wednesday, february 07, 2007
Libertines, universities, and memory
Tonight I found Axess: “a magazine, based in Stockholm, devoted chiefly to the liberal arts and social sciences”. It contains lovely articles about excellent things, and I will quote from them because that’s what I like to do.
I’m trying to write an economic-individualist mock epic poem in the voice of Paris Hilton as a libertine (which I chose for my homework), so I enjoyed this cultural history of the libertine. Parts are relevant for my study of celebrity, like some definitions of the libertine:
…concentrated eroticism, seduction as a selfish but elegant game or a kind of gallantry with more daring overtones…questioned the church, marriage and other social institutions…thoughtless, bold individual, guilty of all kinds of vices…cultivated primarily by the idle and financially independent aristocracy…”the art of maintaining one’s independence in contact with other people”…a nomad — he shrinks from partner relationships, marriage, a permanent home, indeed anything that would cause him to put down roots…
The libertine seducer challenged accepted moral rules and with his apparently unbridled libido undermined the structure of society. The libertine writer with his outspokenness defied prevailing literary conventions and his texts were accused of being reprehensibly pornographic or dangerously atheistic, or both…In the city hunts the sensualist, an individual given to sexual debauchery who is not interested in the refined games of the libertine.
I think I can stretch that to apply to sex videos, The Simple Life, and publishing CDs and perfumes. She’s something of the sensualist, but with a crafty economic-individualist bent that gives her lifestyle some intellectual substance. (This is for “Home and World in British Literature”; context is the Earl of Rochester and Daniel Defoe in the seventeeth century.)
Then I poked around Axess and found a review about W.G. Sebald and memory, among other things. I loved The Rings of Saturn, and I keep wondering about that book in the context of my memory=literature+neuroscience class, so here are passages that may substitute for original thought on my part:
The introductory story in [Schwindel] reproduces, for example, an episode in Stendhal, whose vivid memory…later proved to derive not from an actual visual impression but from the memory of an engraving of the same view. So in Stendahl an artistic image has replaced the original memory and repressed it to the same extent as it has encapsulated it and retained it. We distort and destroy the past every time we attempt to approach it; we falsify those tracks we think we can find, and use up our memories until they are beyond recall. ¶ As Freud points out in his essay “Childhood and concealing memories,” our memories from childhood are rarely reliable but are often tendentious constructs, created to correspond to subconscious, present-day needs.
…as he says about his almost manic information-gathering that it “acted as a surrogate, a compensating memory.” This must certainly be a key to the literally headlong flights of meanings in Sebald’s texts (especially perhaps in the almost paranoid, depressive, circular, leaden Die Ringe des Saturn); the constantly tempting, constantly elusive and infectious accumulation of strange and apparently imperative coincidences and signs. But here a contradiction also opens up, a question that Sebald did not succeed in solving…is memory-loss a deliberate (and therefore reprehensible) suppression of a trauma, of such a perfect break with everything that hitherto has constituted the world of the individual that he/she cannot perceive it or even retain it in their memory?
Memory evolved to be useful to the present looking towards the future, not to the past looking at itself. And information-gathering as surrogate memory? People call their blogs and hard drives “outboard memories” on purpose. Memory is something elusive and accumulative; traumatic memory-loss is not deliberate, and those memories aren’t “lost” anyway — they’re more “frozen”, encapsulated, unconscious, coming back to bite you again and again unless you incorporate them into yourself. Then again, we read a lot of psychoanalysis today because in memory class, Tuesdays are mostly literature and Thursdays are mostly neuroscience.
There was a third article I liked, about American universities:
Acquiring not immediately useful (and often cursory) knowledge about, for example, literature, history and art often comprises a form of demonstrative superfluous overconsumption which tends to create a feeling of having been chosen, of having been initiated into an esoteric society. This is the “cultural capital” which engenders in the children of the elite the feeling of having legitimately conquered the position that they were born to.
Freedom of choice and the necessity of adapting to an educational market has caused many, and not merely conservative, critics to worry about a superficiality and an undermining of those educational ideals which once supported the liberal arts tradition…But, seen through European eyes, the remarkable thing about higher education in the USA is nevertheless its ability to combine high intellectual competence — indeed, even at times a classical humanism — with market thinking and a shameless pandering to the public.
Is my college education just an accumulation of cultural capital? Well yeah, sort of. I am acquiring the knowledge-flinging skills that will allow me to become part of the creative class. Yeah, sounds horrible. I like to think I avoid some of the sense of entitlement, but I’m not sure.
comments (2)
What's moleskin about? I visited the website, but I still don't understand what it is.
– Jason on 2/7/2007 15:08:45
it's a kind of small notebook that people like to carry around and draw in...ask your local border's. :)
– britta on 2/7/2007 17:02:43
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
