Mysticism Note 3

Modernism engaged with the occult to remake the relationship between the world and representation; magic offered a way of reconceptualising mimesis because occultists and magicians “understood that the mimetic is able to produce, not just an inert copy, but an animated copy powerful enough to enact change in the original.” [Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 1.] Magic elevates mimesis to praxis. That is to say, mimesis partakes in magical thinking; the belief that thoughts and desires can directly transfer themselves to, and transform, the material world, other people, or the future. [Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 6.] 

Connections

Prolegomena to any Mysticism Notes

There's a review of Nisha Ramayya's book on the New Statesman, which costs SIX POUNDS FIFTY if you buy it in a newsagent. We'll look at some of her stuff in the Mystical Poetry session.

Satire Note 1

Satire is that which calls for the dissolution of its object of ridicule, all else is mere irony. The presence of this first element is where most descriptions or criteria of satire have hitherto placed emphasis, but it not only calls for the abolition of its target and the conditions that make it a possibility, but also itself and its friends. For example, Verity Spott’s GIDEON is an attack on George Osborne (addressed as “dear legitimate target”) and includes a Stalinist-style purge of friends: “Next purge (party sadness, end of madness): I shot bullets into almost every one of my comrades killing most of them, mortally wounding some, firing novelty ‘bang’ flags into a few.” [Verity Spott, GIDEON (Brighton: Barque, 2014), unpaginated.] I think this has some relation to Marina Vishmidt’s distinctions between negative critique and positive critique, where the latter seeks the dissolution not only of its object but also the object’s conditions of possibility. We might, tenuously, say positive critique is Horatian satire and negative critique Juvenalian – tenuously because those names are so long dead, they no longer seem adequate.

Satire Note 3.2

Secondly, definitions of satire usually note that it has the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Its aim is therefore described as constructive social criticism, which would mean that there is something inherently liberal about certain traditions of satire, in which a free-speech based public sphere is meant to correct certain vices, thereby facilitating progress – hence, I think, the frequent presence of this word in early satires: see, for example, John Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) or Swift’s titles ‘Phyllis, or, The Progress of Love’ and ‘The Progress of Beauty.’ Progress actually meant something different for Swift – he thought of modernity as arrogant, progress as a degeneration. [Pat Rogers, ‘Swift the Poet,’ Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 177-201: p. 183.] See also Hogarth’s ‘The Progress of the Rake’ (1732-4). Anyway, I think the prevalence of liberal satire is predicated in some ways on this new understanding of progress and its relation to satire. Making satire into a call for abolition gets at how Verity Spott’s work, and the work of others, isn’t quite what is usually called satire – see negative vs. positive critique in Satire Note 1.

Satire Note 3

Definitions of satire typically have two components. Firstly, it is a genre in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule. Secondly, definitions of satire usually note that it has the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. These are both inadequate to contemporary satire.

SF Note 1

SF, in the form we know it, is finished, or rather it is ever more attenuated, the initial broth has never been removed or thrown out, but is ever-more diluted by new concerns and modes of expression.