Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 16:50:11 +1000
Subject: BHA: murmurs, mutters and matters mystical


Amidst all the dreadful tedium of proof reading, countless drafts none of
which seem to be the definitive one I saved the previous night, not to
mention vanishing files, floppies that really flop, hard drives that crash
and spell checks that go on and on, I had a thought about the Bhaskar camp
that was advertised on the list.  Oh to be in England=85Alas I will not be
able to go; though I did conjure up a question I would ask Roy if I were to
be there.  I think I would ask him whether there was a repressed mysticism
in his work.

Now I am enough of a materialist to know that my  interest in things
mystical is due mostly to my revulsion at the nature of the totalities I
currently inhabit. At the intensive margin I live in John Howard's
Australia where the smugness and venality of the bourgeoisie is matched
only by their stupidity.  At the extensive margin, the butchers of NATO
have just made a desert of Yugoslavia and they are pleased to call it
peace. On Saturday I noticed in the Murdoch Press a photo of the German
Chancellor Schroder hugging the Finnish negotiator. The caption read would
you believe 'Blessed are the peacemakers.'  I almost vomited. I have an
abiding hatred of Christianity, but not even I would perpetrate that kind
of blasphemy.

Yet there is a more immediate occasion for my turn to the other-worldly.
No it's not the beer but my current  work on the question of film criticism
and the theoretical writings of the postructuralist Trinh T. Minh-ha.  That
has led me back into Walter Benjamin who would seem to be the major
influence on her work. Benjamin is a genuine puzzle.  He seeks to belong to
the worlds of Marxism and Jewish mysticism -that is the Enlightenment and
the non-Enlightenment.  His remarks on criticism are especially
interesting.  He makes the comparison between a 'critic' and a
'commentator'.  The method of the commentary is likened to the chemist
sifting through the wood and ashes of the fire.  The critic however is like
an alchemist in that he is concerned 'only with the enigma of the flame
itself' (Benjamin in Arendt, Introduction, Benjamin, W., Illuminations,
London: Fontana: 1977: 5).

I have also read through William Rothman's  _Documentary Classics_
(Cambridge Uni Press, 1997) where he offers us something I call an
'intuitive critique'. Rothman's criticism is built around waiting for the
moment of revelation when the truth of the text shines forth.  The major
influence on Rothman is Stanley Cavell - who seems in his
Wittgensteinianism very close to what Bhaskar would term fideism - that is
the illicit use of a transcendent to compensate for the lack of a notion of
ontological depth.  

Also in the back of my mind the controversy in the Thirties between F.R.
Leavis and Renee Wellek over the role of philosophy and critique. Leavis
was angered by Wellek's summary of the Leavisite methodology in that it
seemed to preclude an intuitive response to the literary work. For Leavis

"Words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and judge but to 'feel
into' or 'become' - to realise a complex experience that is given in the
words.  They demand, not merely a fuller-bodied response, but a complete
responsiveness - a kind of responsiveness that is incompatible with the
judicial, one-eye-on-the standard approach suggested by Dr. Wellek's
phrase: 'your" norm" with which you measure every poet'. The critic - the
reader of poetry - is indeed concerned with evaluation, but to figure him
as measuring with a norm which he brings up to the object and applies from
the outside is to misrepresent him" (in Hayman, R., Leavis, London:
Heinemann, 1976: 55)

So what has all this got to do with Bhaskar? Isn't it nonsense to suggest
that the author of _A Realist Theory of Science_ might harbour even the
slightest of thoughts mystical?  Does not his definition of blueness as
'manifesting light of a certain wavelength' (DPF 1993: 318) recall Keats'
invective against science and philosophy?  Keats wrote

" Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heave:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things,
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and
line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person's Lamia melt into a shade.
 


Moreover isn't Bhaskar's explanatory critique close to Benjamin's notion of
the chemist at work sifting through the ashes? Besides Bhaskar appears to
give aesthetics a very this-worldly spin with his definition of it in Plato
Etc as 'living well'.

Yet half-held doubts persist. The actual aesthetic examples he gives - a
nature walk, listening to a Beethoven symphony are  arguably other-worldly.
 Moreover doesn't the notion of absence in _Dialectic the Pulse of Freedom_
takes us at least potentially in the direction of the alchemist for what is
absent is the flame? I have in mind also the intriguing last sentence in
the following quote from Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (Verso,
1986):

"Intuitional realism belongs with a world seemingly even more lost, the
world of *enchantment* [original emphasis], in which man is at home and one
with nature. This world if it ever existed, has vanished in the wake of
post-Galilean science, enlightenment culture, capitalist production, and
modern technological forms.  In the disenchanted world, nature appears only
as an object to be probed and not also cultivated, to be seen but not
listened to, a resource to be exploited yet not preserved, as the
contradictory other and unremittingly hostile adversary of man, at hest to
be tamed, dominated and used, And re-enchantment seems a romantic dream.
*But it may even so be a necessary one*  (Emphasis added, SRHE, 1986: 97)".

What are the implications of this for the Bhaskarian dialectic?  At the
First Moment 1M subject-object identity is barred, almost anathematised.
Yet this is the very terrain of the possibly necessary enchantment.  What
those great enchanters the mystics did was to use a variety of techniques
to achieve an ecstatic One, a subject-object identity (Armstrong, K, A
History of God, London: Heinemann, 1993). 

Moreover it is, I think, at IM we find the source of aesthetic pleasure.
For this to my mind is nothing less than the achievement of subject-object
identity - a re-enchantment with nature. But I think that the important
point to hold on to here is that this is not a unity achieved through the
anthropomorphic impulse. In other words nature is not humanised. Rather the
reverse is true. The critic too if she yields to the work, achieves a kind
of unity with the object of criticism.

Let me try and pull all these diverse threads together by returning to the
questions I would put to Roy.  Does the discovery of absence and the
abandonment of ontological monovalence mark the return of the repressed? Is
there a buried mystical mechanism at work even transfactually in DPF?  Does
the acknowledgment that 'science is not a supreme or overriding value'
(DPF, 1993: 15) point us in the direction of other ways of knowing?  For it
is an alternate epistemology that is being hinted at by Leavis when he
talks of the critic not being 'outside' the work. Likewise Benjamin's
rejection of the role of the commentator, and his preference for kritik,
challenges enlightenment ways of knowing. Is this the way to the putatively
'necessary re-enchantment with nature'?

Similarly the Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi (d 1191), a prototype of
the  intuitive realist, solved the epistemological crisis in the most me
intriguing of visions,

"Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a
diaphonous light in the likeness of a human being.  I watched attentively
and there he was=85He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my
bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity.  And
then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of
knowledge.

'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved (In
Armstrong, A history of God, London: Heinemann, 1993: 267)"

Finally a beautiful piece from the Islamic mystic Jalad ad-Din Rumi
(1207-73) who turned his grief at the death of his beloved - the scandalous
prophet and Dervish, Shams ad-Din (sic)- into the love of God. If there was
ever a subject who wanted to achieve identity with an object it was Jalad.

"Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness. Ever
since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused men and women to
moan.  I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold [to such a
person] the power of love-desire; everyone who is left far from his source
wishes back the time when he was united to it. (In Armstrong, 1993: 277)"

May the source be with you

Regards

Gary



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