s Tractarian phase. At that time, he stood for a linguistic essentialism whose equivalent in Wittgenstein is the logical atomism of the first six or so sections of the Tractatus. He confesses to it, too. In his own words he is a ‘reformed’ (or ‘recovering’) stickler. Diagnosing his own disorder, he explains that it is characteristic of sticklers to make an appeal to a kind of essential grammar. This, for sticklers, is a grammar founded in logic. Its invariable presence promises in some way to make good the imperfect flux of day-to-day usage. In its light, and only its, our everyday English shall be judged.

Perhaps Kamm himself once thought he could write in so crystalline and clean a style as never to stray from the logic that underlies language. Perhaps the passionate conviction with which he pursues his anti-pedantic campaign derives from an experience of conversion which he only wishes others could experience as passionately as he did. If this is the case, Kamm’s project is something like that of the reformed addict who guides initiates to the group through the first steps towards a cure. And it is something like that of the later Wittgenstein, who – in the Investigations – had already fallen victim to the philosophical disorder, and who, in practising a therapy, also pursued a cure. One of the critics cited on the back cover of Kamm’s book calls it ‘deeply reassuring’. If so, it is presumably reassuring in the way that therapy is.

I wouldn’t like to overstate the analogy. For one thing, Kamm is as much a satirist as he is a therapist. He has great fun with the risible ranters who write about grammar for a conservative readership. (As he nicely observes, their way of popularising discussion of language seems to be to link it to a generalised kind of declinist nostalgia.†) But, if only pedantry is at issue, there's a surfeit of spite in his satire. In this book, Kamm likes not just to laugh but to lacerate – so that we may wonder whether his anti-pedantic project is in fact a metapedantic one. As far as this ‘metapedantic’ project is concerned, only lesser pedants are his targets, but still, and again and again, they provide him with opportunities to reap a paltry glory from the humiliation of the ignorant – just as did the old pedantry he disowns.

For all that, the parallels are clear. Kamm and Wittgenstein are preoccupied by the same question. Both think they’re in possession of a way to answer it. They both attract the same sorts of antagonists (there are compelling parallels to be drawn between the pathologies of the grammarians and the pathologies of the professional philosophers whom Wittgenstein has in his sights in the Investigations). Both, in the end, succumb to the same problems.

Framed philosophically, the question is this: Are there norms without essences? How can our words mean anything at all without being keyed in some way to a system of reference that lies immutably outside the individual? Of course there aren’t just semantic norms: there are norms of all kinds. In epistemology, for instance, there are ‘epistemic’ norms, and there is this question: What is knowledge without an epistemological guarantee such as Descartes’ God grants in the Meditations? Wittgenstein addresses this question in On Certainty, but Kamm isn’t so interested in it.

Take the question of what art is. This is a question in the philosophy of art. Or take the question of how we ought to use the word ‘art’. This is a linguistic question, or a grammatical one (if you insist). It is a question on which an authority on usage might conceivably wish to issue a verdict.

Both Wittgenstein and Kamm take it for granted that we cannot have recourse to any essential entity in our answers to these questions. Instead, they ask that we appeal to the way the concept (in Wittgenstein’s case) or the word (in Kamm’s) is used. So Wittgenstein asks that we have full confidence in any of his many proxies for ‘use’ – in history, in custom, in practice, in the everyday or the ordinary. (The Wittgensteinian question, then, is not ‘What is art, in essence?’ but ‘What have we customarily [or historically, etc] considered art to be?’) Kamm, for his part, asks that we have full confidence in something he calls ‘Standard English’. When we ask him how to gauge, or even to identify, such a Standard, he is able to give a much more precise answer than Wittgenstein is when he is asked how to define ‘use’. In Kamm’s case – in the case of the grammar of the word ‘art’ – we can have recourse to a corpus, or the OED, or, in quick-and-dirty style, to Google. It’s in terms of bodies of evidence such as linguistic corpora that Standard English is defined. Is there any analogous method we can introduce in philosophy? It would be quite self-defeating to try to appeal to a linguistic corpus to adjudicate the question of what art is. But perhaps there are other literatures or bodies of evidence to which we might turn.

If the question asked by Wittgenstein and Kamm in context of their distinct concerns is the same, their answers are also alike: they would both have us derive definitions from the evidence. Lacking a belief, for instance, in Art Itself, we must derive our definition of it from a study of the concept’s sublunary career, taking into account its history as well as its present state (so the abstract demand as to ‘the evidence’ can be met by citation from a corpus or a historical dictionary). Therefore neither thinks there is one answer. There is no answer in general. They take their questions one at a time. They give their answers case by case. They move from crux to crux, and from problem to problem, in a piecemeal way.

The essentialists' different projects – either the grammarians' project or that of the philosophers who believe that the definition of art is implicit in its essence – suffer the same setback. The grammarians are always getting caught making mistakes. In the treatises in which they lament the mistakes of others they invariably make many of their own. But even a book unblemished by any hypocrisy, an immaculate book that never fell foul of its own prescriptions – even this work would give the lie to the grammarian’s case. Imagine a grammarian who tried to define a certain class of uses of the word ‘art’ as ungrammatical. To refer to any sort of stand-up comedy as art, he says, is categorically bad English. Now if we ask why it is he exactly thinks this ‘bad’ grammar is bad, he typically gives one of two answers that will carry any weight with those of us who can’t expect to share his sense of what is and isn’t artistic. He may say that it is illogical to say stand-up comedy is art or that it is unintelligible.

If he says it is illogical, we should ask him what he means by logic. If he means merely that it doesn’t make sense, he should explain himself (without accounting for the assertion, he’ll just have restated his view). But it’s worth challenging him simply on the principle, here, and asking whether language should 'make sense’ in so rigid a way as to preclude a user of English from, for instance, saying ‘less’ for ‘fewer’ with count nouns. How literally logical should natural language be? For what it’s worth, there are already many languages for writing logic (as there are many systems of logic): the pedant, if they want to communicate as logically as possible – and if they are not already Michael Dummett – should learn one. Natural language has to be recast as logic in a laborious process that bears comparison to translation, and – when it is – much of its content is lost with its context. If it has been so recast, this is no guarantee that it will be logically valid. Indeed, part of the point of rewriting things in logic is to check them for validity. If a sentence in its literal, logical form is found valid, it may still, of itself, make less sense and say far less than the natural-language sentence it was in the beginning. To insist that natural language be logical is something close to a category mistake.

But if he claims that it’s unintelligible to say stand-up is art, we need only turn to the treatise in which he offers a taxonomy of all the errors that offend him. In that treatise there will naturally be an entry for ‘art’, and in that entry there will be examples of the word ‘art’ in the erroneous usage. In that entry, too, the grammarian will seem to have understood the instances of art in this, its erroneous usage: he will seem to have understood them so well as to know exactly why they were in error. Is it not legitimate to infer that he must have understood such usages if he has been able criticise them as systematically as he has? In effect, his treatise will show that the solecisms that afflict the sentences he employs as examples are not so severe as to have made them unintelligible.

It therefore proves impossible for the grammarian to flesh out his complaints without making them seem empty. Perhaps the only way would have been to list them anonymously – that is, to make a list of sentences seen to be in error without glossing it as such. The idea of silence as a solution is familiar from the Tractatus. Wittgenstein's project in that book is to put an end to philosophy, reducing all its questions to an atomised array of answers, and this project falls victim to the same sort of problem as the grammarian's. For if the philosopher aspires to seal off philosophy in a sphere of pure sense, as the grammarian might aspire to separate all correct sentences from their incorrect counterparts, he would seem to have to implement the idea without letting us know, in silence and in secret.

The grammarian’s problem is that the sentence or sentences in which he defines the errors that offend him show those errors not to be errors at all, or are otherwise themselves in error; this problem is illustrated ideally by the pedantic intervention that makes a mistake of its own.‡ The philosopher’s problem is that the sentence in which he might have expected to declare the final unravelling of philosophy, and the full separation of sense from nonsense, may not itself speak sense. If the sentence speaks sense, it invalidates itself: it makes nonsense. If it instead speaks nonsense, and is unintelligible, its success remain unknown. But if its success does become known, it must be undone

The task then is to find a way to fall silent without letting on, for silence is the last thing the word ‘silent’ achieves. The philosopher should perhaps become a performer, a mime. Failing this, the philosopher must give up the project to put an end to philosophy as misguided, as arising finally from a mistake. The grammarian who cures himself of pedantry, and learns to see language as a linguist does, learns also to see grammarians as dilettantes and cranks, each with his own little collection of cheap complaints, each on his own irrelevant crusade against the corruption of language, each claiming to speak more logically than the last.

The philosopher must likewise remake himself. He must be a non-philosopher (and Kamm is ‘non-pedantic’). As a philosopher, he had suffered from a sort of disorder; it left him incurably confused, and the problems of philosophy gave him no relief. It all seemed as vital as if his very life were at stake. But, as a non-philosopher, he knows that these problems are no problems at all. In our difficulties with them we betray a basic confusion, attesting to an approach that does not discover philosophical problems, as it imagines itself to be doing, but creates them. For they are spurious. They are figments, and merely spells to fall under. No one need try to solve them. They are as spurious as the grammarian’s recommendation to use ‘decimate’ only when speaking of divisions by ten.

The philosopher then plays the part of the philosopher against philosophy, as Kamm plays the pedant against pedantry. His philosophy lurches from particular to particular. His solution is not to define, but to do, and do, and do. He has no more disciples: his philosophy is no longer pressed into a package of ideas fit to be digested, disseminated and unpacked again. He has only imitators now. In a sense his method is only to be himself. It does not survive him: it depends on his being there to show us how it’s done

So say he appeals to what people actually do, or to how they actually use the word ‘art’, preferring not to prescribe to them what they should ideally do, or how they should use the word ‘art’ ideally. That’s all well and good – if he is prepared never to stop philosophising, as his previous approach promised he might. The thing is, language is adding to itself all the time. Invoking an evidence-base such as that of the linguist’s corpora, he has to watch it remake itself before his eyes. When he asks ‘How is the word “art” standardly used?’, he’s obliged to answer that ‘art’ must be defined, defined and yet again defined. If he issues a verdict, he's bound to advise that his verdicts are subject to revision from the moment that they are issued. As fresh evidence re-establishes the Standard, and more of our ‘errors’ and lapses become acceptable by its lights, work always remains to be done.

We shouldn't need to be persuaded that Kamm’s problem, the pragmatic problem of repetition, is preferable to the philosophical problem of regress. That the non-philosopher swaps the philosopher’s old problems for newer, better problems – this is undeniable. But he would be wise not to claim too much for his reformed method, result as it is of failure – or of the success that is achieved by an ability to admit defeat where others simply keep going hopelessly on. And Kamm’s way of being high-handed with his antagonists does suggest that he has misjudged the actual power of his approach.

Take the question of art, again. A variable definition of art derived from the evidence was never what we wanted, any more than we wanted an invariable definition derived from its essence. Inconvenient though it is for philosophy, the one definition enters into the other. That’s why the philosopher’s project went wrong: the definition of nonsense is implicated in a dynamic way in the definition of sense, putting into question the project's pivotal sentence, the sentence in which it is to be completed. And it’s not that, when the philosopher underwent his conversion and cured himself of philosophy, his project was saved. No, he gave it up, or at least outsourced it to the ambiguous public whose practice is what ‘ordinary’ language is. Like the philosopher’s, the pedant’s project failed because correct and incorrect language are interdependent and impossible in isolation. Kamm (as an anti-pedant) does not bring this project back to life, crediting the corpus or the OED with the power to determine what is and what is not correct. Instead he credits them – a little circularly – with the power to define what is Standard.§

In his role as a ‘reformed’ pedant, Kamm is required to act as a publicist and even as an activist on behalf of his new programme. He is therefore unable to give due weight to the antithetical principle that makes his analysis possible. No meaningful appeal to the empirical could be made without the involvement of this principle, which – though it needn’t be an essence or even a constellation of atomic propositions – cannot either be supplied by evidence alone. The evidence cannot of itself furnish criteria for its own evaluation: indeed, it provides no intrinsic guarantee that ‘art’ should form any kind of category at all, and still less does it contain any intrinsic criterion that would serve to restrict the instances of ‘art’ as they arise in it to a meaningful minimum. In itself, it lacks the materials to make provision for any degree of limitation such as might be prescribed by an individual set of specifications particular to an individual inquirer. This is why, without any antithetical principle to focus one’s inquiry, one cannot define its terms, and cannot hope for significant results (without such a principle, one is constrained merely to repeat the evidence as it emerges). In the case of the word ‘art’, for example, the evidence does not of itself provide the means for us either to include this quotation in our inquiry or not to include it:

To find out that, good Shepherd, I suppose, In such a scant allowance of Star-light, Would over-task the best Land-Pilots art Without the sure guess of well-practiz’d feet.

When we ask what art is, are we asking about such ‘art’ as a ‘Land-Pilot’ might practise?

Of course Kamm is no kind of fundamentalist, and he never makes the dogmatic claims I criticise here. He is a columnist and, to that extent, he is concerned to impress his opinions on us. His true error is to take his opponents’ indulgence in dogmatism as an occasion for an overreach of his own.

Kamm’s strategy is to insist that the grammarians’ concerns are groundless, but in this he takes the empiricist approach too far. It’s easy to see that, though they aren’t grounded in evidence, they are grounded in intuitions or ‘hunches’ such as most English-speakers share. Had they been purely idiosyncratic, they could not have endured in the unkillable way that they have. The grammarians’ crime isn’t to have conjured up complaints out of snobbery or whatever other prejudice takes their fancy. Their crime is to have raised their aesthetic complaints to the status of logical ones. The split infinitive is an example. Are their complaints about it legitimate? The intuition in this instance is that the split infinitive seems too much to mix adverb and verb, making a new verb where none is wanted and none needed. A split infinitive too often primes us to hear an intrusive hyphen between a verb and its adverb (and is it the same to 'go boldly' as it is to 'boldly-go'?§). But Kamm’s politicised empiricism sees him entangled in still deeper difficulties.

It is to his credit that he has applied a little scholarship to the issue, putting in time at the library in an attempt to produce a history of the prescriptions against this or that pedantic bugbear. To that extent, his appeal to the evidence pays off. But, by the same token, he might feel compelled to produce statistics showing how much traction was gained by all the particular rules at particular points in this broader story. There are judgements he would need to make in order to produce such statistics, and the evidence cannot make these judgements for him. Regarding split infinitives, he would need to determine: did a particular author decide not to split a particular infinitive in deference to a prescription or not? Should any particular non-split infinitive be considered a product of the kind of pedantry his method calls into doubt – and, if it is, should he then exclude it from the evidence constituting the Standard?

The €60 000 question is this. If the evidence shows some infinitives unsplit and some split, but says nothing about whether any one infinitive might stand unsplit as a result of a piece of pedantry, how can Kamm appeal only to the evidence in judging whether or not split infinitives are Standard? Say the evidence is divided 50/50, or even 60/40. If the empiricist knows that infinitives with adverbs only go unsplit when a writer has bought into some piece of false pedantry, can he then avoid recommending that as Standard? Or would his own method compel him to recommend as Standard a prescription that has risen to a regrettable popularity?‖

Above, I made mention of an ‘antithetical principle’ to which Kamm does not give adequate weight in his arguments. Nothing about Kamm’s method works if his appeal to this principle is denied him, and he’s made to rely on evidence alone. It is a principle that could not be derived from any body of evidence; at the same time, it informs all his judgements about the evidence. Once it is admitted, however, there is no knowing how far it will take him back to the arbitrary pedantry he rejects. Insofar as there is a lesson to be learned here, it is that Kamm should not have made his prescription against prescriptions so perversely strict. If his righteous reaction against the pedants leads him never to split, something – somewhere – must be going wrong. He should surely not be seen to be indulging self-consciously in the mistakes he used to scold others for making in ignorance. That is no kind of recovery from pedantry. It is its grisly sequel: Pedantry – The return.

If the appeal to the empirical is to be more than a gesture – that is, if it is to be pursued for more than its effect as a gesture – then it will need to be aided by an antithetical principle, which will complement it as the opposable thumb complements the open hand. But there is a catch here – there is a bug in our code – which is that the moment such a principle is invoked, the empiricist restores to life all the old problems his appeal was supposed to sweep away. So – instead – he holds one hand behind his back. And this is his fate: to proceed serenely, without encountering any pitfall or trap, but to proceed without progress, for all hope of progress has been sacrificed for his serenity, a serenity that the hand behind his back might at any moment sweep aside once again.

This doesn’t make Kamm’s book worthless. It is not. But its readers should bear in mind that its prescriptions against prescription are made in the light of a method with only a little more intrinsic validity than the philosophy it replaces. Its readers should remember, too, that its anti-pedantic practice doesn’t so much arise from an honest desire to offer guidance and advice as from an arbitrary ambition to prove the merits of this method (whose main feature is more that it is not the philosophy that failed us than that it is the method it is). So Kamm recommends his method in the spirit in which a reformed alcoholic might recommend absolute sobriety to an audience of lightweights and social drinkers; perhaps it comes as a shock to him, but they have never had much difficulty keeping their drinking in check.

And the philosopher of art? The aesthetician? Where is he in all this? Dishevelled and spent, is he not now a defeated figure, a figure of fun? Will he not now be the butt of the students’ jokes?

Throwing in his lot neither with the invariable nor in the variable definition of art, and unprepared to claim either that there is one thing art is or that there is no thing it is, he finds himself forced to compromise. Art – he accepts – must lie in the difference between its ideal instance, the last artwork, the art of the infinite, which we may deny, but never renounce, and whatever art we call ‘art’, the finite art of time. In us, each informs the other, and, each being indispensable, neither is privileged. This give-and-take is what is, and what will be, so long as we live without a norm of norms – a rule of rules – that resolves all regresses, and forever justifies their coming to an end with us, here, at this time.

◯

* In Kamm, the term ‘grammarian’ doesn’t always appear in the pejorative sense (as if it was a synonym for ‘pedant’). In this review it is only used in that sense. When I want to refer to grammarians in the positive sense, I call them ‘linguists’.

** I remember too that the Iraq War had few more dogmatic or more vigorous advocates in the British blogosphere. I venture no opinion as to whether his loss of faith in linguistic hawkishness coincided with any comparable loss of faith in the neoconservative ideas he espoused in his 2005 book, Antitotalitarianism.

† Kamm is too confident that the pedant’s sense that his language is in some way suffering a decline amounts to a fallacy (’many of the [language] pundits instinctively confuse change in the language with decline. That’s an error’). This idea of decline may be expressed more colourfully as decadence, debasement, degeneracy, corruption etc. And we may rightly register our distaste for such language, but if we call it fallacious we invest our distaste with a false rigour that is merely rhetorical in force. It is dishonest of the linguist, taking a generalised perspective on the evidence, to so insistently deny the particular perspective of the pedant – for the fact is that there is a pedant. The pedant is a mortal man or woman born in a particular place at a particular time. If there is that mortal man or woman, there is decline. Unless that man or woman is a fallacy, there is no fallacy.

‡ This, from the Guardian, is interesting: ‘So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.’ (I'm quoting a quotation). Does the 'sic' apply to both errors ('guns kills', 'miss spell)', or did the Guardian itself introduce the first error? Is the sign's 'miss'-spelling not ironic, and the Guardian's 'sic' not a bit tin-eared, a sort of subeditor’s kludge?

§ An Ngram on this famous split infinitive (credit: Yian Shang). It’s interesting to see how the rise in popularity of ‘to boldly go’ is reflected in the rise of ‘to go boldly’ in a sort of pedantic afterimage. I’m not sure how a descriptivist wishing to provide guidance on this point should react to what’s happened here.

‖ Note that when Kamm or any other commentator makes a self-effacing appeal to the evidence as part of an anti-pedantic project, they also assert their authority as a sort of spokesperson. If the grammarian tries to demote himself in deference to something greater than him, the anti-pedant denies that there is any such entity to defer to, and characterises the grammarian as idiosyncratic, as a crank. But the evidence does not have a voice of its own, either. No linguist is its transparent tribune, any more than the grammarian is a mere instrument of a greater truth. Does the anti-pedant demote himself in deferring to the evidence, or does he promote himself as its spokesperson? In Britain in 2016, were we not reminded that, for every poll presuming to take a neutral reading of the nation's temperature, there is also a pollster?

2 notes · View notes

aboulian · 8 years

Text

Footnote on capital

These ideas, if they are expanded a little, might yield an explanation of the capitalist's focus on form. He has privileged form over content in aesthetics in the same way that, in ethics, he has privileged prices over value. But if there are any prescriptive principles that apply to the artist making art, they issue from content, not form (artists' own accounts of the matter notwithstanding). Form’s realm is free. All play is accommodated there. In itself form is arbitrary: it is fully at the mercy of the artist, and his impulses and whims.* The artist can mess with it at leisure so long as he does not consider himself to be subject to the prescriptive power of content.

We might indeed interpret the capitalist's project in art as one that consists in the pursuit of content-in-itself through the pursuit of form-in-itself. Failing – as it must – it issues in an unbalanced and inarticulate art, an art with too little content to fulfil its form. The capitalist’s is an art that lacks the power to lay us low. Too unpredictable to be unpredictable, it is powerless to astonish. Instead it has been characterised by a kind of blankness and by the numbly mechanical pursuit of novelty. It has been shocking, but hollowly so; its attempts to shock they have merely been attempts to assert itself as an exception, as some sort of singular commodity. This art may be shocking. It is never overwhelming.

The capitalist competes with his art, and even with the art that he himself has made. If his art is novel, he is not startled. If his art is scandalous, he is not shocked. The ritual is familiar. The capitalist’s art alerts him to his own nothingness. He is empty, it states. Yes, he replies. I am empty. I emptied myself. Emptiness is what I chose. Thus it strikes him that his art is powerless to make him feel. It tells him he is empty, but he is too empty to care (it tells him this too). It even consoles him to see his own nothingness publicised in this way. He enjoys it. It’s why he sponsors this sort of art; it’s why he is its most passionate patron. But would he sponsor its antithesis? A green art? A didactic, a moralistic art? An art that preached to him, telling him it aspired to do him good? Would he sponsor an art that itself renounced and enjoined him to renounce too? Imagine an art that took his money. Imagine an art that made an example of itself by giving him back his money to make a didactic point. This art would piously lay claim to a kind of value that could not be reduced to a price. It would not be unsaleable, it would be unbuyable. Imagine an art whose policy was simply to take capitalists’ money and give it portentously to charity. Imagine an art that forgot irony, as innocent as you like (irony slipped its mind!). Could the capitalist respect it or even recognise it? Could he and it coexist?**

The kind of capitalist art that trades in negation has a lot in common with the post-literary or post-artistic writings of a novelist like Knausgaard. Knausgaard is a meaninglessness-monger. He is a master of negation, shaking his head in universal denial. I don't know that his is a capitalist art, exactly. I don't know whether he has privileged form over content or whether he has striven to reach content-in-itself through the pursuit of form-in-itself. But in Knausgaard’s work we are presented with an accumulation of mundane detail that always serves the same moral: the meaninglessness of things. (And how significant it is that we think of the question of the meaning of life as a question for us to answer! Is it not the case that to think about the question in this way is for its answer to be that life is 'meaningless'?)

Unlike the kind of capitalist art that is excessively focused on form, Knausgaard's fiction has a moral that it makes explicit: its moral amounts to a statement of what the capitalist artist shows in his formal attempt to attain content-in-itself. So it says goodbye. Matter-of-factly it says goodbye to the meaningless particulars of the life it details, and in so doing it says goodbye to meaning, too. Its form is diaristic, essayistic. Its tone is prosaic. And its matter-of-factness is like the anaesthetic neutrality of the art of the capitalist (this numbness is the nihilist’s alternative to awe, wonder etc). But its project is as futile as that of capitalist art in general. If Knausgaard tells life it is meaningless, he doesn't get to tell it not to undermine him in that. And this it may well do. If Knausgaard gets to tell life that its meaninglessness is its meaning, he doesn’t get to tell it not to mean more. So if Knausgaard asserts life's meaninglessness, maybe it is because he cannot tell it not to undermine him, and because he cannot tell it what it means finally and forever. His ‘meaninglessness’ is the only meaning life can’t gainsay. It means that life has too much meaning.

* In itself, form needn't necessarily have content. Say we set a star-sized but still insentient computer the task of creating a library like Borges' Library of Babel: whether any particular scrap of script in the texts it printed had content would be a matter of chance. Incidentally, the library in its totality would not be able to be validated as such in the absence of a catalogue, a catalogue that, needing to be complete, could not itself be admitted to the library – a catalogue, moreover, whose own completeness would stand in need of validation. Such concerns suggest the spectre or spectacle of our star-sized computer stuck for an infinite time cataloguing and recataloguing the library it was designed to generate, compiling a series of catalogues each of which could well include the last, but again not itself in the very entry in which it endeavoured to do so. Perhaps picture an absolute computer plugging away at this process for, say, fourteen billion years – only finally to be disturbed by a small mole-like man given the task of noting down the outcome of the validation test. He turns to the most recent, most complete catalogue verified by the computer, and in so doing he consults the inscription on its spine which identifies it as that same catalogue. But observes, as he checks the classifying mark, and sees it successfully refer to the book on whose spine it's inscribed, that if it so refers, it refers also to itself, and refers tautologically – for its being itself is tautological if nothing else is – but if it refers tautologically, it doesn't refer, it only is, and says nothing about its own identity, and – he observes – in order to so refer, it must not be (and where for it to not be but in him? the man?), it must except itself, or be excepted, and be excluded from the library whose absolute catalogue it classifies, leaving the library incomplete – as excluding the very words in its last catalogue that identify its last catalogue as the last – in the very moment that it achieves a completeness he could validly record. Thereby the mole-like man, who is everybody, un-completes the library, interrupting its spiralling progress in an attempt to obtain a determinate sense of its state, but leaving it, at its heart, determinate or not, utterly untouched, as in the past of nostalgia, or the future of fantasy, forever secure in its mono- or multivalent condition, perhaps complete, perhaps comprehensive, perhaps splendid, had it not been for him, and perhaps not, had it not been for him – and how for it to not be but in him? the man?

** For the capitalist – and especially for the American, the complete capitalist – there is something primitive and unclean about art. If art is not instrumental, or if there is not something utilitarian about it all – if it is not profit-making or is not otherwise redeemed by doing social good – it is in some sense suspicious. There is something the capitalist just doesn't get, or doesn't want to get, about art, and this something is what makes it what it is. (Thus it was film's misfortune to be invented in the twentieth century, the century of the capitalist, or of his acme.)

0 notes