Antiquitopia

Yesterday, a turn away from the world meant a turn towards the self: a turn away from Marxism meant a turn toward psychoanalysis: in that case, the Real was still somehow present, if only as an aching throb, an open wound. Today, even psychoanalysis and desire must be shunned as being too modern, and as requiring an assessment of late capitalism that the postmodern subject cannot tolerate. What offers itself as a substitute is then art and religion, pseudo-aestheticism in the form we have examined it here and its ghostly afterimages in the slow rotation of the religion of art into the art of religion. (Fredric Jameson, "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity," The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998) 134) In the balanced dialectic of the statement, the presence of the "Real" in Marxism and psychoanalysis (even if present only as an open wound) is matched by its pseudo-aestheticism of the permutations of th...

Foucault argued (I think in the History of Sexuality --don't ask me which volume off the top of my head) that the medieval Catholic confessional is the predecessor to the psychologist's analysis (I think he was thinking mostly of psychoanalysis of a Freudian bent), but, perhaps, it is also the predecessor of the advice column and even the bathroom graffito confessional in a post-Reformation, Protestant, predominantly Anglophone context (outside of Foucault's France): For since the British Isles went Protestant A church confession is too high for most. But still confession is a human want, So Englishmen must make theirs now by post And authors hear them over breakfast toast. For, failing them, there's nothing but the wall Of public lavatories on which to scrawl. (W.H. Auden, "Letter to Lord Byron") I am beginning to find many of Auden's lines (especially in this particular poem) rather strained, but I like this particular stanza. It just stands out. It is...