Tag: James Joyce

This Mediated World

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Immediacy itself is essentially mediated —Hegel

Look at that desk in front of you right here, now. Isn’t it just there, a bare existence, a simple immediate thing right in front of you? The senses register its presence. This, at least, is a bare fact that you know.

But look again at the desk in front of you. What is it you are aware of? A desk: not a carpet or a parrot, its colour (brown), its shape (rectangular), all that is that negates what might have been (it isn’t grey, it isn’t circular, etc). Your awareness of the desk is mediated by concepts and you, a language user, can only make sense of the thing through those concepts, the universal terms that enable you to pick out this thing here, now. And you are aware of it now as you were 5 minutes ago, although the light has changed and you, a namable person, not a disembodied spirit, have shifted your position on your chair to look back at the clock on the wall.  Time, place, objects: everything is mediated: that is, nothing is simply ‘there’ in splendid isolation to be passively registered by your senses.[1]

Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.

All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time. 

This doesn’t mean that the way things show up for us is somehow false, an illusion that masks a hidden essence. The essence of a thing is reflected in the way it appears, in the connections and negations with everything else, and in the way in which it develops over time. Read more »

Still Rejoyceing After All These Years

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Sylvia Beach with James Joyce, at Shakespeare & Co, Paris 1922
Sylvia Beach with James Joyce, at Shakespeare & Co, Paris, 1922.

Has it been a hundred years? It seems longer! In Ireland, more Joycemania is upon them. On February 02, 1922, the Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company published Ulysses by James Joyce, a novel that potential publishers had already rejected with vague mutterings about bargepoles and other icons of untouchability. It was not a bookshop business that accepted the risk, but its young owner Sylvia Beach, a literary mother-hen clucking with affection around many impoverished and not yet famous expatriate writers. A hundred years on, Ulysses still sits on many bookshelves alongside 1984, A Brief History of Time, and In Search of Lost Time, in that category of books that everyone claims to have read but usually hasn’t. (That doesn’t include Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which nobody in their right mind admits to having read). But in truth, I have read Ulysses four times and have given a few public talks on the novel and the 1967 Joseph Strick film that attempted the impossible by bringing it to a broader – or slightly less narrow – audience. My first reading was a classically 1960s cliché; not so much reading as dipping in and out of, along with two student friends.

We would sit on the floor of a one-room flat by the canal at Mount Street Bridge in Dublin, fuelled by flagons of cider that cost half an Irish pound. As only students can achieve, we managed to be both uncomprehending and pretentious. But since there was no one else around, we were just semi-literary trees falling unheard in the urban forest. Ulysses does that to young minds – or at least it did in those ancient times. The detractors of Ulysses were many. It was banned; it mocked the Church; it had raw sex, scatology and foul language. Of course, it was a work of literary genius, we all agreed, though we would have been hard-pressed to define what that was. Read more »