Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Just like unicorns?
mike

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Ivan Rosero <irosero@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Reminds me of a time when a friend asked me why I didn't believe in God.  I
> told her that I didn't have to believe in God, since God already existed.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 4:29 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for all of that including the paper, David.
>> A non-German reader, I like the poem as translated, which mucks up
>> serious engagement with Rilke I guess. I have checked out other
>> translations
>> but like this one probably for idiosyncratic reasons. Those reasons,
>> however
>> circuitously, lead me to agree with the conclusion in the final paragraph.
>>
>> odd but probably not accidental.
>> mike
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:40 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>> >wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > I'm going to give two late cheers for eric's formulation "being does",
>> at
>> > least insofar as we are talking about cultural being in general
>> > and aesthetic being in particular. But at the same time I want to
>> reserve my
>> > third cheer for some kind of complement to the verb, and to put in a
>> plug
>> > for a rather literal interpretation of the word "ideal" in the cultural,
>> > artistic realm; I think in order to qualify as culture even material
>> > culture really does have to have a utopian, unicorn element, but that
>> > element is nevertheless irreducibly realist.
>> >
>> > Mike likes to cite the Rilke poem about the unicorn. The English
>> > translation he gives, though, goes like this:
>> >
>> > The Unicorn by Ranier Maira Rilke
>> >
>> > This is the creature there never has been.
>> > They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
>> > they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
>> > its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
>> >
>> >
>> > I think this is a mistranslation; in the German the unicorn is "geliebt"
>> or
>> > "beloved", because in Rilke love is intransitive; it's not an object
>> > oriented activity at all. There's actually a good paper on this poem and
>> how
>> > it was derived from the unicorn tapestries at Cluny at:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10065/66/4/Segal+-+Rilke+&+unicorns+revised+paper+_April+2007_.pdf
>> >
>> > It turns out that intransitivity is an important trope in Rilke
>> generally,
>> > and of course it was a favorite device of the German neoromantic lyric
>> > poets, who believed you could get a kind of unmediated sense of reality
>> by
>> > stripping verbs of their arguments, like petals from a flower.
>> >
>> > Adorno is scathing about all of this. It's sometimes hard to read Adorno
>> > because he seems so irritated all the time, until we remember that he
>> really
>> > had a LOT to be annoyed about. In this case, what he is eating him is
>> the
>> > "jargon"  (or "aura", as Walter Benjamin says) of a secular sacred
>> language,
>> > a language which pretends to be unmediated by human lips.
>> >
>> > What infuriates him is the philosophical rehabilitation of the
>> linguistic
>> > work of Heidegger, a devout Nazi whose main criticism of the
>> extermination
>> > camps was that they were too newfangled and modern (presumably real
>> Germans
>> > would have strangled the Jews one by one with their bare hands). It's
>> really
>> > Heidegger who likes to say things like "Being is" and above all "death
>> is"
>> > (yes, I know that Hegel said it too). But even Rilke likes to speak of
>> > "encounters" and "statements" as if what was encountered was a unicorn
>> and
>> > statements were not concretely instances of who says what to whom and
>> why.
>> >
>> > Habermas says, in a book that would have greatly annoyed Adorno if he
>> had
>> > lived to read it (The Theory of Communicative Action) that our knowledge
>> has
>> > the structure of propositions. I think Adorno would prefer to say that
>> it
>> > propositions have the structure of knowledge, but that knowledge is
>> composed
>> > of questions as well as statements. I'm not sure he would agree that it
>> is
>> > composed of imperatives; I think imperatives are too sly about their
>> > subjects and objects; in linguistic terms, they don't have enough
>> argument
>> > structure.
>> >
>> > One of the things I most like about the unicorn paper (link posted
>> above)
>> > is the historical research. Segal points out that unicorns are reported
>> in
>> > almost all the major cultures, and go back many thousands of years.
>> >
>> > Take, for example, the Chinese unicorn, which is probably the oldest
>> > speciment. During the early Ming Dynasty, when Zheng He was sent on
>> voyages
>> > of discovery to Africa, he captured a pair of giraffes and had them
>> brought
>> > back to China. The emperor then had them widely exhibited, because of a
>> > tradition which held that the discovery of a unicorn during the reign of
>> an
>> > emperor was an extremely auspicious sign. One of them survived, and I
>> > remember seeing an astonishing realistic portrait of it, which for
>> reasons I
>> > never understood, did not have any of the usual polygonal marks on its
>> skin.
>> >
>> > When I was researching a book on the great Chinese famine of 1962-1963,
>> I
>> > interviewed an old woman who said she had eaten part of the giraffe
>> (which
>> > is still called a "qilin", or a unicorn, in Chinese) in the Beijing zoo.
>> She
>> > remarked wistfully that it was a time when
>> > nobody could afford hopes for the future.
>> >
>> > The ubiquity of unicorns is really clear evidence that they really do
>> > exist, or rather it would be evidence of their existence except for the
>> fact
>> > that insistence on the NONexistence of unicorns is an important feature
>> of
>> > all these instances. To me, it is evidence of something even more
>> wonderful;
>> > the literally IDEAL component of even material culture, the element of
>> > culture which suggests, not its reproductibility but rather its
>> > perfectibility. And that's what Adorno is really complaining about, and
>> why
>> > he can't find any culture worthy of the name on television.
>> >
>> > David Kellogg
>> > Seoul National University of Education
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>
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