castell

A particularly fine video (amazingly, it seems it was shot with only one camera) of the Catalan tradition of building castells:



There's much to be said here about bodies, tall buildings, sovereignty, and community. Indeed, in some ways these castles are almost literal embodiments of the famous frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan. A multitude constitutes the temporary illusion of sovereignty.


So what's fascinating is the discipline and coordination invested in the construction of these human towers. But also their inevitable precariousness.

Samaranch

The Saturday photo, part XII: Juan Antonio Samaranch, recently deceased former president of the International Olympic Committee, performs a fascist salute in 1974.


Samaranch is fourth from the right.

For more details on the photo, see this article from The Times. See also Andrew Jennings, "Why Juan Antonio’s right arm is more muscular than his left (It’s had more exercise!) The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name".

Hat-tip to my friend Jaume Subirana.

revolte

The Saturday photo, part VIII: "Christophe Colomb appaise une revolte a bord."


In fact, I'm trying to get any further information about this image, which comes from the Library of Congress. It seems to be a nineteenth-century French lithograph by someone called Turgis. Any information about the lithographer would be most welcome. Or about the original picture of which this is a print. Or any suggestions as to how about going about finding out such details. Thanks.

Gibraltar

The Wednesday quotation, part X: I have just, rather belatedly, learned of George Sassoon's death.

I met George a number of times, many years ago, on the Isle of Mull. On the first occasion, it was the morning after what had evidently been a long night in which he had set out to disprove, by direct and copious scientific experimentation with himself as the guinea pig, the notion that whisky and oysters were a combination fatal to the human frame. He wrote the Island's telephone directory, which included an entry for his cow. He would talk of tram parties in Vienna with Erich Von Daniken.

Despite increasing illness from a slow-moving cancer, George Sassoon remained interested in many aspects of life. He liked to attend conferences on extra-terrestrial activity, and wrote a number of articles on the subject.

He was also a keen student of international affairs, advocating a solution to the problem of Gibraltar that involved offering Spain a reciprocal enclave in southern England - perhaps Dover or Folkestone - which would become a centre for bullfighting and other facets of Spanish life. ("George Sassoon". Daily Telegraph [March 17, 2006])

democracy

I admit that this review is fairly negative, but what can you do?

Waisman, Carlos H., and Raanan Rein, eds. Spanish and Latin American Transitions to Democracy. Brighton: Sussex Academic Pres, 2005.

The Preface to Carlos Waisman and Raanan Rein's co-edited Spanish and Latin American Transitions to Democracy opens by declaring that "this volume compares the political and economic transitions that have occurred in Spain and Latin America over the past three decades" (vii). But the book does little of the sort. Rather it collects six essays on Spain and adds a further five on Latin America; only one of these makes even the most token of gestures (and it is little more than a token) towards comparative analysis. Any such analysis, then, is up to the reader to undertake at his or her leisure. All of which rather belies the Preface's subsequent declaration, that "this comparison is a natural one" (vii): in fact it is not, it would seem, natural for any of the contributors to this volume.

The failure to compare the two case studies, however, is not necessarily a cause for disappointment, at least judging from Waisman's Introduction, in which he does indeed attempt to consider Spain and Latin America together. Waisman argues that the Spanish transition is a "paradigmatic case," but that the Latin American transitions differ from it on just about every count. A strange paradigm, then, surely? So whereas Spain (Waisman argues) boasted a healthy civil society, a consensus over past trauma, positive demonstration effects from regional neighbors, a strong state, and cooperation from the European Community and the USA, Latin America lacked each of these five pre-requisites for a successful transition. Hence, Waisman concludes, Latin America is "likely to remain at the margins of modernity" (13). But if the result of such a comparison, then, is once again simply to use Europe as a yardstick by which to condemn an implicitly "premodern" Latin America, then we should be glad that this volume's contributors have not been tempted to go down that road.

Fortunately, the collection's essays on Spain are much more interesting than either Preface or Introduction might suggest. Moreover, each one of them gives the lie to Waisman's assertion that the key to Spanish success has been "state effectiveness" (6). In different ways, they emphasize the Spanish state's weaknesses: the historical myopia and short-termism of its leaders in Enric Ucelay-Da Cal's analysis; its popular illegitimacy that bolstered social movements in José María Marín Arce's account; its increasingly diffuse sovereignty vis-à-vis the regions in Xosé-Manoel Núñez's essay; its inability to deal with Basque nationalism in Ander Gurrutxaga Abad's contribution or with nationalist violence in Juan Avilés's; and the unexpected effects of its half-hearted educational reforms according to Tamar Groves. Indeed, so often do these six authors refer to what Ucelay-Da Cal terms Spain's "weak systemic loyalty and underlying doubts of political legitimacy" (41) that, pace Waisman, we might even suggest that it is a certain measure of state ineffectiveness and incapacity that has been central to the Spanish transition.

The essays that follow, on Latin America, are far weaker than the contributions on Spain. Luis Roniger's overview stands out, perhaps above all for his repeated and rather bizarre attempt to present Colombia as a model democratic polity, and his praise for that country's "most dynamic elites" for their "profound vision of democratic public co-existence" (144). The little matter of the ties between said elites and paramilitary forces goes strangely unaddressed, except with the note that such violence is a "blemish" (134). By contrast, Roniger's whipping boy is Venezuela, which "seems to have lost this shared vision in the last few years" (144). Yet the notion that there ever was such a shared vision of communal well-being will come as a surprise to, say, Caracas's urban poor: they have understandably backed Hugo Chávez on the grounds that his attitude is rather more inclusive than that of the elites whose political monopoly he has overthrown.

Like Waisman, Roniger cloaks his political judgements behind the norms and the jargon of mainstream political science. But he can't quite shake pervasive metaphors that are now second nature within such discourse. Strikingly, for instance, he suggests that some nations and some publics evince "immaturity" compared to others (132). This of course is an age-old trope, dating back at least as far as Las Casas, for which the "Old World" is adult while those who can do no better than "thinking themselves as part of the civilized world, by visiting or following attentively the centers of diffusion of new ideas and styles" (151) are condemned permanently to childishness.

In this context it is worth praising the essay written by Tamar Groves, who I take to be the youngest of the twelve contributors; she is certainly the only one still studying for her PhD. In a book that is at best uneven (plagued also by poor translations and seemingly non-existent copy-editing), her essay is much the most interesting. And it is, moreover, a study of childhood, of the political sensibilities in rural Spanish schools in the early 1970s. Groves explores the complex interactions between Francoist state initiative, liberal pedagogical theories, teacher mobilization, relative isolation, and schoolchildren who soon demonstrate they have minds of their own. These young people are aware that they are ignored and looked down upon. But they show incisive critical spirit towards such condescension, and their response to the tired discourse of the older generation could be applied to much of the standard line on Latin American democracy, as evidenced by this collection: they point out that it is "sin razonar y creemos que sin pensar" (123).

mediation

"I went [to Sarajevo] with many ideas," Juan Goytisolo is quoted as saying in Ben Ehrenreich's "Me and the Major". "I came out only with doubts, no certainties at all." It's not clear, however, whether he is talking of his first visit to the city, in 1993, or his subsequent, 1994, trip.

In 1993, if his "Sarajevo Notebook" is any guide, Goytisolo finds that his experience of the city under siege leaves him little time for such doubts:

Life there acquires a vertiginous rhythm and intensity. [. . .] New friendships become deep and long-lived. Sincerity and a longing for truth take hold. One's sense of morality is refined and improved. Discarded concepts hurriedly cast on the dungheap of history are reborn with a new richness and strength: the need for commitment, the urgency of solidarity. Things that previously seemed important wane and lose substances; others slight in appearance suddenly acquire greatness and stand out as self-evident truths. (51)

Even so, and despite this insistence on "experiences and images that don't fade from the mind" (51), in practice what emerges from Goytisolo's account of his trip is how heavily mediated he found his encounter with war.

His first dispatch for El País, for instance, opens with a mediation on an advert glanced in Paris as he is en route to the airport. These feature "the blackened manly face of an actor (Tom Berenger?) beneath capital letters of a film title: SNIPER, CRACK MARKSMAN" (3). This "true grit face of the Crack Marksman" is, Goytisolo suggests, "the sublimated ideal and ineffable model of those shooting for real in Sarajevo" (3). But how to distinguish the ideal from the real?

For, however much he lambastes the indifference of the European public, and particularly the reticence of other intellectuals to visit the city ("Attempts by Susan Sontag and myself to bring writers of renown to Sarajevo have ended in fiasco" [47]), the Spanish novelist is continually aware that he himself also remains at one remove from what's going on. His bullet-proof vest, for instance, "compulsory to board UN planes [. . .] privileges me and separates me out from the rest of the besieged" (50).

And at the airport in Rome, headed to Split, though Goytisolo casts an eye askance at his fellow travellers who are, he imagines, on some kind of war tourism thrill, "on their way to the land of Bosnia in their search for a succulent repast, a huge repertoire of genuine horror scenes" (4), is he not reflecting on his own motivations? For is he not, too, but another of these "seekers after such singular encounters" (4)?

Moreover, this account of violence in the Balkans, and international indifference, is continually framed in terms of Goytisolo's own obsessions with the prelude to fascism in the 1930s, and above all the fate of the Spanish Republic. He has prepared for his experience of Sarajevo by re-reading Antonio Machado's account of Madrid under siege: "Whoever heard the first shells fired over Madrid by the rebel batteries, set up in the Casa de Campo, will always remember one of the most distasteful, distressing emotions . . . that can ever be experienced in life" (49).

Goytisolo (born, Barcelona, 1931) surely never heard those shells over Madrid. Is he now, "profoundly reliving the feelings of the poet canonized by our socialist politicians" (49), finding in Sarajevo an aide mémoire to reconstruct an intangible scene of Spanish trauma?

But is this not too easy a critique? Despite his claims to experience and the authenticity of his encounter with the Balkan conflict, Goytisolo hardly hides or shies away from the multiple mediations that frame his account. His point, indeed, is not that there has been silence about the fate of Sarajevo, or even that much obfuscation: he asks rhetorically whether the tourists, who he has later decided are in fact off to a beach holiday on the Dalmatian coast, can "be unaware of what is happening only a hundred kilometers away?" (6). Of course not. "We cannot plead ignorance: the journalists and photographers dispatched to Sarajevo and the war fronts have generally 'covered' the news with exemplary honesty and courage" (47). It is not that we do not know. It is that we do not do anything about our knowledge.

The difference between Sarajevo in the 1990s and Madrid in the 1930s, then, is properly posthegemonic. The issue is not ideology or truth, but affect and habit. For some reason, Europe in the 1990s is no longer affected by what happens at or within its borders. The problem is not doubt--if only it were--or the unreliability of the media. It is a question of habituation.

Finally, then, if we lack solidarity, it is not because we lack imagination. What's required, rather, is an affective rapport, a resonance that is felt physically. We need to be moved, immediately if without resort to ideologies of authenticity.

fragile

A brief note in the July 2003 edition of The American Journal of Psychiatry, entitled "Delusional Self-Portrait", concerns the case of "Mr A, a 32-year old Caucasian man" who had asked

to have some wires that stopped him from sleeping removed from his leg. He said there were many more wires inside his body that he had discovered after experiencing that "a magnetism of storms" produced multiple internal sensations in the form of erratic contractions and "electric currents," which he tried to alleviate by sticking needles into himself so as to "discharge the current by touching the wires with a metallic object."

Mr A depicted his condition by means a stick figure, made of wire, which he had taped to the cover of his diary: "That’s what I’m like inside—all made of metal."

The psychiatrists treating him diagnose "cenesthetic schizophrenia," a condition characterized by "a peculiar conservation of affectivity." Chambers defines cenesthesis (also, coenaesthesis) as "general consciousness or awareness of one's body." Webster defines it as "common sensation or general sensibility." It is, in short, affect without specific object. It is affect in common, affect as such; an unspecific but decidedly concrete consciousness of materiality.

It is not then so surprising that the treatment prescribed for Mr A should have been markedly literary: the point was presumably to (re-)enable representation, to give this non-specific affect subject and object. So the patient was recommended to read Miguel de Cervantes's "El licenciado Vidriera" ("The Glass Graduate"). Upon reading Cervantes's short story, we are told, Mr A gained a measure of relief:

I was relieved that somebody else had experienced the same as me, and I realized that reality is a very broad, diverse concept, not something unique and the same for everybody.

This Golden Age "exemplary novel" thus proves its exemplarity: providing both a literary precursor against which experience can be (re-)cast as similar, a repetition; and also ironically modelling singularity, that is the unrepeatable, itself. The singular becomes representable only through its iteration, its doubling.

We have something here of what Jacques Derrida, in Monolingualism of the Other, terms "the exemplary or testimonial singularity of martyred existence" (27; emphasis in original). Cervantes becomes a proleptic witness to Mr A's pain. And Derrida is precisely interested in this establishment of representation by means of the paradoxical meeting of the singular (an unrepresentable affect, a pain no-one else can feel) and the universal (a sign system available to all):

As regards so enigmatic a value as that of attestation, or even of exemplarity in testimony, here is a first question, the most general one, without the shadow of a doubt. What happens when someone resorts to describing an allegedly uncommon situation [. . .] by testifying to it in terms that go beyond it, in a language whose generality takes on a value that is in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological? When anybody who happens by infers the following: "What holds for me, irreplaceably, also applies to all. [. . .]" (19-20)

The only twists here are, first, the pre-emptive character of Cervantes's exemplarity--a "classic" written almost 400 years ago--and second, the analytic scene. But this is precisely how analysis works: transforming immanence into a relation with transcendence through representation, by provoking identification and recognition on the part of the analysand: the conjunctive synthesis, "so that's what it was!" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 20).

That moment of realization is, of course, the fruit of interpretation. In his Prologue to the Exemplary Novels Cervantes underlines, albeit circuitously and somewhat ironically, the ways in which they demand readerly hermeneutics:

I have called them Exemplary, and if you look closely, you will see that there is not one from which you cannot extract some profitable example; and if it were not for the fact that it would make this over-long, perhaps I would show you the delicious and wholesome fruit which could be pulled both from the collection as a whole and from each one alone.

He is not going to show us the moral to be gleaned from his writing, precisely because a large part of that moral--perhaps the moral--is the requirement to "look closely" and to decipher the texts' meanings, apparently for yourself (your self?).

The story prescribed to treat Mr A, "The Glass Graduate," is in many ways an allegory of interpretation: it deals with clarity and obscurity, and, equally, the difficulties of knowing either the self or the other.

Very briefly, the plot concerns a boy, who initially adopts the name Tomás Rodaja and is in turn adopted by two "gentleman students" from Málaga and sponsored through the course of studies in law at Salamanca. He subsequently takes up with a Captain of the army, and tours Italy before going on to Flanders. Returning to Salamanca, he is poisoned by an ardent suitor, as result of which

The unfortunate young man imagined that he was all made of glass, and in this delusion, whenever anyone approached him, he would shriek, begging and pleading with coherent words and arguments, for people not to come near, because they would break him, because really and truly he was not as other men--he was made of glass from head to foot. (73)

Taking as his name the Glass Graduate, or just Glass, in his madness the youth wanders the streets delivering caustic aphorisms on contemporary social mores, and as such becomes something of a character and celebrity. After two years as a semi-itinerant holy fool, sleeping and travelling packed in hay to ensure that his fragile body is well protected, he is rather abruptly cured by a Hieronymite friar. But, as a notorious former madman, he is unable to return to the practice of law, so with the name now of Tomás Rueda he sets off instead to seek fame in arms in the company of his friend Captain Valdivia.

The graduate's sense of self is shown to be brittle in a host of aspects. As I've indicated, he's forever changing both his social role and his name: there's more than a little of the picaresque about his adventures, except that he is for all intents and purposes without character; he is instead consistently renamed and re-adopted by those around him. We learn next to nothing about his background, and never, for instance, learn his real name (if indeed he has one). Until his final (un-narrated) incarnation as valiant soldier, he is notably shy to commit or invest in anything or anyone. (Elaine Dunn's "Fashioning Identities in 'El licenciado Vidriera'" is good on the ways in which he "resists all forms of intimacy and social relations" [130].)

He never really acquires an ego, then: he serves rather as a lens through which others are led to believe they see the hypocrisy and corruption of their own society all the clearer. In this sense, he's not far wrong to imagine himself as made out of glass. (Indeed, as George Shipley implies in "Vidriera's Blather", perhaps that's about the sum total of what he's not wrong about.)

But at least he is of interest. For all the desire for a cure, or for all that this like the other exemplary novels is designed to be curative, in the end the normalized subject is, frankly, portrayed as rather boring. In fact, he's not portrayed at all, but is dispensed with in a final, single sentence, paragraph. When the exemplary becomes universal, it no longer holds any pull on narrative; it has simply flattened out into language as such. It is only in so far as the exemplary remains singular, and so resists representation, that it also demands narrativization, even if that narrative ultimately irons out and eliminates the very singularity that is at first so seductive.

The same is true, for instance, of the eponymous "Jealous Old Man from Extremadura." As soon, at the tale's resolution, as he comes to his senses and gives up his jealousy, he is promptly dispatched without further ado, expiring within seven days and a single sentence. (On a rather different tack, I heartily recommend Shirfa Armon's analysis of this story in "The Paper Key", which persuasively argues that it is a critique of Spain's unprofitable investment of American spoils, and an anticipation of the shift from faith in precious ore to the fluidity of paper money.)

Finally, though, is there not another way of thinking about creatures of glass? One outlined in a poem by Keith Walton that also takes the title "The Glass Graduate". This gives us a voice whose glass self is not distanced and packaged away from the world, but vibrantly expectant and affectively, joyously, erotically responsive to the slightest liquid touch:

I sing
          as the wetted finger
                                           circles my rim
vibrate
wait
terrified -
                  Sing!           Sing!           Sing!