We have already staked out a wide
domain for the emergence of Cultural Studies even at this relatively
early point in this series of lectures. We have also, or at least I
hope we have also called into question not a few things that might
have been taken for granted or seemed “just the way the world is.”
The purpose of our introduction is not
to denounce or disavow the objects of our critique – though in
other contexts it might be appropriate to do both – nor is it to
give a special authority to Cultural Studies over other approaches
and formal disciplines. I hope that in the course of these lectures,
you will recognize that Cultural Studies is as much a cultural
artifact as are the objects of its analysis. It might appear that
academics such as myself are above the reach of the everyday, but a
quick reminder of Kant’s recognition of the Emperor’s power
should persuade you otherwise.
Understanding this point is in itself a
very good reason for asking you to view the two documentaries before
us, Michael Wood’s Hitler’s Search for the Holy Grail
and the PBS-style Degenerate Art.
Both of them illustrate the need to critique knowledge as well as
artistic production. They also set the stage for the first tendency
in Cultural Studies, the critical theory of the Frankfurt Institute
for Social Research [the “Frankfurt School”].
and holy and
wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such
as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And
so when we have anointed him with myrrh and set a garland od wool on
his head [‘tarred and feathered”], we shall send him away to
another city. For we mean to employ for our souls’ health the
rougher and severer poet or storyteller who will imitate the style of
the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribe at
first when we began the education of our soldiers.” Plato,
Republic, Book III, 398.
And Socrates’ other student,
Xenophon, tells us that indeed one of the charges against Socrates
was that he had misused the poets to undermine the State: “...his
accuser alleged that he selected the most immoral passages, and used
them as evidence in teaching his companions to be tyrants and
malefactors....” Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. II., 53-57; pp.
39. Of course, as students of Socrates, each in their own way
defended him against the charges. Art effects the soul, whose care
has consequences for the State and was one of Plato’s chief
concerns in his Republic. Sorrowful or relaxing music as well
as flutes excepts those used by shepherds far from the city walls
would be banned in the Republic. Stringed instruments except
for the harp and the lyre would also be prohibited because “our
principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words, and
not the words by them.” Plato, Republic, Book III, 400.
“But shall not
our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to be
required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on
pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State? Or is
the same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also
to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and
intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building
and other creative arts; and is he who can not conform to this rule
of ours to be prevented from practicing his art in our state, lest
the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our
guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious
pasture, and here browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower
day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering
mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be
those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and
graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair
sights and sounds,and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the
effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a
health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the
soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty
of reason.
There can be no
nobler training than that, he replied. Plato, Republic, Book III, 401.
Certainly you find this idea of
committed art in, for example, Thucydides’ “Funeral Oration of
Pericles”
“When we do
kindness to others, we do not do them out of any calculations of
profit or loss: we do them without afterthought, relying on our free
liberality. Taking everything together, I declare our city is an
education to Greece.... Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments
which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present
age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of
anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but whose
estimation of facts will fall short of what is really there. For our
adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every
land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting monuments of
good done to our friends or suffering inflicted on our enemies.”
(Thucydides, Peloponesian War, pp.119-120)
Pericles goes on to at the end implore
the wives and mothers of the dead to have and care for more children
so that they might replenish the ranks defending Athens. Where there
is a matter of the government of territory and population Art with a
capital A is never far behind. Who else designed and made all those
different kinds of uniforms, after all, so that soldiers might
recognize which territory and population that they each fought for.
And of course, the Greeks were not
alone in leaving their marks and monuments upon the landscape:
At least Pericles admits that the
Athenian monuments serve an ideological purpose; they are “an
education to Greece.”
Be that as it may for the Classical era
– and we should always be careful not to read the present back onto
the past just to suit us – for the purposes of understanding our
era, we have to begin with the premise that education, ideology, and
knowledge are ineluctably linked to each other and each is as well an
aspect of Reason, the State, and the social relations of Capital.
What we call science, and what we say it establishes as true [or
rather knowledge] changes over time. Science is the human pursuit of
knowledge of the material world, and it changes as we change the
material world and are changed by it. There are, of course, many who
would take exception to this provisional definition, and you should
take their objections seriously. No one has all of the answers,
including myself. Socrates gave us that bit of wisdom, too.
The distinction is often made between
science and scientists, that error and bias reside with the
scientists, while science corrects such errors. It might even seem
as though if only we could have better people then we would
presumably have better science as the foibles and limitations of
humans would no longer stand in the way of scientific knowledge. It
is ironic that rather than separating science from scientists, those
who sympathize with such a view are readily admitting that science is
not separate from social relations, it is just that those scientists
and naturalists of the past are often seen as having been more
gullible, more prone to error and more likely to be susceptible to
the scientific ideologies of their day then we are in ours. This is
a version of saying that we are smarter now than they were then. A
little idea of progress is always sure to message the egos of any
contemporary, no matter the era in which they thrived.
Well, one thing we can say is that
those lesser beings of our past were quite often perfectly secure in
their knowledge that they were superior to their predecessors, too.
Cultural Studies should lead us to learn humility as we, like the
Angel Novus, are thrown forward rather than the hubris that
comes with an ideology of intellectual progress.
One could argue that science is a form
of rationalist and skeptical materialism and as such has a long
history. However, the institution of the laboratory and the figure
of the scientist are of relative recent invention.
Look at these two charts from Google,
which show the references in English to Scientist, scientist,
Laboratory, laboratory, Science, and science – it is unfortunately
case sensitive – from 1800 to 2008. Notice that the term scientist
appears rather late, as it is coined by William Whewell [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell ] in 1833 (he also gets
credit for the term “physicist,” too)
The distinction between scientists and
science also has the ultimate result of making science into something
metaphysical – another ironic aspect of the distinction – i. e.,
beyond the physical world. Making science into a metaphysical entity
(“a mysterious hieroglyphic” – to use Marx’s phrase) results
most importantly for our understanding of science, into the removing
of history and social relations. I suppose that is the point, since
the idea is to make science into something that is not effected by
the social or even, to a large degree, by its own history.
Remove science from the material of
society and history and you are left with a jaundiced science, but
also a science that might be adapted or adapt itself to any set of
historical social relations or reconciled with any history written
for the dominate ideology. Indeed, many of the errors of scientific
ideology that we would like to forget, such as the science of
Eugenics, were directed towards the government or populations and
territories.
To avoid this, one should try to see
science as having a history and this history is predominately a
history of errors, as George Canguilhem (Ideology and Rationality in the History of the life Sciences) has noted and W. P. D.
Wightman (Growth of Scientific Ideas,1951) affirmed: science
is “set in the context of the history of language & human
institutions of every kind.” After all, if science is a
self-correcting process, then even leaving aside the question of
social embeddedness for a moment, what is it correcting if not error
and what are today’s errors but yesterday’s truths? This is what
is really means to say that “science is a process.” Even the
term scientist did not exist until 1833. Was there “science’
before there were ‘scientists”? If not then science is a
relatively new invention for understanding the world and thus hardly
a candidate for being an eternal human pursuit. If the answer is
yes, then the history of science demonstrates that scientific
knowledge is conditioned by the contemporary structure of social
relations. Both views, however, leave open the possibility that
science as we know it is a product of the social transformations of
industrial society and the accompanying division of labor. Certainly
Whewell was thinking of the scientists as the embodiment of a new
rationalism.
But lets be clear that in critiquing
the authority of science we are not advocating irrationalism. Far
from it. The great materialist philosopher Epicurus responded to the
charge that he disavowed the gods by stating that it was not he who
insulted the gods, but those who affirmed the commonplace views of
the gods who truly insulted them. It is much the same with us. We
are taking science seriously, rather than degrading it by elevating
it to a metaphysical realm.
To emphasize the relation between
education, science, and ideology, I want to turn your attention to a
somewhat neglected series of events in the history of science that
Michael Wood introduces. Despite its unfortunate title, Wood shows
us how science and ideology can be linked and made to enhance the
authority of one enhances the authority of both. The documented
events are the context from which the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory arose. It was in the midst of these and the events to be
described next week that Critical attention began to be given to the
artifacts of popular culture and everyday life.
Every successful revolution has
promoted some form of mass literacy, some grand reform of the
educational system. No matter whether the revolution was from the
left or the right. The Americans, the Soviets, the Cubans, the
Sandinistas, etc. all embarked on some form of literacy campaign.
After all, you need to be able to read the Constitution, Wall
Street Journal, Daily Worker, or whatever, for yourself.
So we should not be surprised when we take note of how central
education/knowledge was to the long-term goals of the Third Reich.
The emphasis on the purity and development of youthful bodies was not
at all discontinuous from this emphasis on knowledge. In fact, the
raising of youth for the new Reich demanded the strict regulation of
all aspects of education and knowledge, including science. What the
young German had to learn to become a National Socialist was all
important.
“For education
in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to
stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and
martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its
climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges,
which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of
eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as
conscripts, in the armed forces.... ‘The whole education by a
national state,’ he had written, ‘must aim primarily not at the
stuffing with mere knowledge but a building bodies which are
physically healthy to the core.’ But even more important, he had
stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training
the youth in the service of ‘a new national state’ – a subject
he returned to often after he became German dictator. ‘When an
opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,”’ he
said in a speech on November 6, 1933, ‘I will calmly say, “Your
child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your
descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time
they will know nothing else but this new community.’” (Shirer.
[1950] 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. p.343.)
Education was organized through the
reduction of the social status of teachers and professors except for
those who had already dedicated their careers to the study of Race
Science (Rassenkunde) or those who now embraced the view that
‘science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned
by blood” (Shirer, p.345.)
“Every person in
the teaching professions, from kindergarten through the universities,
was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League
which, by law, was held ‘responsible for the execution of the
ideological and political coordination of all teachers in accordance
with National Socialist doctrine.’ The Civil Service Act of 1937
required teachers to be ‘the executors of the will of the
party-supported State’ and to be ready ‘at any time to defend
without reservation the National Socialist State.’ An earlier
decree has classified them as civil servants and thus subject to the
racial laws. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. All teachers
took an oath to ‘be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.’ Later,
no one could teach who had not first served in the S. A., the Labor
Service, or the Hitler Youth. Candidates for instructorships in the
universities had to attend for six weeks an observation camp where
their views and character were studied by Nazi experts and reported
to the Ministry of Education, which issued licenses to teach based on
the candidates political ‘reliability.’” (Shirer. [1950] 1960.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. p.344)
Heidegger, in his capacity as Rektor
of the University of Freiburg, sits fourth from the right at a public
demonstration of support for Nazism by German professors on 11
November 1933 in Leipzig.
http://www.think-israel.org/jan12pix/nazi.heidegger.jpg
Heidegger is in the middle of the photo as he was on his way to give his first address as Rector of
the university in 1933. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj6nJIOarKxTs8bN391VpVo8beJzboJugdNoP4NRk3MwiUhN8SN_WEkNKD_3aq8TX55fi2qtiGRgLiLaJ2eNU2qBK7npUaLPoEFKwCIfk6Hy_Ezx9KAFlWoTQSCVjTbW_J_RW5YC-V/s1600/Rektor.jpg
We might assume that universities were
centers of liberalism. Certainly the common view of modern American
academia is of a bastion of liberalism or even radicalism. In
neither case is this commonplace view correct. In reality, it
depends on the specific field and department. Yes it is more likely
that a sociology professor will be a liberal than a professor of
business administration, but there are far more professors of
business or engineering than there are professors of sociology.
Then, of course, there are those professors that imagine themselves
to be liberal or radical when they actually espouse conservative
positions. (For example, one commonly hears from a vocal few that “I
am a Marxist (or radical, or anarchist or committed to one or another
identity-based ‘new politics’)” and that is used to justify an
opposition to being unionized. In the old days one would hear the
call for Black separatism, which would have in fact only served to
reinforce the system of segregation that gripped America. The
examples are many. So to see the university or academics as liberal
or radical is to simply and conveniently ignore the obvious.
Universities are inherently conservative institutions where the vast
majority of students and faculty are to be found in so-called
apolitical or technical fields (e.g., engineering, medical, computer
science, forensics, etc.) or in fields that tend to affirm the
current status quo of social relations (law, business, sports,
architecture, etc.). The Frankfurt School itself owed its existence
to a wealthy philanthropist who funded it because there was no space
for them in the conventional university. It was affiliated with the
university, but was largely separate. The only other similar
institution would have been the Bauhaus, and in fact they were
created within a couple of years of each other and there was a good
deal of personal and intellectual exchange between them.
Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe designed the monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Gropius was close to Alban Berg,
Adorno’s friend and teacher. Berg’s Violin Concerto (To
the Memory of an Angel) was composed as a memorial to Gropius’
and Alma Mahler’s recently deceased 18 year-old daughter, Manon.
Anton Webern perhaps because he was too upset by Berg’s own death
in December 1935 to conduct the premiere in April 1936, but conducted
the U. K. premiere of the work only a couple of months later.
There are many other connections, and
these connections were as much due to the fact that both institutions
were quite marginal during their day and became more so as the
authoritarian movement grew until those that could fled the
continent.
“The Wiemar
Republic had insisted on academic freedom, and one result had been
that the vast majority of university teachers, anti-liberal,
undemocratic, anti-Semitic as they were, had helped to undermine the
democratic regime. Most professors were fanatical nationalists who
wished the return of a conservative, monarchical Germany.... By 1932
the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.
It was surprising
to some how many members of the university faculties knuckled under
to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933. Though official
figures put the number of professors and instructors dismissed during
the first five years of the regime at 2,800 – about one fourth of
the total number – the proportion of those who lost their posts
through defying National Socialism was, as Professor Wilhem Roepke,
himself dismissed from the university of Marburg in 1933, said,
‘exceedingly small.’ Though small, there were names famous in
the German academic world: Karl Jaspers, E.I. Gumbel, Theordor Litt,
Karl Barth, Julius Ebbinghaus and dozens of others. Most of them
emigrated, first to Switzerland, Holland, and England and eventually
to America.... A large majority of professors, however, remained at
their posts, and as early as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led
by such luminaries as Professors Sauerbach, the surgeon, Heidegger,
the existentialist philosopher, and Pinder, the art historian, took a
public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist regime.
‘It was a scene
of prostitution,’ Professor Roepke later wrote, ‘that has stained
the honorable history of German learning.’” (William Shirer.
[1950] 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p.347)
“The new Nazi
era of German culture was illuminated not only by the bonfires of
books and the more effective, if less symbolic, measures of
proscribing the sale or library circulation of hundreds of volumes
and the publishing of many new ones, but by the regimentation of
culture on a scale which no modern Western nation had ever
experienced. As early as September 22, 1933, the Reich Chamber of
Culture had been set up by law under the direction of Dr. Goebbels.
Its purpose was defined, in the words of the law, as follows: ‘In
order to pursue a policy of German culture, it is necessary to gather
together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified
organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reich must not
only determine the lines of progress, mental, and spiritual, but also
lead and organize the professions.’”
“Seven
subchambers were established to guide and control every sphere of
cultural life: The Reich chambers of fine arts, music, the theater,
literature, the press, radio and the films. All persons engaged in
these fields were obligated to join their respective chambers, whose
decisions and directives had the validity of law. Among other
powers, the chambers could expel – or refuse to accept – members
for ‘political unreliability,’ which meant that those who were
lukewarm about National Socialism could be, and usually were,
excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of
a livelihood.... Every manuscript of a book or a play had to be
submitted to the Propaganda Ministry before it could be approved for
publication or production. (William Shirer. [1950] 1960. The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 333-334.)
“After six years
of Nazification the number of university students dropped more than
one half – from 127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at
the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists
and engineers, was even greater – from 20,474 to 9,554.” (William
Schirer. [1950] 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
pp.347-348)
But those who espoused the creation of
a German science were the extreme; less obvious still are those that
simply went along so as to either further their own careers or their
scientific fields (which no doubt in the long run would also be
personally beneficial). Some of these were swept up in the social
movements of the time, while others went about work which tellingly
could fit within the structures of either the Wiemar Republic or the
Third Reich.
Shirer may be forgiven for his
denunciation of the professors. He had witnessed the rise of
National Socialism as a reporter in Berlin and other European
capitals; interviewed most of the major and minor figures in the
years before the declaration of war between the United States and
Germany, covered the war as a combat reporter, and continued his work
during the post-war period. He was the first reporter picked by the
legendary Edward R. Murrow to work for CBS News. His radio reports
are just as notable as his later work with Edward R. Morrow (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Shirer)
As a witness to the book burnings of
May 1933, Shirer reminds us that the bonfires took place not in some
Nazi cellar or stadium rally, but “opposite the University of
Berlin” after “a torchlight parade of thousands of students.”
(Shirer, p.333) you’ve seen clips of that night and you see
glimpses of them in both documentaries. Shirer relates that some
twenty thousand books were burned that night in Berlin and at rallies
in several other cities. He gives a partial list of the authors
whose works were put to the torch:
“Thomas Mann,
Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stefan
Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein,
Alfred Kerr, and Hugo Preuss, the last named being the scholar who
had drafted the Weimar Constitution....Jack London, Upton Sinclair,
Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur
Schnitzler, [Sigmund] Freud, [Andre] Gide, [Emile] Zola, [ ] Proust.
In the words of a student proclamation, any book was condemned to
the flames ‘which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the
root of German thought, the German home, and the driving forces of
our people.’” (William Schirer. [1950] 1960. The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich, p.333.)
If we had time we would look at the
chapter “The Misunderstood Poet” from Brent Engelmann’s
Everyday Life in Nazi Germany to get even more of an
understanding of how the burnings were no mere propaganda/media
events, but indicative of the changes in everyday life that many –
if they were not of a suspect class or degenerate stock – were
rapidly adjusting themselves to accommodate. Christopher Isherwood
was in Berlin during the same period as Shirer and so they give us
two nicely parallel artifacts of the era. Isherwood writes in his
Berlin Stories how much had changed during the years he taught
English in Berlin. Thugs from the SA, the forerunner of the SS, now
stood about accosting passersby and acting as moral police. One of
Isherwood’s students who had been a police chief under the Wiemar
regime took his lessons in the semi-secrecy in his car as his driver
toured them about or as they walked in a park or countryside.
Isherwood recorded various encounters and like all urban dwellers,
snatches of everyday life as he strolled the streets:
“Overheard in a
cafe: a young Nazi is sitting with his girl; they are discussing the
future of the Party. The Nazi is drunk.
‘Oh, I know we
shall win, all right,” he exclaims impatiently, ‘but first blood
must flow!’
The girl strokes
his arm reassuringly. She is trying to get him to come home. ‘But,
of course, it’s going to flow, darling,’ she coos
soothingly, ‘the Leader’s promised that in our Programme.’”
(Isherwood, The Berlin Stories, p.199)
In the chapter “Winter 1932-33”
“This morning as
I was walking down the Bulowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house
of a small liberal pacifist publisher. They had brought a lorry and
were piling it up with the publisher’s books. The driver of the
lorry mockingly read out the titles of the books to the crowd: ‘Nie
Wieder Krieg!’ he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner
of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile.
Everyone roared with laughter.
‘No More War!’
echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh.
‘What an idea!’” (Isherwood, The Berlin Stories,
p.205.)
Nie
Wieder Krieg / Never Again War,
1924 ~Käthe
Kollwitz.
[This incident may
be related to the closing and sacking of the Anti-War Museum in
Berlin, which occurred in March of 1933 and the work by Ernst
Friedrich, who founded the museum, War Against War. It is one of the
most noted works in the pacifist/anarchist tradition. Be forewarned
that the images in War against War are very disturbing.
Friedrich wanted to convey the horror of war, much like Otto Dix, but
with photographs of disfigured and crippled soldiers, military executions, and the aftermath of battle. ‘Nie Wieder
Krieg! was the slogan of the
pacifist movement in the interwar period. see
http://www.anti-kriegs-museum.de/english/history.html]
Shortly after witnessing the sacking of
the office, Isherwood decided to leave Berlin for good. He relates
that when he informed Frl. Schroeder, who boarded him,
“She is
inconsolable: ‘I shall never find another gentleman like you, Herr
Issyvoo – always so punctual with the rent . . . . I’m sure I
don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin, all of a sudden,
like this. . . .’
It’s no use
trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is
adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime.
This morning I even heard her talking reverently about ‘Der Fuhrer’
to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the
elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny
it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimating
herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which
changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl.
Schroeder are acclimating themselves. After all, whatever government
is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”
(Isherwood, The
Berlin Stories, pp.206-207.)
Isherwood would later become a member
of the circle of Americans and European exiles in Los Angeles that
included Mann, Schoenberg, Adorno, Brecht, Weill, Eisler, etc. The
Berlin Stories, really two novelistic memoirs, were published in
1935 and 1939. You know some of it in a more popular form as the
basis for the musical Cabaret.
Shirer and Isherwood witnessed the
consolidation of the authority of the new regime. What struck both
of them was the degree to which the residents of Berlin quickly
acclimated themselves to the new regime. Shirer noted the effects on
himself of the relentless repetition of the ideology across the
realms of education, entertainment, culture, and knowledge. Indeed,
the Authoritarian impulse to merge all of these under the rubric of
the State was satisfied for a time.
“I myself was to
experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press
and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had
daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris
and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I
listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job
necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German
press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and
going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes
consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to
learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one
learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of
falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s
mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a
totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape
the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant
propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a
casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a
cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly
educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were
parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read
in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on
such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a
shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one
realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind
which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become
what Hitler and Geobbels, with their cynical disregard for truth,
said they were.” (William Shirer. [1950] 1960. The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich, p.342.)
Into and from this mix come the
human-all-too-human academics, scientists, and naturalists of the
Ahnenerbe to affirm the ideology of the regime and the
scientific ideologies of race and culture, to locate the origins and
true nature of the Indo-European/Germanic volk and thus affirm
their destiny as well.
This is a good place to break before we
go on. An appropriate piece of music to hear before the second part
is this, Oliver Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1941)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSVu1zbF94
A work for
clarinet, violin, cello and piano by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992),
who composed the piece while being held prisoner by the Germans
during the Second World War. The quartet was premiered by clarinetist
Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, cellist Étienne Pasquier
and Messiaen on the piano in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (now
Zgorzelec, Poland) on Jan. 15, 1941, before an audience of about 400
prisoners and guards.
Käthe Kollwitz, Lithograph, Gefangene, Musik Horend
(Prisoners Listening to Music), 1925.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1988 [1977]. Ideology and Rationality inthe History of the Life Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Engelmann, Bernt. 1986. In
Hitler’s Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Gueriin, Daniel. 1973 [1965] Fascism
and Big Business. New York: pathfinder Books.
Isherwood, Christopher. 1935-1939.
The Berlin Stories. New York: New Directions.
Isherwood, Christopher. 1938. The Berlin Stories (The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. New York: New Directions.
Plato. 1892. The Dialogues of Plato translated into English with Analyses and Introductions by B. Jowett. Humphrey Milford: Oxford University Press.
Poulantzas, Nicos. 1974 [1970].
Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of
Fascism. New York: Verso Books.
Shirer, William. 1960 [1950]. The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New
York: Fawcett Crest.
Thucydides. 1954. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Penguin Classics.
Toland, John. 1976. Adolf Hitler.
New York: Ballantine Books.
Wightman, William P. D. 1951. The Growth of Scientific Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press.
_________________________________
Next:
Degeneracy, Culture, and Critique - Part I: Science, Reason, and
Knowledge II
Lecture Three - Jorge Luis Borges: Fragments, Dreams, and the Meaning of Tradition
(Part I)
[DRAFT currently being updated- last updated 01.20.2020 - Part II to be added.]
It is difficult to write about Borges. Much like The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim there is a "hybridization" or "a rather uncomfortable combination of those allegorical poems of Islam which rarely fail to interest their translator and of those detective novels which inevitably surpass John H. Watson and refine the horror of human life found in the most irreproachable boarding houses of Brighton." There is no one approach or point of departure for examining his work and its significance for Cultural Studies. In fact, the difficulty of approach, or rather the multiplicity of possible approaches to Borges mirrors the multiplicity of possible approaches to the genealogy of Cultural Studies. Perhaps it is interesting to note that it is easier to speak about Borges than it is to write about him. In any event, we shall give it a try. Borges the person we will leave to the biographers and focus for the most part on Borges the author, as he suggested.
Why read Borges in the context of a genealogy of Cultural Studies? Well, first of all, keep in mind that we do not examine literatures, objects, or sounds as mere critics. Instead, these constitute objects of study whose construction and interpretation may give us some insight into our own existence. They are artifacts rather than aesthetic objects. While I have always found Borges to be a uniquely appealing writer, that is not why he is included in the genealogy of Cultural Studies that I am presenting to you.
Among the reasons to read Borges are the influence his work had on, for example, Michel Foucault and his views on the author, authority, and critical analysis; the themes which circulate freely across Borges’ works are precursors of many of the themes we later find in Cultural Studies and related fields; his simultaneous marginality and cosmopolitanism. So we will try to take up some of these up leitmotifs, but much will be left unsaid and unexamined --- all of which is up to you to pursue further. Perhaps a course devoted to Borges would be appropriate....
For our approach to Borges, we will begin with three short texts: Borges and I, The Other, and Kafka and his Precursors. The first of these is a parable and the last an examination of a writer known for his parables and stories wherein one finds parables within parables or stories within stories, as we find in the Homeric epics and the Thousand and One Nights, which Borges refers to in many of his stories and poems.
The text of Borges and I is brief:
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page. -- Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I (complete text).
The identity of Borges or any other author/producer with a work, and indeed the very unity of the self/individual are both called into question in this parable. The two (or more) Borges are clearly growing more distant from each other. The one writes, he exists and experiences the world, but the other one, “the one called Borges is the one things happen to. I walk... look.... understand” and while Borges shares these passions, his passion is not genuine because his is made of words and interpretations. Things happen to one while they are recounted or mythologized by the other: “I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.” The text does not actually bestow immortality to the one who is “destined to perish.” The one who is writes will “return to language and tradition.” Words and interpretations, not quite immortality; a virtual or dreamworld where “everything belongs to oblivion or to him.” The ambiguity of the final sentence brings to the fore the problem of the author, intention, and who has the authority to determine the meaning of a work.
This fragmented self is to be found in our second text from Borges' The Other. The story begins: “It was in Cambridge. Back in February, 1969, that the event took place.” The event was the meeting of the seventy year old Borges with his 20 year old self; the younger Borges in Geneva just after the horrors of World War I and the older Borges in Cambridge just after the events of 1968. Except that time and space are both compressed in the story into a few moments in one place:
I said straight out ‘your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I, too, am Jorge Luis Borges. This is 1969 and we’re in the City of Cambridge.’
‘No,’ he said in a voice that was mine but a bit removed. He paused, then became insistent. ‘I’m here in Geneva, on a bench, a few steps away from the Rhone. The strange thing is that we resemble each other, but you’re much older and your hair is gray.’
They debate whether they are dreaming each other. They explore knowledge that only they share or will share, but having that knowledge is not enough to convince either of them of the existence of the other while at the same time neither doubts the reality of his own existence. In the end
Each of us was a caricature copy of he other.... Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless since, unavoidably, it was his fate to become the person I am.
We goodbye without touching each other.... I have brooded a great deal over that meeting, which until now I have related to no one. I believe I have discovered the key. The meeting was real but the other man was dreaming when he conversed with me, and this explains how he was able to forget me. I conversed with him while awake and the memory of it disturbs me. The other man dreamed me, but he did not dream me exactly.
Borges appears as the one who “knows... walks....understands” and as Borges the author, but additionally Borges the dreamer of a figure and as a figure in the dream of another. In other words, the one who experiences, the one who exists as a trace in others, and the Borges of the unconscious of the dreams of many dreamers. What exists in the imagination is no less real for Borges than the aspects of the physical world that present themselves to our limited sensory apparatus. As with dreams, so too with texts. It is enough, Borges maintained, that a book merely be imagined for it to exist. (See, for example, the story The Secret Miracle.) Dreams here are not approached in terms of the sort of vulgar Freudianism that now pervades everyday life, as we are not delving into dreams as disclosing some individual psyche or even a collective unconscious, because there are no such unities in Borges. Dreams here are approached in a manifestly pre-Freudian sense that can be found in such diverse texts as Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep Walker(1799):
Proceeding irresolutely and slowly forward, my hands at length touched a wall. This, like the flooring, was of stone, and was rugged and impenetrable. I followed this wall. An advancing angle occurred at a short distance, which was followed by similar angles. I continued to explore this clue, till the suspicion occurred that I was merely going round the walls of a vast and irregular apartment.
The utter darkness disabled me from comparing directions and distances. This discovery, therefore, was not made on a sudden, and was still entangled with some doubt. My blood recovered some warmth, and my muscles some elasticity; but in proportion as my sensibility returned, my pains augmented. Overpowered by my fears and my agonies, I desisted from my fruitless search, and sat down, supporting my back against the wall.
My excruciating sensations for a time occupied my attention. These, in combination with other causes, gradually produced a species of delirium. I existed, as it were, in a wakeful dream. With nothing to correct my erroneous perceptions, the images of the past occurred in capricious combinations and vivid hues. Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment. Whether the day was shut out by insuperable walls, or the darkness that surrounded me was owing to the night and to the smallness of those crannies through which daylight was to be admitted, I conjectured in vain.
Sometimes I imagined myself buried alive. Methought I had fallen into seeming death, and my friends had consigned me to the tomb, from which a resurrection was impossible. That, in such a case, my limbs would have been confined to a coffin, and my coffin to a grave, and that I should instantly have been suffocated, did not occur to destroy my supposition. Neither did this supposition overwhelm me with terror or prompt my efforts at deliverance. My state was full of tumult and confusion, and my attention was incessantly divided between my painful sensations and my feverish dreams.....
The sound of my voice made him start and exclaim, 'Am I alive? am I awake? Speak again, I beseech you, and convince me that I am not dreaming or delirious.'
The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the ‘spiritual world.’ And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The ‘larger universe,’ here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Supernatural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions the other half. Even today dream-objects figure among the realities in which some ‘psychic-researchers’ are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds. -- William James. The Principles of Psychology, Volumes One and Two, 1890. Dover Press edition, 1950, Vol. II., pg. 294.
One finds James mentioned frequently in the pages of Borges, and using James, Borges offers us a way through this maze of shifting simulacrums in the short piece Kafka and his Precursors where we can see his own approach to one of his favorite authors --- and one whom we will discuss in the next lecture. It also introduces Borges’ approaches to "intertextuality" and to the "death of the author."
Borges writes that he finds Kafka in the pages of other writers. That if Kafka had never written, the elements that we associate with the Kafkaesque would still be with us. But we don’t see Kafka’s precursors as precursors until we know Kafka. Until then, they would seem to have no Kafkaesque themes. By looking for his precursors, we reread their works as having elements that we would otherwise recognize by a different author’s name, if we even named them. At the same time, even if Kafka’s executor had burned his work, Kafka would still have existed, would still have composed the stories that we can read back into other texts. Trees fall unheard in the forest all of the time, after all.
When we read a text, we are bringing to that reading all of the other texts we have read, knowledge that we have accumulated, experience, commentaries by others, etc. and bringing these to a reading, Borges maintains, amounts to a re reading or even rewriting of the text. That the engagement of the reader with the text is not an engagement with the author (assuming we could hold that figure steady for more than an instant), but the creation of a new variation of the text.
Borges finds Kafka in the following texts, which means that Borges reread these texts as precursors to Kafka, whether or not Kafka did or they intended to invent Kafka. [In a similar manner Umberto Eco, whose essay we will read in a couple of weeks, says that he created the pop writer Dan Brown and that Dan Brown is just a character from his novel.] Of course, Kafka exists elsewhere, too, in fact, in Kafka we can find a Precursor and contemporary of Borges, but Borges finds Kafka in:
And finally this poem by Browning where a monster, an imaginary being, a dreamer, and possibly god appear and disappear, with its' hints of Kafka's The Trial or Memoirs of a Dog.
Fears And Scruples
Here's my case. Of old I used to love him.
This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,--
Wake to hope and trust my dream was true.
Loved I not his letters full of beauty?
Not his actions famous far and wide?
Absent, he would know I vowed him duty,
Present, he would find me at his side.
Pleasant fancy! for I had but letters,
Only knew of actions by hearsay:
He himself was busied with my betters;
What of that? My turn must come some day.
'Some day' proving--no day! Here's the puzzle.
Passed and passed my turn is. Why complain?
He's so busied! If I could but muzzle
People's foolish mouths that give me pain!
'Letters?' (hear them!) 'You a judge of writing?
Ask the experts!--How they shake the head
O'er these characters, your friend's inditing--
Call them forgery from A to Z !
'Actions? Where's your certain proof' (they bother)
'He, of all you find so great and good,
He, he only, claims this, that, the other
Action--claimed by men, a multitude?'
I can simply wish I might refute you,
Wish my friend would,--by a word, a wink,--
Bid me stop that foolish mouth,--you brute you!
He keeps absent,--why, I cannot think.
Never mind! Tho' foolishness may flout me.
One thing's sure enough; 'tis neither frost,
No, nor fire, shall freeze or burn from out me
Thanks for truth--tho' falsehood, gained--tho' lost.
All my days, I'll go the softlier, sadlier,
For that dream's sake! How forget the thrill
Thro' and thro' me as I thought, 'The gladlier
Lives my friend because I love him still!'
Ah, but there's a menace some one utters!
'What and if your friend at home play tricks?
Peep at hide-and-seek behind the shutters?
Mean your eyes should pierce thro' solid bricks?
'What and if he, frowning, wake you, dreamy?
Lay on you the blame that bricks--conceal?
Say 'At least I saw who did not see me,
Does see now, and presently shall feel'?'
'Why, that makes your friend a monster!' say you;
'Had his house no window? At first nod,
Would you not have hailed him?' Hush, I pray you!
What if this friend happen to be--God?
There are two additional references in the marginal notes and in Borges, footnotes and asides should be taken seriously. The first reference is to Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, which serves to remind us of two recurring themes in Borges: the unconscious and the meaning of scientific rationality.
The second note refers back to Borges the writer. The question of author/and the authority of the author that confronted us at the end of Borges and I returns in the form of a reference to T. S. Eliot’s “points of view.” Looking at this reference to Eliot tells us something about how Borges deals with the problem of the author. Eliot’s “points of view” is concerned with the question of whether authoritative knowledge of an author’s intention - or even of the meaning of a text - is possible.
His early poetry broaches the question of authority as a matter of conduct and value. How might we gain authority over ourselves? And how might we reach definitive judgments about life’s meaning?.... Eliot’s first response to this dilemma is what his philosophy calls the ‘theory of points of view,’ which held that we can construct reliable --- though never indubitable – judgments through the accumulations of many immediate perspectives. David Chinitz. Companion to T. S. Eliot. John Wiley and Sons, Jun 22, 2009, pgs. 376-377.
We find these “accumulations of many immediate perspectives” scattered throughout the pages of Borges. There is accumulation of events, but not any development of psyches or unfolding quests. Characters do not grow nor do they develop. (Think Seinfeld here, if you would like a more popular reference.) They might enjoy those sudden epiphanies you can find in James Joyce’s short stories, but as in Joyce the epiphanic experience in Borges is either forgotten or passes over into “language and tradition.” The absence of character development is one result springing from Borges’ rejection of the Novel as a means of expression. As the preferred form of Modernist writing, the novel was essentially dependent upon character development. The plot had to unfold, the nature underneath had to be gradually revealed, etc. Borges might also reject the recent explosion of memoirs as well, or take a stance of welcoming the display of repetition one finds across these supposedly unique re-tellings of memories, all of which add to the "accumulation of many immediate perspectives” without moving us anywhere.
This accumulation tells us that there is no unity to the past, but also that as we line in time and space, there is no unity to us, either. Each of the many Borges is the real one and simultaneously a “false” one who is, on his own terms, also real. This multiplicity of perspectives aligns with Eliot’s “attack” on “the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul” and his disparaging of any idea of the unity of a self and an author who expresses:
“the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).“Tradition and the Individual Talent” from The Sacred Wood. 1921.
So, just as Borges finds Kafka in the pages of others, so too can we find Borges prefigured already in the texts of Eliot, Kafka, Poe, Conrad, etc. We are again presented with a fragmented “self,” a fragmented and infinite past, and texts which are altered by our very reading and commentary.
But do not let me give you the impression that Borges is doing nothing more than - as he himself modestly put it - playing games with language and time. There is always in Borges’ work a concern with ethics in an indeterminate world lacking the surety of Enlightenment categories and optimism. For Borges, time is both circular and a labyrinth, infinite and perhaps determined perhaps not, but the place where reality and dreamworlds are equally real:
That pure representation of homogeneous objects – the night in serenity, a limpid little wall, the provincial scent of the honeysuckle, the elemental earth – is not merely identical to the one present on that corner so many years ago; it is, without resemblances or repetitions, the very same. Time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate..... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal, it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. This is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges (Borges, A New Refutation of Time).
All of this seems at odds with Modernism understood as the last avant garde of the Bourgeois era with its emphasis on individual artistic expression, exploration of the self through narrative, grand narratives of history, the Novel, the text as a singular and relatively autonomous object of criticism and work of individual creation. It appears so because Borges as well as a precursor such as Eliot took themselves to be modernists, or at least Borges once remarked that “say what you will of me, but at least you can not deny that I was a contemporary” (quoting Goethe, he said).
And let’s not forget that he and his contemporaries experienced the very social dislocations that we mentioned last week as the social context of the origins of Cultural Studies.
With WWI, we get the a seeming wholesale rejection of Enlightenment by both expressionism as well as the rising Fascism. We also have the supposed apex and demise of a Modernism defined by enlightenment, the individual artist/author/scholar, the novel, the work, the text a singular work of individual creation.
With World War II we find the rise of globalism, the Cold War and technological innovation, social movements centered on styles of life, to name a few. Many observers note a profound shift in the order of the world marked by:
1] the end of colonialism
2] the de-centering of Europe (and the “European”) as the key referent or norm against which all else is measured
3] the rise of the United States and the globalization of American culture
To which I would add a fourth, the Rise of Fascism and Authoritarianism, and societies of terror [i. e., control of everyday life and acceptance of authority]
Keeping these social and epistemological dislocations in mind, let’s turn to Borges’ insights into texts, authors, and the authority of knowledge through what we now refer to as intertextuality.
In Borges’ work, the individual text is deconstructed into its referential texts, the identity of the author becomes less and less important. The personality of the author is almost ignored, with the exception of their immediate experience.
Borges had been taken by the critics as the writer who discovered intertextuality, albeit via a different route, as had also a number of other writers, including Foucault, certain geographers, novelists such as Hesse in The Glass Bead Game, Flaubert in Sentimental Education, in the marginal notes of the Medieval scribes, Freud in his theory of the structure of the psyche.
The idea of intertextuality: the text is never close, it never refers only to itself, the author of the text is relatively unimportant, etc. The connections are to be found in and between the texts. More than that, each time we read a text we alter it, we rewrite it, and so produce another version of that text. Quite quickly one arrives at the Library of Babel:
In “The Library of Babel,” everything that can possibly be said has already been said: it contains all conceived and imagined languages, and even those which might be conceived or imagined; everything has been pronounced, even those things without meaning, so that the odds of discovering even the smallest formal coherence are extremely slight, as witnessed by the persevering search of those who have never been granted this dispensation. And yet standing above all these words is the rigorous and sovereign language that recovers them, tells their story, and is actually responsible for their birth: a language that is itself poised against death, because it is at the moment of falling into the shaft of an infinite Hexagon that the most lucid (and consequently the last) of the librarians reveals that even the infinity of language multiplies itself to infinity, repeating itself without end in the divided figures of the Same. -- Michel Foucault. Language to Infinity.
And certainly we are close to the labyrinth of “Pierre Menard”
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—in the history of philosophy. In literature, this eventual audacity is even more notorious. The Quixote —Menard told me—was, above all, an entertaining book; now it is the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions. Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.
Lucretius is mentioned by Borges in his stories and essays; for example see page 224 where he gives the thesis of the article. It is fitting on many levels that Borges and Foucault often refer to Lucretius, because besides his name, we know almost nothing about him, other than that he lived between 95 and 55 B.C.E. He really is an author who is just a name and a poem. Lucretius is also fitting because he advocated a philosophy that lays, quite literally, in ruins such as Oinoanda and Herculaneum and yet still persists).
Foucault tells us that his The Order of Things was prompted in part by a reading of Borges that made him start to consider our modes of classifying the world. (This is the point where words and things can not be separated, where they become our way of classifying and giving meaning to the world.
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all familiar landmarks of my thought ---our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography --- breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs,) (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that....
That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off. Perhaps because there arose in its wake the suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder that that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry.... -- Michel Foucault, preface to The Order ofThings: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, xv.
Foucault’s book is about how particular discourses classify the world and how these classifications relate to one another as discourses comprising what he refers to as a “Regime of Truth” (the political overtones are important, because establishing the regime of truth is part of the analysis of the relations of power, which is Foucault’s larger project). He takes a number of discourses: natural history (often mentioned by Borges), political economy, linguistics, anthropology, wealth, etc. and try to understand what the calls the “functional conditions of specific discursive practices”(114), one of these specific discursive practices is the author function. By this, we along with Foucault mean that:
...an author’s name is not simply an element of speech. It’s presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts. Neither Hermes nor Hippocrates existed in the same sense that we can say Balzac existed, but the fact that a number of texts were attached to a single name implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentication, or common utilization were established among them. Finally, the author’s name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.
The author's name is not simply an element in a discourse... it performs a certain role in regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts.
It is... the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call 'author.' Critics doubtless try to give this being of reason a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a 'deep' motive, a 'creative' power, or a 'design,' the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish as pertinent, the communities we recognize, or the exclusions we practice.
At the end, Foucault announces that new questions must be asked and these questions no long focus on the single text and the intention of the author.
No longer the tiresome repetitions:
‘Who is the real author?’
‘Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?’
‘What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?’
New Questions will be heard:
‘What are the modes of existence on this discourse?’
‘Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?’
‘What placements are determined for possible subjects?’
‘Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?’
Jorges Luis Borges remarked that “I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses.’ Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.” (Preface to The Book of Sand, 1977). “What matter who’s speaking...?” as Foucault quoted Beckett.
Next: Lecture Two - Borges: Fragments, Dreams, and the Meaning of Tradition, part II.
Heidegger, in his capacity as Rektor
of the University of Freiburg, sits fourth from the right at a public
demonstration of support for Nazism by German professors on 11
November 1933 in Leipzig.
http://www.think-israel.org/jan12pix/nazi.heidegger.jpg 
Lecture Three - 