Lars Iyer's Blog, page 45

Wittgenstein Jr now in this best novel and fiction list i...

Wittgenstein Jr now in this best novel and fiction list in the Daily Telegraph.

Nietzsche never seemed to lose sight of his own condition...

Nietzsche never seemed to lose sight of his own condition: he simulated Dionysus or the Crucified and took a certain delight in the enormity of his simulation. The madness consisted in this delight. No one will ever be able to judge to what degree this simulation was perfect and absolute; the sole criterion lies in the intensity with which Nietzsche experienced the simulation, to the point of ecstasy. [...]

What he was conscious of was the fact that he had ceased to be Nietzsche. [...]

In [eternal] return, everyday things abruptly receded into the distance: yesterday became today, the day before yesterday spilled over into tomorrow.

Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Almost everything I do now is a 'drawing-the-line under e...

Almost everything I do now is a 'drawing-the-line under everything'. The vehemence of my inner oscillations has been terrifying, all through these past years; now that I must make the transition to a new and more intense form, I need, above all, a new estrangement, a still more intense depersonalization. So it is of greatest importance what and who still remain to me.

What age am I? I do not know - as little as I know how young I shall become...

Nietzsche, from the letter to Fuchs (14 December 1887)

Perish the ThoughtJuliet JacquesLars Iyer's fourth no...

Perish the Thought

Juliet Jacques

Lars Iyer's fourth novel carries an epigraph from Ludwig Wittgenstein, impelling thinkers to 'descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there', but its core theme lies in the lament of its central character, a lecturer at Cambridge, that: 'The philosopher's misfortune is to be a part of nothing. To stand apart from everything'.

That standing apart is usually not through choice - this is an observation of a man torn down by external forces. 'Wittgenstein Jr' is a nickname give to him by a group of students; his 'aura' makes him an object of fascination, especially for the narrator, Peters, one of the few working-class northerners to attend Cambridge in an age when 'raves are full of posh boys ... and the DJs have double-barrelled names' and undergraduates are expected to do more than 'fill the classrooms, and pay the fees'.

His gang consists of 12 young men who veer between re-enacting Socrates's execution and drawing cocks on the notebooks, including Ede, the self-loathing Old Etonian who feels doomed to squander his family's heritage; tedious Titmuss, enlightened after his Indian gap year; Scroggins, who nearly dies of a ketamine overdose; and the athletic Kirwin twins, whose tragedy 'is that there's no way for them to die in'.

Besides the sad realisation that after graduation these people will never be together again or realise the potential that their teacher seems to see in them, there is deep melancholy beneath their fantasies about Wittgenstein Jr praising them or asking them to help him solve problems. As in Iyer's Spurious trilogy, about two philosophers called W and Lars Iyer, the humour derives from the gulf between the protagonists' world-changing ambitions and their awareness of their own impotence as anyone who does not fit in with the neoliberal vision of universities as sources of income is driven out.

Fighting indifference above all, Wittgenstein Jr is unashamed about reaching only a small audience, preferring to focus on those who might alter things than being led by numbers. As in Spurious, a crucial problem is that the ostensible comforts of 21st-century western society make the stakes seem so low. 'You could say he's risked nothing more than paper cuts', reflects Peters, but Wittgenstein Jr wants thought to 'tear out our throats' and his fulminations against 'English lawn' dons who facilitate the monetisation of Cambridge provide the angriest, funniest monologues. His biting dismissal of them as the 'intellectual equivalent of suburban cul-de-sacs and out-of-town retail parks' has an economy familiar from the brutal put-downs that characterised Iyer's trilogy. 

A lecturer at Newcastle University who has written two books on the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Iyer has never been to Cambridge and the university functions as an academic everyplace. However, the specifics of the real Wittgenstein's life do feed into that of Iyer's fictional hero: three of Wittgenstein's brothers killed themselves and the suicide of Wittgenstein Jr's brother as a 20-year-old Oxford student provides this novel's great tragedy.

Like Iyer's previous works, this book is written in short chapters, most just a couple of pages long, and anything longer stands out. The most striking passage is an expressionistic account of Wittgenstein Jr's brother going to Norway to strive towards the totally logical language that Wittgenstein demanded in the Tractatus and returning with such knowledge of the human condition that he cannot survive.

Deftly, Iyer changes pace and scene, moving to a dance-off between two students before cutting back to 'the look of relief on his brother's face, when they cut down his body'. Iyer's use of italics gives not just emphasis but rhythm to his emotive scenes and the device is employed to heart-breaking effect in these scenes. With four words - 'Philosophy invaded his brother' - this tragedy becomes that of anyone who values thought for its own sake, however burdensome such insight can be.

Eventually, the boredom, alienation and despair give over to warmer emotions as Wittgenstein and Peters grow closer, but ultimately it seems as though madness is the only option left. The lecturer tells his class, 'Philosophy stands between us and salvation', knowing that the stakes remain as high as ever. The dons and the powers above them know this; hence their insistence that the subject is useless and their denial of access to it for those likely to question their monetarist ideology. There will be a time 'after philosophy' but it remains to be seen because it is no longer needed or no longer allowed. Right now, Iyer's novel insists, utopian thought remains an urgent necessity.

New Statesman 19-25 September 2014

The great Steve Mitchelmore on Wittgenstein Jr at This Sp...

The great Steve Mitchelmore on Wittgenstein Jr at This Space.

This is the neoliberal period of capital in all its fetid...

This is the neoliberal period of capital in all its fetid glory: the ruthles marketization of everything existing - including itself, in th sense that the marketization is itself marketed as, among other things, 'natural', 'fair', 'win-win', 'progress', and other empty signifiers. [...]

Neoliberalism triumphant presents us with the more frightening specter of what I am calling educational eliminationism, by which i mean a state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utlize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers' surplus labour value. It has instead become easier for them to cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether. Any remaining commitments are purely vestigal and ahve more to do with social stability rather than with education proper, as vast swaths of our school system (particularly in urban areas) are decisively repurposed as holding facilities for (putative) proto-criminals, lost within what Henry Giroux decries as a 'youth crime-control complex', with a special layer of legal menace for urban kids in what Michelle Alexander pointedly calls 'the new Jim Crow'. [...]

It should now be clear to everyone that neoliberal education policy is not about reforming public schools. It is about obliterating any remaining vestiges of the public square via a market discipline that is officially supposed to apply to everyone but in reality is selectively applied only to those lacking sufficient wealth to commandeer state policy; ironically the sacred market applies to public schools not to megabanks. It is in essence the strategy of the gated community, where those at the top 'have theirs' and withdraw from the educational commons and into their state-backed corporatist enclaves. Our elite capitains are abandoning the public educational ship in whose hold lie nearly 90% of US school children. [...]

The newer kind of non-recognition involves not merely reducing people to means but simply wishing them away and ignoring them altogether; in this way at the level of the concern for the Other, we are transforming from abuse to neglect. An increasing proportion of humanity - in the global South but also here at home - grows non-exploitable economically. Their labour is incapable of importing enough value to render them serviceable for traditional capitalist production and so they are economically 'out of the loop'[...] They have become 'extra people' and superfluous. At best their realtion to the formal economy is occasional and precarious as evidence by the stunning growth of those living most of their lives in what anthropologist Keith Hart desceribes as 'the informal economy', living, for example, under subsistence conditions of 'forced entrepreneurship' such as prostitution or the selling of odds and ends. They are the disposable ones[...] Their main productive function now is to serve as part of a disciplinary warning to precarious remaining workers that 'but for the grace of the (job)Creator, there go I'. [...]

From a wider lens, what is actually occurring is that monopolistic neoliberal elites are asserting their grip more strongly by more directly harnessing all social institutions as adjuncts for their ever-more desperate drive to accumulate capital[...] the end result is [...] a flattening-out and homogenising of the range of what human beings value, where every activity is to be translated into the language of only one would-be totalizing sphere. This in the end is the neoliberal leviathan in all its monomaniacal glory. It seeks only itself, a monomaniacal sameness, ultimately offering the existentially terrifying boredom of absolute self-identity. [...]

Who are the these rugged competitive heroes who live by the global free market alone? Who actually embraces this?  It is manifestly not today's capitalist class, who by now by and large enjoy secure monopoly positions from which they can watch at a distance the little people tear each other apart as gladiatorial economic sport. 

David J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

A long way off, but I'll be discussing Wittgenstein Jr in...

A long way off, but I'll be discussing Wittgenstein Jr in Cambridge on 30th October at Heffers Bookshop, from 6.30 to 8.00. Tickets here.

I'll be doing the same thing at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts on 6th November, from 7.15 onwards. I'll be reading with Evie Wyld. Tickets here.

More news to come on an event in London on 1st November.

Wittgenstein Jr by Jon Day in the Daily Telegraph, Saturd...

Wittgenstein Jr by Jon Day in the Daily Telegraph, Saturday 13th September.>

Bonfire of the Humanities

Jon Day relishes a clever satire on academic life that is also a love letter to the world of ideas.

Lars Iyer's previous three novellas - Spurious (2011), Dogma (2012) and Exodus (2013) - followed a pair of academics as they travelled around the country attending conferences and exchanging gnostic utterances. They were hilarious and unsettling books about the limits of friendship set against the backdrop of what Iyer calls the 'suburbification' of professional philosophy. As well as being terrifically funny they were stylistically bold: critics invoked the name of Beckett in hushed tones. 

Wittgenstein Jr is both a continuation and a development of the themes of the Spurious trilogy. The book centres on the relationship between a group of Cambridge philosophy students and their don, an enigmatic, lonely figure they take to calling 'Wittgenstein'. He has gone to Cambridge to 'do fundamental work in philosophical logic' (Iyer, himself a philosophy don at Newcastle University, is fond of italics, always seasoned with a deep irony) and to write a book - Die Logik - so profound as to end philosophy.

Wittgenstein himself is not quite a character but rather a collection of aphorisms. 'It is never difficult to think', he says, 'it is either easy or impossible'. His classes are, by the standards of the contemporary academy, terrible. His students complain they have no idea what he is talking about. They revere him anyway. He is tolerated by his fellow dons.

The book is written in the repetitive, lulling metre that Iyer perfected in the Spurious trilogy. Clauseless sentences do the job of description: 'Eating in class. Mulberry, chewing gum. Titmuss, sucking mints. Doyle, eating a packet of crisps and regretting it: the crackling! the rustling! the grease!'

Wittgenstein Jr is as much a satire on the contemporary academy as it is an existential novel of udeas. But is is also a love stroy. Ultimaitely it's a novel about the idea of philosophy, about what Wittgenstein's students call 'the romance of learning' and that all-consuming erotic yearning for knowledge that you sometimes experience as an undergraduate.

It is also an elegiac book. 'There's a fire backstage, the clown comes out to warn the audience. Laughter and applause. They think it's a joke! The clown repeats his warning. The fire grows hotter; the applause grows louder. That's how the world will end', Wittgenstein says, 'to general applause, from halfwits who thik it's a joke'. Amid the humour, or despite it, Iyer is deadly serious. The bonfire of the humanities is upon us.

David Rose reviews Wittgenstein Jr at Quadrapheme.The g...

David Rose reviews Wittgenstein Jr at Quadrapheme.

The group of students, including the narrator Peters, who seem to behave more like third formers than undergraduates, act collectively like some uncomprehending Greek chorus similar to that in Murder In The Cathedral; witnesses to Wittgenstein’s agony yet not fully touched or involved. They represent brute Life, destined always to be creatures of the sun-suffused shallows.They act out being philosophers, realizing they are only going through the motions. Significantly, they play-act death, play-act the deaths of philosophers: the death of Socrates; the death of Nietzsche. Displays of ersatz despair which throw into relief the real despair of ‘Wittgenstein’, which is fictionally underwritten by the suicide of his brother and the temptation to follow suit.

Yet maybe the students’ desire for despair is real? Maybe there is hope for them, spiritually?

Sally Allen has been reading Wittgenstein Jr at BookInk's...

Sally Allen has been reading Wittgenstein Jr at BookInk's Hamlet Hub.

Tibor Fischer reviews Wittgenstein Jr for the Guardian.

Daivd Rose reviews Wittgenstein Jr for Quadrapheme.