Writers are always selling somebody out

1
Writers are always selling somebody out
Joan Didion Moralism beyond Good and Evil
2
What is a Moralist?

• British Moralists Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury,
  Bentham, Mill, etc.
• To find basis for ethical judgment in human
  psychology
• Are we naturally selfish?
• Or do we spontaneously sympathise with others?
• Or can we calculate our interests?

3
What happened to the Moralists?

• I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now.
  It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We
  are not sent into the world to air our moral
  prejudices. I never take any notice of what
  common people say, and I never interfere with
  what charming people do. (Oscar Wilde)

4
Beyond Good and Evil

• We think that morality, in the earlier sense,
  that is, a morality based on intentions, has
  become a prejudice, something rash and perhaps
  provisional, along the lines of astrology and
  alchemy, but, in any case, something that must be
  overcome.
• Good and evil are expressions of the will to
  power

Friedrich Nietzsche
5
Marx and Morals

• Morality is ideological, historically relative,
  shaped by social and class determinants, etc.
• What we need is social science, not morality,
  which is always a fig-leaf

6
Freud and morals

• Morality is the product of a basic pleasure
  principle coming up against the limits of the
  reality principle
• We adapt our selfish desires to the necessary
  constraints of civilization no innate virtue

7
Replayed in the 1940s and 50s

• Jean-Paul Sartre literature of engagement,
  inflected with ideological and moral value make
  existence better!
• Roland Barthes literature must be stripped of
  all pretensions to morality, because it fills
  writing with myth

8
Writing Degree Zero

• craftsmanlike writing (Henry James, Joseph
  Conrad, etc.) does NOT disturb any order form is
  meant to transcend History
• The dislocation of writing (Mallarmé, Joyce,
  etc.) undermines only literary language
• One option remains between the subjunctive and
  the imperativethe indicative mood of writing.

9
Writing Degree Zero

• writing at the zero degree is basically in the
  indicative mood, or if you like, amodal it would
  be accurate to say that it is a journalists
  writing, if it were not precisely the case that
  journalism develops, in general, optative or
  imperative (that is, emotive) forms.

10
Writing Degree Zero

• The new neutral writing takes its place in the
  midst of all those ejaculations and judgments,
  without becoming involved in any of them it
  consists precisely in their absence. But this
  absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no
  secret one cannot therefore say that it is an
  impassive mode of writing rather, that it is
  innocent. The aim here is to go beyond Literature
  by entrusting ones fate to a sort of basic
  speech, equally far from living languages and
  from literary language proper.
• Roland Barthes, 1953

11
Precursors for Didion

• Orwell language purified of cant, jargon and the
  idée fixe.
• Hemingway language purified of literary
  diction, streamlined, American

12
And those other precursors
Nathanael West
Raymond Chandler

• The Noirs
• Razor-sharp portraiture of a civilization in
  meltdown
• Merciless dissection of commodity culture

13
Didion as moralist

• those of us who remain committed mainly to the
  exploration of moral distinctions and
  ambiguities (p. 276)

14
Morality

• a word I distrust more every day
• (p. 126)

15
Beyond good and evil, again

• Ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious.
  (p. 129)
• No way of knowing what is right and what is
  wrong, what is good and what is evil.
• Yet, morality is trumpeted from every corner
  everyone claims it.
• Factitious moral burdens cover up questions of
  straightforward power.
• The fashionable madmen return via morals

16
What does a moralist after moralism have left?

• Language
• I am still committed to the idea that the
  ability to think for ones self depends upon
  ones mastery of the language, and I am not
  optimistic. (p. 99)
• For against language, there is spectacle, the
  Golden Dream, California

17
Didion between language and spectacle

• You cant negate the society of the image with
  the pen
• you cant moralize it in the old sense
• you can only demonstrate perfect moral rectitude
  by documenting it with a neutral eye.
• Writing degree zero erasure of ideology

18
Golden Land

• The future always looks good in the golden land,
  because no one remembers the past. (16)
• where every day the world is born anew (32)

19
Romans noirs

• began to resemble the novels of James M. Cain
  (p. 24)
• the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live
• Noir wisdom your appetites are the appetites of
  the Big Other
• Pursuit of jouissance is your social fate

Double Indemnity
20
Jouissance

• Society now commands jouissance as a civic duty
• There is no social space left but the space in
  which we desperately pursue our private bliss
• Jouissance the Death Drive

Jacques Lacan
21
Apocalypse

• This is The End (of human nature)
• let it come and clear the rot and the stench
  and the stink (p. 128-29)
• Los Angeles weather is the weather of
  catastrophe, of apocalypse (172)
• Jouissance is the Death Drive it is our Nature

22
against which

• Sentences.
• These sentences do not reject or condemn the
  Death Drive
• they perform its rhythms linguistically
• so that we can read the Drive
• Drive my car.

23
Death Drive

• I closed my eyes and drove across the Carquinas
  Bridge, because I had appointments, because I was
  working, because I had promised to watch the
  revolution being made at San Francisco State
  College and because there was no place in Vallejo
  to turn in a Budget Rent-A-Car and because
  nothing on my mind was in the script as I
  remembered it. (p. 214)

24
What the Death Drive circumvents Modernism

• I kept the radio on very loud not to find out
  what time it was but in an effort to erase six
  words from my mind, six words which had no
  significance for me but which seemed that year to
  signal the onset of anxiety or fright. The words,
  a line from Ezra Pounds In a Station of the
  Metro, were these Petals on a wet black bough.
  The radio played Wichita Lineman and I Heard
  It on the Grapevine. Petals on a wet black
  bough. (p. 214)

25
Postmodernism

• The sentences perform a vacillation, or
  interference pattern, between the literary
  (Modern) and the mass cultural.
• They do not comment on this tension, or decide
  for or against either pole of attraction.
• They perfectly record it, and pass no judgment.
• That is the true origin of postmodernism.

26
No hierarchy of meaning

• In this light all narrative was sentimental. In
  this light all connections were equally
  meaningful, and equally senseless. (p. 220)

27
Modernism already knew the postmodern

• W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
• Things fall apart the centre cannot hold
• And what rough beast, its hour come round at
  last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

28
Jean-François Lyotard

• A work can become modern only if it is first
  postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not
  modernism at its end but in the nascent state,
  and this state is constant. (Reader, p. 59)

29
Jean-François Lyotard

• The postmodern would be that which, in the
  modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
  presentation itself. (p. 60)

30
The unpresentable has no syntax

• I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid
  it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer
  did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew
  was what I saw flash pictures in variable
  sequence, images with no meaning beyond their
  temporary arrangement, not a movie but a
  cutting-room experience. (p. 196)

31
What is postmodernisms unpresentable?

• Is it not morality itself?
• Didion is a moralist by virtue of her direct
  presentation of the absence of any moral rules in
  the cutting-room of contemporary experience.
• Thematics of the meaningless contained by the
  pressure of a neutral style.
• Her style projects her meaningless materials
  towards a sublime region truth.