--- Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Going back to Frederick's earlier post on
> pronouns...
> 
> <snip>
> "I" has feelings; "he" or "she" has meanings. And
> duties; all
> ethical thought, conservative or critical, involves
> this transposition.
> [FP]
> <snip>
> 
> This is a distinction between the connotative and
> the denotative, between
> intension and extension, more or less. However, I
> would also point to a line
> of ethical thought which involves _recovering_
> subjectivity in some way.
> Think of Rousseau upon sovereignty v representation,
> for example, or Council
> Communism, or *autonomism* in Italy.
> 
> As to political narrative, Nanni Balestrini, who is
> a poet, novelist and
> visual artist, might be relevant: on the emblematic
> Turin Fiat strike of
> 1968 (*Vogliamo tutto* / *We Want It All*); on
> Italian political violence in
> the late 1970s, plus (most probably) the 1980 Trani
> prison rebellion (*Gli
> invisibili*; translated as *The Unseen*, though I'd
> call it *The
> Disappeared*), and on the death of Giangiacomo
> Feltrinelli, friend of
> Pasternak and Che Guevara and subsequently amateur
> terrorist, in 1972
> (*L'editore* / *The Publisher*).
> 
> All three novels present themselves in the first
> person and use (only?)
> found material. (Eco said that Balestrini gave the
> impression of being one
> of the laziest writers ever because he wrote not a
> single word.) *Vogliamo
> tutto* conveys without overt commentary the
> politicization of those
> migrating to Northern industrial plants, *Gli
> invisibili* (inter alia) the
> split between *autonomism* and the sort of coercive
> violence represented by,
> for example, the Red Brigades. However, the
> underlying material is reworked
> into short, overlapping paragraphs involving some
> sharing of content, three
> or so to a page, so that the effect, a sort of
> narrative voluntarism on
> Balestrini's part, is that of _drift_, of being
> pulled rather than pushing,
> with no settled point of view. And the inevitable,
> multiple ironies within
> what's narrated by the speaking I serve to alienate
> the reader not from the
> I's points of view but from any point of view which
> goes beyond those
> individual points of view or which pretends to be
> overarching, comprehensive
> or extensive, leaving a residue, a sort of pure,
> *individual* subjectivity
> which struggles with the forms imposed by the
> *social* subjectivity of which
> it forms a part but by which it is also constituted.
> If that makes any
> sense...
> 
> Anyway here is Adorno: 'A concept doesn't exhaust
> the thing conceived of.'
> And here is Luigi Malerba (the character is
> considering shooting a
> villainous criminal/political Moriarty): 'The search
> for unity brought me
> fatally into the territory of abstract individual
> definitions. No, I didnt't
> want to become the concept of myself, I didn't have
> to give in to that
> conceptual trap.'
> 
> ... Should that makes things any clearer, which I
> doubt.
> 
> Balestrini, incidentally, was published by
> Feltrinelli, worked for
> Feltrinelli was one of those who went into exile
> during Italy's *years of
> lead*. And he's a good example of someone whose
> working methods (or what
> appear to be his working methods) really do reflect
> his ethical perspective.
> 
> At any rate I shall stop.
> 
> CW
> _______________________________________________
> 
> 'It was really only in spelling out the decrees of
> the high
> command that we came to understand ourselves'
> - Kafka

> "When the information comes/we'll know what we're
made from"--Beck

(Hi, Christopher)

Candice





 
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