Giving Hand

Counterfeiter

“Kierkegaard, like Kafka, wrote many religious parables on contemporary and bourgeois themes”

“One is the story of a counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, counts banknotes in the Bank of England.”

-from Kafka and his precursors by J L Borges

The parable of the counterfeiter is constructed around the difference between the comparative affects of the counterfeiter himself, who desires against the situation and the control case of the ordinary bank clerk who presumably works, and therefore desires, in order to retain his place, however humble etc. The parable only makes sense given certain conditions, which follow from a certain economic organisation of life.

1. That constructing ideas provisionally proves superior to constructing ideas from first principles

2. That desire can become dissociated from action

Of course language always is desire dissociated from action, but the parable presupposes that this dissociation of desire can be shown to be enacted in reality. It is this condition that constitutes the analytical tool that makes the writing of the parable possible: What happens if desire is unrealised? The provisional organisation of life is as follows:

Desire – Conceptualisation – Affect

We have two cases, the counterfeiter and the bank clerk. The comparative affects associated with their situations are different, and this is a consequence of their differing conceptualisations of reality, which follow from their differing desires. Desire effects the conceptualisation of reality, because both characters conceptualise reality in a provisional way rather than from first principles. The mechanism by which this takes place is the mechanism of complications. Complications are systematic adjustments attempting to compensate for abstractedness; for example altering a concept to take into account its probability rather than vice versa. Complications always run counter to desire, it is absurd, and possibly psychotic, to consider complications conspiring with desire. Hence the reality of the bank clerk who desires to preserve the situation is complicated, and therefore worse, than the reality of the counterfeiter, who desires to abolish the situation, and whose reality is accordingly uncomplicated. Given that desire can become dissociated from action the organisation of life is:

[Conceptualisation - Affect] – Desire

The paradox embedded in the parable is that, given that desire will not be realised, it is desire itself rather than reality that is subject to adjustment. The ideal way to organise desire, in this situation, and for the purpose of affect alone, would therefore be to desire the exact opposite of what one desires.

Charles Kennedy self destructs

The moment at which Charles Kennedy self-destructs, i.e. the moment at which he becomes incoherent with respect to his political position, is not when he confirms that he has a “drinking problem”, which would merely be a regrettable consequence of a certain mode of life, but in his affirmation that he had “sought professional help”.

If politicians can be expected to be aware of anything it is that words carry certain implications.

The programme recalled to mind by professional alcoholism counselling would be something like this:

Whatever you believed to be determined by politics was in fact determined by your personal neurosis.

Reprise

Any false reality can be discerned from the quality of its works of art

Grocers' signs

Black Square – Kasimir Malevich 1915

“The form of academicism as representation, as agitation, as a means for propaganda, is essentially temporary in the same way as grocers’ shop signs are.”

The situation shown by television is abstracted from the flow of history; irrespective of the particular way in which it unfolds, what happens does not inform history. The situation is constructed as a compliment to a supposed historical knowledge that remains exterior and unexamined. Consequently, the situation is coherent only in a conditional way.

The situation is constructed in a way that excludes historical knowledge, yet it is passed off as a moment of life; and as life it inevitably deals with things that relate to historical knowledge. For this reason, the content of that which is presented as historical knowledge will inevitably be faulty. This contradiction is circumvented by the way in which that historical knowledge that inevitably intrudes into the situation is presented. Historical knowledge is distanced. The faulty nature of the content is compensated by the way in which the exposition is made remote. It is, however, possible to concentrate, in a perverse way on the content of this exposition. In doing this one is concentrating directly on the error implicit in the situation.

Since art depends on definite historical knowledge, there is a scientific value to the work of art as a device for registering the situation’s resistance to historical knowledge, and by implication, the extent to which this supposed presentation of reality is the presentation of a false reality. With respect to this situation, the device would register…nothing.