Du Christ aux 'home counties'

Press and media reaction to Andy Murray's interaction with the Centre Court spectators has been divided. Some welcome his gesticulation after each hard-won point painfully garnered during his comeback against Gasquet, others lament the further decline of the decorum for which Wimbledon is anecdotally renowned, the most enduring symbol of which is that part of the sartorial fascism which decrees that 'ladies' be clearly identifiable as such by virtue of wearing dresses - a division of the sensible which many women players can unfortunately be relied upon to endorse - and that men should be, well, and here is where the divide manifests itself, manly in one way or another. Their privilege of course is to be able to choose between codes of masculinity. Manly, if effete, restraint a la Federer or manly battle-cry on home or adopted turf. The former was introduced by timhenam in an attempt to extract every last ounce (not gram) from the home counties and public school escapee/releasee contingent in order to help him on his way to the elusive title. But now with added actual perceptible bicep (just feel the quality) courtesy of Andy Murray. The difference between Nadal and Murray is that the former has his permanently on display (you imagine him in a customised sleeveless dinner jacket out sabadonoche-ing). A tanned armour-body continuum, a physique which has soared free of earth and taken on a Christic transcendence (yet made flesh), while Murray, with the round-necked T-shirt of the bedroom teenager in colder climes reveals his upon victory in an ironic riposte to those who would doubt that he exists, that he has presence, that he has staying power. timhenman retired at 29, JC at 33. Sampras? Who said Sampras? Borg retired only once and perversely early, but the most (paradoxically) jesuit of players he has never really been allowed completely to withdraw. He is there when the image of Wimbledon is viewed from a certain angle, like those wonderful pound shop images of the nazzarine.

Academic hoaxes of our time # 1

...but terrifyingly they are all probably true:

Reinvention: The Journal of Undergraduate Research

Lost in the limit

A remarkable by-product of the excesses of recent academic publishing will itself be one of the fruits of the proliferation of the phenomenon of the 5,000-6,000 word journal article. In an effort to condense their prose into bite-size chunks (including notes and bibliographies) authors cut all manner of material once considered a pre-requisite for peer acceptance. Gone the survey of existing material in the field; vanished the cursory acknowledgement of established contributors, peers and up and coming unpublished PhDs; shortened to a snapshot the once extensive bibliography. In such a stripped down domain (paradoxically located within the hyper-saturation of material), not only is it increasingly difficult to feel one can contribute anything substantial within the word limit, it is also becoming very tempting to hide behind a shrug of the shoulders as if to say, “sorry no space to acknowledge your exemplary scholarship, space is never permitting.”

Conducts of Time #1

Conducts of time are not only behaviours and channels but also gaits of time, postures of time in movement. They may equally inhere in the pas au dela, the step which is also a pas – a not, in Derrida’s Blanchovian formulation. Conducts of time may give rise to systole or diastole, to condensations and saturations, as in running on the spot, and to disseminations. A conduct may produce reifications and consolidations of the most facsistic kind, or it may liberate blocs of becoming. The Block versus the bloc, the distinction which might be found in formulations such as the Abstract Machine in its multivalent functioning in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. The abstract machine as programming inertia on the one hand, and as processual experimental bricolage on the other. Our contemporary technoscientific milieu elicits from its minions – and according to certain accounts we are working whether we like it or acknowledge it or not – responses along both lines in equal measure. Indeed the internet itself displays in its mutations the contending performances of these contrasting and opposed positionings: freedom of expression but only insofar as search engine hierarchies aid in the visibility of that expression, proliferation of glimpses beyond the threshold of copyrighted artefacts but constant reminder of the increasingly flexible border twisting and insinuating itself into every journal article glimpsed via Project Muse, but tantalisingly out of touch to those in universities not subscribing to it. The frustration of the Athens password holder in the university which touches the frontier of Project Muse but can only peer across the digital tract, what Samuel Beckett might call, the “vastitude”, at the disappearing thread of the legible abstract. The web for the university student or staff member is always territorialised. They find the borders everywhere.

In praise of Klinsmann's shirt

The difference between the Germany of Klinsmann and that of Low comes down to one thing: the ability to wear a white shirt. Klinsmann wore his with the confidence in his midriff’s ability to carry off the hip-hugging slacks with skinny belt ensemble. It was a look which, when hands went on hips, as they often did when he ventured into the technical area, accentuated the lithe Delonesque confidence in his corporeal dominance of the frame (he could have done without the white T-shirt underneath however). It was a look which displayed the manager’s awareness of the frame, of enframing. The logical furtherance of his renowned ability to simulate being on the receiving end of a foul as a player. A confidence man, a snake-hipped retro disco ironist, resident in California yet still managing the national team. Like Baudrillard in Las Vegas still running a sub-section of the academic book industry – primers – except he didn’t know it. Both examples of the fatal strategy. Clothing as technology. The current German manager has the same uniform; it’s just that the waistline is a centimetre too high, the sleeves rolled up too far. It has evening wear-style panels.

The window in Truffaut's Jules et Jim

The window pane is a surface which defies inscription or recording: it is a pure medium in that it does nothing other than intervene. Its intervention however solid from a physical point of view (it keeps out and keeps in: it holds) is transparent (usually). If blacked out then it is in some sense no longer a window but a wall. It cannot record or archive the figures reflected in it or which pass in front of it and the gaze of the person stationed at it. It is in some sense erased by reflections upon it. And yet this erasure is paradoxically achieved by embellishing and thickening it, giving it body, even if spectral body.

Any film featuring a medium shot of a window automatically reflects whether intentionally or not on the frame within which it itself falls. A curious thing occurs in Truffaut’s handling of an already interesting window scene in Jules et Jim. They have been looking out at night, then they are filmed from behind, which image is revealed and brought into light by a diagonal wipe which starts with a small square in the top right hand corner and proceeds across the screen in a right to left diagonal axis in order, finally, to fill it with a window scene shot from the interior. It is a remarkable inversion and interpenetration of juxtaposed perspectives and spaces.

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And yet also:

Like any surface capable of being projected upon – and of course windows are surfaces receptive of that most evanescent of modes of inscription involving the technologies of breath and finger combined – the window has in literature enjoyed a rich metaphorical life. Frequently it is summoned within a long tradition of metonymy whereby the writing itself finds itself subject to miniature and emblematic scrutiny. Of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves one commentator asserts that “the window is seen in relation to the awakening of the day, the tabula rasa of the child’s mind, as well as the creation of the novel” (Senn 47).

Cathrin Senn, Framed Views and Dual Worlds: The Motif of the Window as a Narrative Device and Structural Metaphor in Prose Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001)

D comme Deleuze, Dionysius, dissonance and (sober) dissolution

A short text from 2005 after another viewing of L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze’s career in philosophy took frequent detours through domains of enquiry which if not exactly alien to the discipline, then were decidedly peripheral to its principal concerns, whether those concerns are defined in traditional terms or in Deleuze and Guattari’s own terms as the invention of concepts. Never one to subscribe to the sense of philosophy as higher/first philosophy, Deleuze not only sought out a maverick line of philosophers from Spinoza to Nietzsche – thinkers in one way or another of immanence – but also sought out concepts or problems in thinkers to whom his own thought is in profound disagreement. The most famous case of this is Kant, who despite being the primary philosopher of the tribunal (a process which Deleuze holds in disdain). However it is in his devotion to certain problems and concepts in Kant that lies one of the clues as to the role played in the development of his thought by the non-philosophers to whom he so frequently turned. When, in his series of interviews with Claire Parnet for the Franco-German television station Arte broadcast in 1995, Deleuze came to consider the letter K (…comme Kant); he dwells on two central moments which define for him the immensity of Kant’s achievement, in spite of the conservative and reactive effects of the tribunal of reason. These are the Kantian reversal whereby instead of time being subservient to movement, movement depends upon time, and the idea of a discordant accord between the faculties (as in the experience of the sublime).

Our clue is in the passion evinced by Deleuze for these concepts, and for the questions they pose. The task of philosophy confronted by a system such as that of Kant becomes less a tribunal to judge the overall system as a totality, than to evaluate immanently the capacity of the concepts to create thought, or to engender new concepts responding to new problems. Eschewing therefore the transcendent position which would judge in a reactive manner the work of a philosopher (Russell on Leibniz for example), the Deleuzean approach to the history of philosophy adopts a more active and affirmative approach. In this way the philosophy of Kant can find itself reconfigured in the form of four poetic formulas. This manoeuvre is a prime example of the principle governing most of Deleuze’s work in the history of philosophy, that is “giving…a little of the joy they…”( ). The case of this particular use of Kant provides another clue as to the detours into non-philosophy in Deleuze’s career. In celebrating the Kantian reversal and its correlative discordant accord, Deleuze also makes this problem and this concept resonate in new confrontations (an example itself of philosophy as the production of discordant accords). However the confrontations are not with antagonists in a dialectical argument or dispute; rather they are encounters with non-philosophers and with the material they can bring to the Kantian dinner party.

Deleuze makes much of the fact that philosophy entails a certain sobriety, a certain asceticism, often coupled with hardship or persecution. It is perhaps Kant who most comprehensively deserves the label of sobriety, this despite his addictions – a combination brilliantly brought out in Thomas de Quincey’s book on the philosopher and which is superbly evoked by Philippe Collin’s film based on the de Quincey volume. If philosophical activity – the generation of concepts – is essentially a sober endeavour, then it will be necessary to look outside philosophy for a little joy, a little inebriation, a little passion. Even the Kantian dinner party seemed a reluctant host to just a little bit of dissolute[1]. This joy can appear when philosophy touches upon its own limit, as when Leibniz takes his philosophy close to the shores of Dionysius, but pulls back. Equally it might arise when the creation of concepts is allied – acrobatically – to the creation of percepts and affects. This is the case of Nietzsche with his cast of dwarves, giants and walkers. Nietzsche is the primary example of a philosopher taking his concepts to their limit; of a philosopher whose concepts exist in a discordant accord with their own non-philosophical components. When Nietzsche writes of ‘lightness’ he has created a concept-percept with one foot in the philosophical and the other in literature. Here then is the second clue: in order to be philosophical one must simultaneously be non-philosophical. In the interview with Parnet, under the category ‘P…comme professeur’ Deleuze recalls with fondness the distinctive nature of the public attending his cours at Vincennes. Marked by the variety of their occupations, by the diversity of their ethnic origins, and by the disparity of their relations to the philosophical as such, the cours was for Deleuze a key landscape for producing encounters between philosophy and non-philosophy, an environment wherein it was possible to pursue what he calls a ‘double lecture’ - the professional and competent on one level and the impassioned amateur on another.
[1] For an example of a virulently anti-Kantian embrace of the dissolute in philosophy see Land 1992.
An excerpt from Les derniers jours d'emmanuel Kant is can be seen at
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