Serendipity alaways seems to play a part in academic research. I finished my previous post having decided that I needed to do a more thorough exploration of what Lacan had to say about ideology. I turned to  Krutzen, who is not infallible, but normally delivers the main references, at least according to key words. The head word produced five references in four seminars: 14, 16 (2), 18, and 19. I will explore these texts in more detail later, but I want to finish the serendipity thread first.

The first piece of luck came through Academia.edu, in the form of an essay by Peter Caws, Goerge Washington University: "The Unconscious is Structured Like a City: Freud, Lacan, and the Project of the Human Sciences", whose unpromising title led me to consider a new-to-me concept of the ex-conscious, a category to add to Freud's Conscious-Pre-conscious-Unconscious, which Caws created following a passage in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents:

    . . . Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical             entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once         come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist         alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium      of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S.         Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by      the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once         more stand—without the palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this         not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still     showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands     we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we           should find not only the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site,     the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the            church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer        would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one     view of the other . . . [Freud, 17-19]

Caws goes on to observe: 

    So there is a lot in cities that we don’t see, or can’t see, or don’t want to see. But it is there just the same,.... All of it, not just the early morning activity, is in Lacan’s words "the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts," even if not always consciously thinking thoughts.

Although Lacan in his Baltimore text (more on this later) does not state the parallel between those material expressions of "thoughts", his statement at least creates a metaphor between the ever-present but past-created thoughts and ideology, or at least one kind of ideology.

The second piece of serendipity, although coming out of a conscious search for "ideology in MUN's library catalogue, was an essay, "Ideology and the Question of the Subject" by Goldberg and Sekoff, published in a collection of essays, published 1978 by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology, London : Hutchinson & Co., 1978, pp.265. Further discussion of this essay will have to wait for my next blog.

 My best laid plans to make this blog a weekly event were set aside by the visit of a former student, now a dear friend, who was in town to see his ageing father. Time was not lost, however, since we had several lively discussions centred on the questions I posed in the previous blog. 

Tom's doctoral dissertation dealt in part with the ways in which First Nations have been dealing with the impact of North American culture on their traditional way of living in the land. We tried to thrash out the interactions between native culture -- all the various aspects of family relationships, role models, entertainment, rhythms of seasonal activities-- and the importation of mechanical devices such as guns, snowmobiles, radio, and planes. We differed in our approach: Tom preferred to think of the First Nations' world view as "culture"; I am leaning towards the cluster of ideas grouped under "ideology".

Lacan rarely used the term "ideology".  Instead, focussing on the preeminence of language, he developed his thinking according to the three orders: Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. The Symbolic deals with language. Beyond that simple statement lies: the language that the child learns in the context first of the family -- the "mother tongue" in common parlance, harking back to a time when children were raised in the early years by a mother (or mother substitute in wealthy families) -- then the extended family, early schooling, and so on up to the general level of the nation. Signifiers are grouped by sense into sentences, then into more complex conscious constructions. However, at some stage, links beyond sense are formed as the unconscious comes into play. Firstly, one signifier becomes "lost" -- it simply disappears from conscious recall. It will however play a role in organizing, beyond conscious control, other signifiers. Among these other signifiers, some will act as "quilting points", drawing some signifiers into chains or webs. When in early sessions the analysand is asked to freely associate, avoiding where possible conscious choice of words, the analyst is listening for those signifying chains, in order to determine the "quilting points", and eventually the "lost" signifier. This is a rather crude description of the Symbolic order.

The Imaginary is more difficult to describe. It includes all the visual images that surround the child and then the adult, which are absorbed without conscious effort. They include the obvious: buildings, advertisements both large and small, photographs (especially family photos that place the subject in the nexus of family relations), statues, monuments, and so on. And then the tricky notion of ideology. Most of ideology rarely receives conscious expression until it is analysed from a radically different point of view. Class consciousness, which may be dimly perceived by the subject through an awareness of the quality of clothing, accent, topics of conversation, cultural references, manners, and so on; religion or general world view, including race; political views. In a separate but related category I am placing work relations, and especially the relationship between worker and the means of production. My reasons for separating this aspect is because as the means for production remained stable over a fairly long period of time, there was a direct and sustained impact somatically. (I will deal with this in more detail later.)

The third order, the Real, is not to be confused with reality. Lacan came to identify the real with the "lost" object mentioned above, giving it the "title" (not the name) objet a. No signifier can be attached to it, but it has an enormous impact on the subject. If a metaphor might help, it is like a black hole -- nothing escapes from it, because its magnetic force is so great. The subject experiences it as the object cause of their desire, something they constantly strive to reach, but from which their drive is diverted.

Next time I want to focus more on the Imaginary, since I think that it is there that I will find some answers to my initial questions.

Robbe-Grillet in the light of Lacan

 This is a general title that I am going to use for what I hope will be a series of posts concerning my recent thinking about Robbe-Grillet. Why now? you may ask. Well in September 2022 I attended a conference on R-G to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in Brest, Brittany. The event had attracted scholars from various countries, some of them like me, old-stagers from previous conferences, and some new faces, an encouraging aspect for future scholarly work on this important novelist, cineast and essayist.We had the added attraction of R-G's wife, Catherine who attended every session, sitting in the front row and paying close attention to the proceedings. So much for the context that has prompted this series. The Actes of the conference will be published shortly, an event which may result in some attention being given to R-G's work; since his death in 2008, most publications have been edited versions of interviews he gave to various people in the last decade of his life., notably Roger-Michel Allemand's Entretiens complices and Benoît Peeters' Alain Robbe-Grillet: Réinventer le roman. Entretiens inédits.

In my presentation, I focussed on Lacan`s concept of jouissance as displayed/hidden by R-G in his repeated use of a gap or a hole which he attempted to cover over. A similar structure can be find in incidents involving doppelganger; and in his last major novel, La Reprise, repetition in various forms operates to provide jouissance for the author/narrator. I indicated, during the presentation, that some questions had to be left for a future work. I have not formed a complete plan, but I will be guided by the following questions:

The first major question, which I think R-G answers in part as early as Pour un nouveau roman, is answered by R-G's focus on the creation of the work itself, shifting away from a Balzacian depiction of reality. My question focuses more tightly on trying to explain what is going on when so many other artists in all disciplines are pursuing the same line. I think that the usual recourse to "influence" is weak and insufficient. Flaubert, Verlaine and Rimbaud, the "Art for Art's sake" movement, impressionism, cubism, Schonberg, Stravinsky: each in his own way was responding to aspects of their world that could not be approached through earlier means.

The three numbered questions represent my attempt to bring some kind of cohesion to my research. More broadly, I am looking to spell out the dominant ideology that individuals are reacting against, whether consciously or unconsciously.

This is the prologue.

It has been quite a while since I have posted on this blog. But recent events have prompted me to return.

Below you will find excerpts I have lifted from an article appearing on Truthdig that I hope will spark debate about Canada's currently pathetic response to infrastructure needs, and especially to climate change.

Germany has a public sector development bank called KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or “Reconstruction Credit Institute”), which is even larger than the World Bank

Unlike private commercial banks, KfW does not have to focus on maximizing short-term profits for its shareholders while turning a blind eye to external costs, including those imposed on the environment. The bank has been free to support the energy revolution by funding major investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Its fossil fuel investments are close to zero. One of the key features of KfW, as with other development banks, is that much of its lending is driven in a strategic direction determined by the national government. Its key role in the green energy revolution has been played within a public policy framework under Germany’s renewable energy legislation, including policy measures that have made investment in renewables commercially attractive.

KfW is one of the world’s largest development banks, with assets totaling$566.5 billion as of December 2017. Ironically, the initial funding for its capitalization came from the United States, through the Marshall Plan in 1948. Why didn’t we fund a similar bank for ourselves? Simply because powerful Wall Street interests did not want the competition from a government-owned bank that could make below-market loans for infrastructure and development. Major U.S. investors today prefer funding infrastructure through public-private partnerships, in which private partners can reap the profits while losses are imposed on local governments.

KfW’s role in implementing government policy parallels that of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in funding the New Deal in the 1930s. At that time, U.S. banks were bankrupt and incapable of financing the country’s recovery. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to set up a system of 12 public “industrial banks” through the Federal Reserve, but the measure failed. Roosevelt then made an end run around his opponents by using the RFC that had been set up earlier by President Herbert Hoover, expanding it to address the nation’s financing needs.

The RFC Act of 1932 provided the RFC with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. As with KfW’s loans, its funding source was the sale of bonds, mostly to the Treasury itself. Proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms and much more; it funded all of this while generating income for the government.

The RFC was so successful that it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest banking organization. Its success, however, may have been its nemesis. Without the emergencies of depression and war, it was a too-powerful competitor of the private banking establishment; and in 1957, it was disbanded under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. That’s how the  United States was left without a development bank at the same time Germany and other countries were hitting the ground running with theirs.

Today some U.S. states have infrastructure and development banks, including California, but their reach is very small. One way they could be expanded to meet state infrastructure needs would be to turn them into depositories for state and municipal revenue. Rather than lending their capital directly in a revolving fund, this would allow them to leverage their capital into 10 times that sum in loans, as all depository banks are able to do, as I’ve previously explained.

The most profitable and efficient way for national and local governments to finance public infrastructure and development is with their own banks, as the impressive track records of KfW and other national development banks have shown. The RFC showed what could be done even by a country that was technically bankrupt, simply by mobilizing its own resources through a publicly owned financial institution. We need to resurrect that public funding engine today, not only to address the national and global crises we are facing now but for the ongoing development the country needs in order to manifest its true potential.

While the "country" referred to is the US, similar ideas need to be examined urgently in Canada, especially the move away from financing public works through private banks. A return to the original ideal for the Bank of Canada would be a good start.

Electricity Generation: A reposting from April 2014

In the light of recent revelations on the Muskrat Falls fiasco, I thought this earlier post was worth a second glance. Obviously NALCOR never considered options other than MF...

Electricity Generation

More musings. I haven't got facts and figures this time. I am still convinced that Integral Fast Reactors (I misspelled that in the previous blog) are the way to go. Far safer than current methods, using heavy or light water which rely on pressurized steam, and which leave a residue of fuel cells that need to be kept cool for thousands of years.

This time I want to ask questions about wave and tidal power. With Newfoundland and Labrador's highly indented shoreline, it would seem obvious that such methods should have been explored. While tidal difference on the east coast of the island is not as dramatic as that in the Bay of Fundy, it is sufficient to warrant examination. The type of installation that the French put in place in Dinard shows what can be done, and that site has been producing electricity for 50 years.

In the Bay of Fundy, a dam could not be built, but turbines anchored to the sea bed did produce electricity for a short while, but the tidal flow was so strong, the units were destroyed in short order, and the project abandoned.

Smaller projects on the island's south coast would, I am sure, prover feasible and profitable, especially if built close to the transmission line from Bay d'Espoir. Similar projects could be built on the North Shore of Labrador, providing power for coastal communities. Wave power could also be used in coastal communities.

The feasibility of using wind power has already been discussed and demonstrated, with some interesting solutions proposed to deal with the problem of intermittent supply.

The main problem remains in the heads of politicians. When vanity trumps sanity, no amount of evidence or common sense can prevail.

Gryphon Trio at the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival 2016

Monday night 15 August saw the welcome return of the Gryphon Trio. A near capacity audience in the DF Cook Recital Hall was testimony to the support in the St. John's area for high calibre chamber music, and the special place this trio holds in the hearts of music lovers.

The concert did not have a thematic title (the Trio's name is sufficient to draw in an audience without the need for spin), but in retrospect appassionata would have been appropriate, with two of the evening's offerings bearing that musical notation. More of that later.

The Tuckamore Festival brochure never offers program notes to help the audience prepare for performances, although sometimes a pre-concert talk is given. On Monday night pianist James Walker pithily described the circumstances surrounding Debussy's early work, his Piano Trio in G major, composed in 1882, but then "lost" for almost exactly one hundred years before re-emerging in 1982. Arnold Schönberg was not impressed when he first heard it, classifying it as juvenilia, a slur which may have contributed to the work not being performed very frequently since. The Gryphon Trio, clearly, think otherwise, and judging by the physical state of the scores they were playing from, have made it a part of their repertoire, at least for the moment.

Just at the end of his teenage years, Debussy was hired as a music teacher to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He was to teach the younger children the rudiments of music, develop the musical talents of a twenty-seven-year-old daughter during the day, and play duets with the mother in the evening. After travelling for part of the year the family settled in one spot and in short notice a 'cellist and a violinist were hired. Here (may I imagine?) was the beginnings of a double trio: Debussy, mother and daughter; Debussy, violinist and 'cellist. I don't know how long the arrangement lasted, but if you are looking for a narrative to underpin Debussy's composition, it is not hard to find. The first movement opens with a simple theme of five notes that do not make a tune but offer endless possibilities for variation. 'Cello and piano, piano and violin answer each other in a series of duets as the composer/piano interacts with the mother/'cello, then daughter/violin. The mood is, in contemporary spin parlance, sunny, the composer is contented to be in bucolic surroundings. The second movement moves into a slightly more sombre mood; there are clouds on the horizon, as yet unspecified. The scherzo in the third movement might be considered to be a series of images of the younger children in the family running around, with the composer joining in. The final movement, however, with its sudden changes in tempo and key, perhaps portrays the complications that arise with the introduction of two other performers in the real life situation: the original trio has superimposed upon it a trio of musicians resulting in the trio composition by Debussy. Fanciful? Perhaps.

James Parker yielded the microphone to Dr Andrew Staniland for the introduction to the two short works that concluded the first half of the concert. As he explained, "14 Seconds" is the fifth movement of a fourteen movement work Dark Star Requiem chosen to open the 2010 Toronto Luminato Festival. The libretto for this oratorio/opera was drawn from a series of poems written by Jill Battson in reaction to the AIDS epidemic that was sweeping, apparently unchecked and unstoppable in the 1970s and 1980s. The title alludes to the chilling statistic that world-wide, one person died from AIDS every fourteen seconds. Staniland has taken on a seemingly impossible structural limitation of composing fourteen short pieces, each lasting fourteen seconds. I have yet to hear the complete work, but this extract does provoke a question that has received a fair amount of debate: when faced with a massive trauma (Auschwitz is the perennial choice) is art even possible? Theodor Adorno posed the question (somewhat baldly, and later retracted it because it was so often cited without the full context of his argument). AIDS cannot be put in the same category as the extermination camps of the the Second World War, but it was a trauma that affected many individuals with enormous impact. The sole clue to the structure of the piece, which was, I am sure, a first hearing for the majority of the audience, was provided in Staniland's introduction: a theme and variations. The theme is simple, repeated, harshly accented notes on the piano at first, taken up by the 'cello and violin. If you are looking for narrative, then perhaps the sound of a heart monitor next to a dying patient, the pulse rate quicker than normal as the body tries to fight the spreading disease and the mind tries to cope with that realization. The first few movements are clearly marked off with a slight pause, the trajectory the music might be creating cut off abruptly. But as the work progresses, there is no pause, not the slightest relief. There are key changes, changes in rhythm and pace, but each fourteen seconds barely has time to establish itself before the next "life" moves to centre stage. Towards the end, the mood becomes more intense; is this rage against the dying of the light? Until finally, the beat of the heart monitor flatlines... a single note, high in the 'cello's register, morendo.

For the second of Staniland's pieces, "Solstice Songs", the audience was given no help. While the composer had indicated that it was to be performed attaca, with no break between to the two pieces, there was a pause while the trio, some more quickly than others, removed the first score from their stand and set up the second. It did give the audience time to take the impact of "14 Seconds", but we had no preparation. The musical notation the program simply said: "Lively, Dance-like", and while it lived up to the first, I defy anyone to dance to this music! I certainly enjoyed the music, as did the Gryphon Trio who bounced with the sudden stops and starts, fortissimo to pianissimo. But I will need to hear it again. Once again, the finale was characterized by passionate playing.

On the question of hearing contemporary compositions more than once, Dr Staniland, in his introduction to last Saturday's performance of new works by Tuckamore Young Composers, said how fortunate they were to hear their composition performed twice, once in the composers segment at 7pm, and again in the main concert at 8pm. He also observed that their new works were, in the second performance, being presented in the company of some of the Western tradition's greats: Brahms, Dvorzak, Fauré, and the like. It is a mark of Staniland's stature that his compositions tonight stood up well in the context of Debussy and Mendelssohn.

The second half of the evening consisted of the single work, Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio no.2 in c minor, op.66. This is a late work, composed just a few years before his death and shows the complexity of a mature artist's mind at work. James Parker's playful introduction offered up a narrative drawn from the Jason Bourne series of action dramas: first movement "full of car chases, explosions, narrow escapes; the second movement "a peaceful interlude in a Mediterranean luxury hotel (James Bond?); I can't remember Parker's characterization for the third movement; and, the fourth movement, more dramatic action, accelerating to a triumphant conclusion. My narrative would substitute a Victorian melodrama for Jason Bourne, with the villain tying the heroine to the railway tracks and... you get the picture. Such narratives do help the concert-goer who has no formal musical training (and perhaps little concert experience such as myself) to grasp complex artistic creations which take thirty minutes to unfold.

In response to a much deserved standing ovation, the Gryphon Trio gave us Piazzolla's "Autumn". I have become a fan of tango dancing, both the balletic, dancing-with-the-stars routines by young performers whose joints do not seem to obey the laws of physic, but especially those where the dancers are my age, their movements more gentle, but the sexual innuendo all the more powerful for being understated. So it was with last night's performance: the rubato passages only ever-so-slightly slowed, then quickened, the lingering slide of the trailing foot referenced by the glissando on violin and 'cello.

What a night!

Tuckamore Chamber Music festival

After a long gap in posting, I'm going to try my hand at something different: music reviews. I have no formal training in music, but I do know what I like, and what I don't want to see or hear repeated. For my first attempt, here are my observations of Friday night's offering at the D.F. Cook Recital Hall: "In My Love and In My Song".

While the title made obvious reference to the two song cycles "An Chloé" (Mozart) and "Sechs Gesängen"(Schumann), the other pieces seemed not to fit: "Valse" by Rachmaninoff, Hungarian Dance No. 15 by Brahms, and Beethoven's String Quartet No.7. This last, at a stretch, might have found justification in its dedication "To my brother", an expression of filial love, but a change in programming saw it replaced by the same composer's Op 74 "The Harp".

I am not familiar with this work (it was a first hearing for me), but for a quartet of players, who had not had much time to gel (this is the first week of the festival) their ensemble playing was remarkable. Given the foreshortened preparation time, the high level of co-ordination in the rapid scalar passages, and the syncopated rhythm sections in the final movement was breathtaking. Sensitivity in the pianissimo sections was to the fore, and the changes in prominence for each of the voices were seamless as each instrument sang clearly above the understructure provided by the other three. The exuberant finale brought out the obvious enjoyment the four individuals have in making music together, enjoyment conveyed readily to an appreciative audience.

Sophie Leblanc's performance of selections from "An Chloé" was preceded by a welcome introduction to the texts, since no translation had been provided to the audience. Her playful, even flirtatious depiction of the textual context of the songs prepared the audience well for her flawless singing: impeccable German diction, musicality, and an appreciation for the dramatic possibilities of the varying fortunes of the characters in the songs. Each of the four chosen presented love in a different light: "Dans un bois solitaire" shows the would-be lover alone; in "Abendempfindung" the lover discovers the gloomy mood of the dusk matches his mood; "Wie unglücklich bin ich nicht", with the double negative pointing to an uncertain positive, has the lover finding happiness, but not sure of its permanence; and "Der Zauberer" finds the lover robbed of his heart by the beauty of the beloved. Mozart found inspiration in simple, folksy tunes that he endowed with matching simplicity and wit.

Schumann in like manner chose to stay in the folk tradition of the Gesängen, rather than the more elevated art-song form of the Lieder. Again, Ms Leblanc provided a brief synopsis of each of the songs. The first five depict the unfortunate ones in love: "Herzeleid" (Heartbreak), "Die Fensterscheibe" (The Window-cleaner), "Der Gärtner" (The Gardener), "Die Spinnerin" (The Spinner), and "Im Wald" (In the Forest). In the first and fifth, the protagonist is not specified, but the emotion suffered could be shared by all, the heartbreak of a lost love in the first, the loneliness of the not-yet-loved in the fifth as the protagonist observes pairing up in nature -- two butterflies, two birds, and two deer -- and wonders implicitly when he or she may find love. The sixth song "Abendlied" (Evening Song) contrasts the first five by offering a more positive outlook on love, the title indicating a more noble approach, a Lied, and the choice of major key a more joyful outcome.

Rather than choosing the traditional accompaniment of piano, Ms Leblanc went for the twentieth century arrangement by the German composer Aribert Riemann for string quartet. Susan Waterbury played first violin, Nancy Dahn second (reversing the pairing in the Beethoven), Dov Scheindlin viola, and Vernon Regehr 'cello. The combination worked very well and I will seek out a recording of this version.

The only question mark I had for the evening concerned Ms Leblanc's constant reference to the score. Since the two song cycles are not arduous examples in the soprano's repertoire, why were they not memorized?

Finally, a word on the two pieces for piano-four hands. Rachmaninoff's "Valse", while posing some challenges for the upper hand, is not technically difficult. The composer's somewhat sardonic treatment of the waltz genre -- you can't dance to the music, and the lumbering, fortissimo section may have been an allusion to the brutal aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution -- turns the piece into a salon novelty rather than a serious concert offering. Brahm's Hungarian Dance no.15 similarly works best in a salon setting, though concert versions have become popular. Is it possible, as the late John Herriott was fond of pointing out, that such compositions for four hands, often played by tutor (male) and student (female), offered an opportunity for close physical contact, in public, under the guise of music-making? No such possible interpretation could be made for Friday evening's performance as Timothy Steeves and Robert Kortgaard gave us only fun-filled panache.