Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Is it possible for us, moderns, to think in circles any more? Perhaps Sunni triangles, or Shia crescents, but circles? No, we increasingly think in terms of straight lines: mine or thine, us or them, black and white, "Friend" or "Enemy" or linear progress: a line that extends into infinity.
What would it be to think in circles again, to recognise that thought can take place within faith (Anselm), that reason is bound by the Law, that we live and think with what is given to us. To think in circles is at once to reformulate the cogito : I am , therefore i can think..or, better still, we are, therefore I can think, but it is also to express one's gratitude for this possibility being opened up for me.
To think in circles is to accept the gift and pass it on. It is also to see that all of nature moves in circles and place oneself at its heart. Of course, there is at one level a discontinuity with nature, but perhaps we should also see thought arising from within nature. For the moderns, at least before Darwin (and even post-Darwin , for all practical purposes) the dull cyclomania of Nature is something to escape at all costs. She is so much "dead matter". Only we are truly alive.
Hospitality, Derrida.
One must be ready to be not ready, be prepared for the unprepared. To welcome someone who is known is not to truly welcome; to welcome someone without a smiling face is something else as well..as if one could welcome someone grudgingly! The stranger is not just an other but radically other, someone beyond our conceptions, distinctions of 'the same' and 'the other'.
Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':
Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerbale people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is a s if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.
Massignon.
'Prospect of the Human Person in Islam'.
Forgiving, the supreme act of hospitality. To forgive is to welcome in, to allow a return back into the fold. But one must also forgive oneself for a lack of openness, for the inability to give oneself fully. True hospitality is always aware of a lack of hospitality. How can I welcome what is beyond my capacity (the infinite)?; how so the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, the utterly unpredictable?
What would it be to think in circles again, to recognise that thought can take place within faith (Anselm), that reason is bound by the Law, that we live and think with what is given to us. To think in circles is at once to reformulate the cogito : I am , therefore i can think..or, better still, we are, therefore I can think, but it is also to express one's gratitude for this possibility being opened up for me.
To think in circles is to accept the gift and pass it on. It is also to see that all of nature moves in circles and place oneself at its heart. Of course, there is at one level a discontinuity with nature, but perhaps we should also see thought arising from within nature. For the moderns, at least before Darwin (and even post-Darwin , for all practical purposes) the dull cyclomania of Nature is something to escape at all costs. She is so much "dead matter". Only we are truly alive.
Hospitality, Derrida.
One must be ready to be not ready, be prepared for the unprepared. To welcome someone who is known is not to truly welcome; to welcome someone without a smiling face is something else as well..as if one could welcome someone grudgingly! The stranger is not just an other but radically other, someone beyond our conceptions, distinctions of 'the same' and 'the other'.
Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':
Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerbale people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is a s if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.
Massignon.
'Prospect of the Human Person in Islam'.
Forgiving, the supreme act of hospitality. To forgive is to welcome in, to allow a return back into the fold. But one must also forgive oneself for a lack of openness, for the inability to give oneself fully. True hospitality is always aware of a lack of hospitality. How can I welcome what is beyond my capacity (the infinite)?; how so the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, the utterly unpredictable?
Monday, March 19, 2007
From the Archives: The Ongoing Moment
There is a tendency to want to see everything from every point of view.
Sometimes we need to see clearly only one thing from one point of view..to arrest the ongoing moment.
The world moves on. Death may give us pause for thought but then other words, other thoughts carry us forward. Herein lies the tragedy of life, herein its saving grace. Death is just a memory, a memory that awaits us...
As I write this blog other writings will be consigned to the archives, out of sight, out of mind.
Time is the healer of all things.
What if time is the problem?
To write is to forget, to displace other feelings, other words; it is to send some words to oblivion, and to elevate others at the same time. To say a word is already to lose it. When one writes one ceases to be what one was prior to doing so. To say a word is to give something of oneself away. Tell it, but tell it slant.
How reassuring those bleak and blank spaces we inhabit. To be interested in everything is to be interested in nothing. To cite other people's words is to deflect attention. Like Zeus, we want to and do not want to be known.
When we live we occupy a certain space.
And when we die?
Even then the space is haunted by the memory of us. Like signs or messages that appear but whose sense leaks from them.
'His life was tragically cut short'.
All life is cut short. We can never be finished, even if try. To complete was to compromise. Always the archivist's urge to catalogue overcame the editor's obligation to discard and dispense with.
The artist and the degenerate share a love of-and need for- anonymity , darkness, obscurity. People living out their lives in obscurity. The street is not a street of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognisable, but of sheer emptiness.
He saw life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.
--citations from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment'
Sometimes we need to see clearly only one thing from one point of view..to arrest the ongoing moment.
The world moves on. Death may give us pause for thought but then other words, other thoughts carry us forward. Herein lies the tragedy of life, herein its saving grace. Death is just a memory, a memory that awaits us...
As I write this blog other writings will be consigned to the archives, out of sight, out of mind.
Time is the healer of all things.
What if time is the problem?
To write is to forget, to displace other feelings, other words; it is to send some words to oblivion, and to elevate others at the same time. To say a word is already to lose it. When one writes one ceases to be what one was prior to doing so. To say a word is to give something of oneself away. Tell it, but tell it slant.
How reassuring those bleak and blank spaces we inhabit. To be interested in everything is to be interested in nothing. To cite other people's words is to deflect attention. Like Zeus, we want to and do not want to be known.
When we live we occupy a certain space.
And when we die?
Even then the space is haunted by the memory of us. Like signs or messages that appear but whose sense leaks from them.
'His life was tragically cut short'.
All life is cut short. We can never be finished, even if try. To complete was to compromise. Always the archivist's urge to catalogue overcame the editor's obligation to discard and dispense with.
The artist and the degenerate share a love of-and need for- anonymity , darkness, obscurity. People living out their lives in obscurity. The street is not a street of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognisable, but of sheer emptiness.
He saw life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.
--citations from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment'
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The Fanatic
Life on the periphery, renouncing centre.
---Ammons.
The radical individual has no name, only a purpose, a Cause. And what happens when this too fails, when the Will itself is paralysed?
The unique individual expunges all sense of belonging and cannot be defined, he resists the easy classifications of the bourgeoisie, the soul-destroying abstractions of powerful elites. No nation or land binds him, his being is infinitely malleable: he can become anything.
.
P.Valery:
.
The ..being of the immense cities returns to the wild state-that is, to a state of isolation. because the social mechanism allows him to forget the need for community and to lose his feelings of connection to other people, which were once kept alive by his wants. Every movement in the social mechanism renders useless certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes to communal life.
.
From now on there will only be one act, one clear and decisive movement of the Will that will crystallize his very essence: Die Tat.
.
Man no longer had a profile, the man from the underground, the egoist denies all dependence, but every sort of dependence is a root, terrestial or celestial.
.
The shapeless mass, vagabonds and prostitutes, the alienated, incapable of class loyalty, rootless from the womb, violent, inarticulate, disrespectful enemies of labour and learning ..an underground emerging into the open.
.
But in this day and age everyone in the city will claim to be a nomad-from the disaffected intellectual to the global citizen to the richest entrepreneur: all touch the earth only lightly.
.
The ruined proletarian, the pauper, the slum-dweller without fixed abode, has an energy that cannot be chanelled into historical progress (from the Marxist perspective). The wretched of the earth, every sort of obscure and marginal existence is a counter -revolutionary (Rosa Luxemborg). The anarchist is like an intellectual (Lenin): declasse.
.
Cut loose from society, norms, customs, social conventions, place, what else is this individual but a terrorist ?
Black Square
At the centre of the British Library is a black square; at the heart of that centre is an inner chamber where the treasures are stored. In that heart there is a central glass chamber where a few books are kept: Blake's notebooks, Mozart's musical notes, as if the essence of the world and its creativity had to be stored here. But at the core of this centre was the quintessential, a splendid page of the Qur'an in Kufic , majestic, weighty words, verticals in authority. And beyond them was a voice, "If all the sea were ink for my Sustainer's words, the sea would indeed be exhausted ere my Sustainer's words are exhausted! And [thus it would be] if we were to add to it sea upon sea" [Q:18:109]
Star, Crescent, Emerald City
One of the heartaches of supporting the Pakistani cricket team is that they can be the best in the world one moment, all tremendously stylish and flamboyant, and the very next they will flop into a farcical display of comical absurdities and amateurishness. Brilliant and pathetic seem to follow one another like night follows day. But it is more: When driving in Lahore the only 'law' is: expect the unexpected!
Ubo reminds me that a supporter died of a heart attack when a player was given out for 99.
'So, what's so surprising about that?,' I ask.
'He was the first'.
Many die of heartache in this country.
The Irish beat us. It must have been in the stars. If there's anyone more fatalistic than us it is the Irish..and so good luck to them! There's something in the land that does it to us. As Ubo is fond of saying, somewhere down the line there's something wrong with our blood. Or as the swami would say: we are intelligent, it's just that God put our heads on the wrong way round. It derives, I think, from getting bored very easily. We must have a new government every few years or some sort of crisis. The country wouldn't be what it is without crises and the village gossip that accompanies them. We perpetually live on the edge. And if we don't like it, then (as the cricket team did last summer) just say: sod it, and walk away. If things turn out well then it was our kismet, nothing to do with us, and if not, then not (as the saying goes). If someone criticises our country you can be sure that a Pakistani will jump in with ten more criticisms-and they'll be better ones than those of the farangi!
At the embassy I realised that I didn't have Ubo's signature. What to do? There was no way I was going to trudge all the way back home for it. the instincts took over. There are only a few options open. Feign some fatal illness or try and dominate, make my presence known with some made-up high connections; however, I find this invariably works: act like a complete retard. The man at the desk winked, saying 'you could always sign it yourself, who would know, who can say what the truth of the matter is'.
Who would know? The question is meaningless in Pakistan.
What to say? Maybe there was a Hindu conspiracy, maybe the players were betting again. I can hear the dark rumours swirling in the dusty streets of Lahore now since nothing gets them worked up like such useless talk:weren't these Irish Zionists, after all?
Who can say what the truth of the matter is?
Ubo reminds me that a supporter died of a heart attack when a player was given out for 99.
'So, what's so surprising about that?,' I ask.
'He was the first'.
Many die of heartache in this country.
The Irish beat us. It must have been in the stars. If there's anyone more fatalistic than us it is the Irish..and so good luck to them! There's something in the land that does it to us. As Ubo is fond of saying, somewhere down the line there's something wrong with our blood. Or as the swami would say: we are intelligent, it's just that God put our heads on the wrong way round. It derives, I think, from getting bored very easily. We must have a new government every few years or some sort of crisis. The country wouldn't be what it is without crises and the village gossip that accompanies them. We perpetually live on the edge. And if we don't like it, then (as the cricket team did last summer) just say: sod it, and walk away. If things turn out well then it was our kismet, nothing to do with us, and if not, then not (as the saying goes). If someone criticises our country you can be sure that a Pakistani will jump in with ten more criticisms-and they'll be better ones than those of the farangi!
At the embassy I realised that I didn't have Ubo's signature. What to do? There was no way I was going to trudge all the way back home for it. the instincts took over. There are only a few options open. Feign some fatal illness or try and dominate, make my presence known with some made-up high connections; however, I find this invariably works: act like a complete retard. The man at the desk winked, saying 'you could always sign it yourself, who would know, who can say what the truth of the matter is'.
Who would know? The question is meaningless in Pakistan.
What to say? Maybe there was a Hindu conspiracy, maybe the players were betting again. I can hear the dark rumours swirling in the dusty streets of Lahore now since nothing gets them worked up like such useless talk:weren't these Irish Zionists, after all?
Who can say what the truth of the matter is?
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Middle England, Glamour, and the End of Irony
I always hear the term 'Middle England' used in a pejorative sense (I'm not sure if there's an equivalent Americanism: Hicksville, perhaps?). When one thinks of Middle England one never thinks of the working class but, rather, of a vast swathe of silent and deeply frustrated whingers and complainers. It is everything that is the opposite of metropolitan; a hinterland largely untouched by the currents of modernity, it dreams nostalgically of old (rural) England -though it doesn't have the faintest idea of what the countryside really is!
Middle England is suburbia, ground zero, heart of mediocrity and pagan conceptions of happiness. Every issue is a moral one and though the people of these strange lands could never be described as extremists or Puritans there is a niggling fussiness and pedantic strain to their natures.
And yet, Middle England is also the norm, the median voter: Essex Man, Mondeo Man that politicians find so appealing. To the extent that we live in an increasingly homogenized world, does it even make sense to talk about 'class' or 'chavs'? Middle England is nothing but a statistic, our reality.
For the Chinese the 'middle people' had a central role; the Middle Kingdom always conveyed a sense of balance and equilibrium. Middle England, on the other hand , oscillates between a mind-numbing 'averageness' absorbed in its own petty dramas on one hand and an unbalanced, angry, unhinged mass at the heart of society on the other, a mass that tends to be suspicious of Culture and intellectuals or anything foreign. King and Country. Sure. But beyond the masks what lies beneath?
Harvie Ferguson:
The decline of public life has meant that identity is now not associated with the public world but, increasingly, with inwardness and personal traits. whence the emphasis on "depth." And yet, of the contemporary age it can be said: Now the soul is exposed, open, spread flat like the page of a book...there is no disjunction or rupture upon which irony can get to work..identity [now] displays itself in a vortex of disconnected experiences. What is left but the surface and the glamour of the personality?
Social and personal identities are reconciled in the unity of fashion. Personality is shiny, mirror-like, constantly in flux: the surface is the reality. there is no interior to express or actualize.
R. Ford:
I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.
The drifting soul of the contemporary world, unsure of what's next (existence precedes essence) : pleasure without identity.
All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life (the American future...Americans don't 'do' irony). Lightness that is boredom, a directionless life (Larkin,Death is no different whined at than withstood) and an ubiquitous sense of drifting (we live an an age of surfers).
For Robert Musil the abandonment of the personal past means that identity for a person without qualities becomes a more or less arbitrary matter of social relations. Social identity is in terms of superficial signs: clothing, style of life, and the dominance of advertising are indicative of how far the surface gloss, the spectacle , has come to dominate.
Glamour is exciting, in it the self loses itself , abandoning itself to appearance. Is this the only way in which innocence can be regained? Identity now is only transitory selfhood..an infinity of points of view ..thus we escape all one-sided centrismes and recover the impartiality of justice and reason. (Thomas Mann)
Middle England is suburbia, ground zero, heart of mediocrity and pagan conceptions of happiness. Every issue is a moral one and though the people of these strange lands could never be described as extremists or Puritans there is a niggling fussiness and pedantic strain to their natures.
And yet, Middle England is also the norm, the median voter: Essex Man, Mondeo Man that politicians find so appealing. To the extent that we live in an increasingly homogenized world, does it even make sense to talk about 'class' or 'chavs'? Middle England is nothing but a statistic, our reality.
For the Chinese the 'middle people' had a central role; the Middle Kingdom always conveyed a sense of balance and equilibrium. Middle England, on the other hand , oscillates between a mind-numbing 'averageness' absorbed in its own petty dramas on one hand and an unbalanced, angry, unhinged mass at the heart of society on the other, a mass that tends to be suspicious of Culture and intellectuals or anything foreign. King and Country. Sure. But beyond the masks what lies beneath?
Harvie Ferguson:
The decline of public life has meant that identity is now not associated with the public world but, increasingly, with inwardness and personal traits. whence the emphasis on "depth." And yet, of the contemporary age it can be said: Now the soul is exposed, open, spread flat like the page of a book...there is no disjunction or rupture upon which irony can get to work..identity [now] displays itself in a vortex of disconnected experiences. What is left but the surface and the glamour of the personality?
Social and personal identities are reconciled in the unity of fashion. Personality is shiny, mirror-like, constantly in flux: the surface is the reality. there is no interior to express or actualize.
R. Ford:
I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.
The drifting soul of the contemporary world, unsure of what's next (existence precedes essence) : pleasure without identity.
All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life (the American future...Americans don't 'do' irony). Lightness that is boredom, a directionless life (Larkin,Death is no different whined at than withstood) and an ubiquitous sense of drifting (we live an an age of surfers).
For Robert Musil the abandonment of the personal past means that identity for a person without qualities becomes a more or less arbitrary matter of social relations. Social identity is in terms of superficial signs: clothing, style of life, and the dominance of advertising are indicative of how far the surface gloss, the spectacle , has come to dominate.
Glamour is exciting, in it the self loses itself , abandoning itself to appearance. Is this the only way in which innocence can be regained? Identity now is only transitory selfhood..an infinity of points of view ..thus we escape all one-sided centrismes and recover the impartiality of justice and reason. (Thomas Mann)
Friday, March 09, 2007
The Perfect City
In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself. In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its ‘ideal type’, and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of going through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the ‘ideal’ for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities.
This is a perfect description of Dubai:
But in the desireforperfection whatgets repeatedaswell isnot the 'idealtype', but thenegativeoftheideal; the darkunderisde ofthe eternalcity, an infernalcity. Here,only a blacksun dimlyglows; is it day, is it night?
MikeDavis: PlanetofSlums: wordscrampedlikepeople
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Black Sites
There are places on the earth that no human eye knows; these are the black lands, the people living under a black sun, unredeemed. Sometimes in an Empire of Liberty an excess of light can seem like none...
http://www.virginialawreview.org/content/pdfs/91/1425.pdf
'Supreme Emergency Exemption'.
"This exemption allows us to set aside -in certain special circumstances- the strict status of civilians that normally prevents their being a direct attack in war. We must proceed with caution here. Were there times during World War II when Britain could have properly have held that civilians' strict status was suspended, and thus could have bombed Hamburg or Berlin? Possibly but only if..."
This is Rawls, mind you. Not some incidental voice , but one of the great philosophers of the last century.From 'The Law of Peoples' , page 98. (drawing reference to Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars, chap. 16, pp255-265 for this idea of 'exemption').
In this regard, it is also worth looking at Agamben's work, The State of Exception. Here is an excerpt.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html
And shall we go back to Hobbes? As far as I understand him, if a people is conquered by violence and then sues for peace that new rule is legitimate. i.e violence is sanctioned within some western political theory itself. (see Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' for a discussion).
http://www.virginialawreview.org/content/pdfs/91/1425.pdf
'Supreme Emergency Exemption'.
"This exemption allows us to set aside -in certain special circumstances- the strict status of civilians that normally prevents their being a direct attack in war. We must proceed with caution here. Were there times during World War II when Britain could have properly have held that civilians' strict status was suspended, and thus could have bombed Hamburg or Berlin? Possibly but only if..."
This is Rawls, mind you. Not some incidental voice , but one of the great philosophers of the last century.From 'The Law of Peoples' , page 98. (drawing reference to Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars, chap. 16, pp255-265 for this idea of 'exemption').
In this regard, it is also worth looking at Agamben's work, The State of Exception. Here is an excerpt.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html
And shall we go back to Hobbes? As far as I understand him, if a people is conquered by violence and then sues for peace that new rule is legitimate. i.e violence is sanctioned within some western political theory itself. (see Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' for a discussion).
Thursday, March 01, 2007
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