Send in the clowns

Walking under the tents in the early morning brings a strange sense of satisfaction, a feeling of being at ease with the world. Was I a clown in my former life? (Former??, says Roxana)

Car wont' start so end up pushing it to the garage. To look at an engine is to marvel at the wonder of the human mind. Someone walks over to help, looks at the engine and walks straight past. Another person stops him and says: "fix the car first and then go for your cigarettes. 

This other voice is the senior mechanic, you suspect. He instructs to younger one to bring a brush and he diligently does so and then cleans up the battery with a brush that could, in all honesty, be used to tidy up a small pony. This can't work, can it? 

He stands there giving authoritative instructions. The younger man greases part of the battery connections with one finger dipped in what looks like solidified beeswax. Never mind, as long as it works-which, by some kind of miracle, it does! the old man looks at me wistfully. "You've come to the right doctor, wouldn't you say?"

A land of many clowns.

~

On Friday there was the truly astounding lecture by Samuel Bowles. 

The timeless future

A man who's gone back to live in the irradiated zone-to wander, alone, in a religious trance, as a kind of holy fool-explains his decision by saying, "The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire."

--from The New Yorker.

-

The knowledge economy

"As a faculty member, you need to be able to see how you're judged and how you've done so far." 

That was from an article in the Chronicle and just goes to show you how deeply ingrained the slave mentality is. The faculty member is referring to Data Analytics, a programme costing a cool half a million dollars over four years, that "adds up" the various features of research to generate a number that indicates "productivity". The Americans have got this down to a tee. 

One strand of criticism focuses on the distorting effects 'quantification' will produce since faculty will be encouraged to game the system, producing more articles rather than books (for example). Also, means 'targeting' particular journals and following specific lines of inquiry (notably: what is 'do-able' and what is currently fashionable). 

All of that obviously needs to be said. But what is missed here is the key point: why should anyone think that thinking can and should be reduced to numbers? This question obviously leads us to the next: in whose interest is it that knowledge be reduced this way?

And here I think we're getting to the heart of it. This is not just about administrative control but really something much deeper: the way in which capitalism is constantly trying to tap into and siphon off value from "non-market" sectors. The 'knowledge economy' is a case in point. But how do you put a contract , a number, on what is something that essentially and assiduously avoids all categorization? 

This is not just about making students into consumers or investors-which is what they've become. But it's really more about how the very idea of knowledge must be brought into line with the idea of service to the machine. Instead of being places of resistance universities themselves contribute to the fragmentation of value. The profession itself has been decimated by thirty years of neo-liberalism and is now dominated, you suspect, by gamesmanship, careerism and an obsession with bringing in the dough (grants etc.)

Over here, in the land of the pure, one school has just received over 50 million Rs for work on "Islamic Finance" even though no one has the foggiest idea what is meant by that term. Listening to a very senior colleague.."we don't care if we have to teach Islamic Marketing, Islamic accounting, as long as it brings the money in." Well, there you go: that's the truth of it in a nutshell. 

Recognition

'Who am I?' is a question I cannot answer
(after Augustine).

What is Man, then?

What is living? The broad hall found
between narrow walls.
What is acknowledging? Finding the one root
under the branches’ tangle.

What is believing? Watching at home
till the time arrives for welcome.
What is forgiving? Pushing your way through thorns
to stand alongside your old enemy.

What is singing? The ancient gifted breath
drawn in creating.
What is labour but making songs
from the wood and the wheat?

What is it to govern kingdoms? A skill
still crawling on all fours.
And arming kingdoms? A knife placed
in a baby’s fist.

What is it to be a people? A gift
lodged in the heart’s deep folds.
What is love of country? Keeping house
among a cloud of witnesses.

What is the world to the wealthy and strong? A wheel,
turning and turning.
What is the world to earth's little ones? A cradle,
rocking and rocking.

-Waldo Williams.

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What is the world to the wealthy and strong? A wheelturning and turning.

Denise, on a brilliantly clear Saturday morning, the chill in my bone, the earth frozen under foot..and yet still I cling to the thought of home..

We seek a witness to our being. 

~


'What comes first in the universe is connectedness-recognition. In that sense, the enterprise of poetry is taking us to the level of primordial language, primitive language; ultimately, the word of God-the speech which underlies our humanity, indeed our very being."

--Rowan Williams.

'To recognize the connections we do not make: which can mean: that we have not made, that we we will not make.

'The Parisian Nonsense Machine'

… it is the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation using the value of ‘reference back’ possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports.
--Lacan.

"Offence itself has become a cliche." -
--Scruton.

There is a 'habit of faking,' the 'collective fake,' 'fake emotions' and 'institutionalized fakery'  

I haven't read Scruton's book but there is something wonderfully irreverent about the take-down of all those 'intellectuals' who are supposed to be fiendishly clever (if only one could understand what they were saying!)

The university, of course, specializes in the production of buffoons and false experts, the theorists of nothing, who contrive to appear sophisticated by filling their poor students' heads with a jumble of barely comprehensible sentences and mangled thoughts. 

The students, bless 'em, come out after four years, their minds packed with half-baked theories, their ears full of the latest jargon, and one could excuse them if they appear stunned, slightly dazed, wondering if to be clever means only that no-one else can quite understand what you're saying.

The bright ones would have learned to nod in approval, smile at the right time and, if good enough, to replicate the same kind of mindless drivel because they have been persuaded that they can (and therefore should) debunk everything. They've seen though it all, come to the realization that it's nothing more than a wild and provocative game for grown-ups that they can play with some panache. If they are lucky the gates will be opened and they will be taken in, because they were taken in.  

~
As straight as the crow flies.

Does this apply to some other time, some other way of life that has passed you by? Crows now, as far as you can make out, are urban creatures that hop around, barely touching the earth with one foot. Or when they do settle they are too busy scurrying about, pecking at each other over discarded scraps, morsels and trash, their minds constantly alert, on the look out for all that is second-hand, like any city scavenger. 

And their flight is clumsy, awkward, broken and jagged under the morning sun, full of fits and starts and resembles nothing like a pure line of flight. Instead, a kind of erratic zig-zagging motion, darting in and out of your field of vision, like a late-night improvisation that they've only recently learned but will have forgotten by dusk.

Did crows fly any different when there were fewer humans around? Or perhaps it's the built-up environment they now face that precludes any kind of sustained grace? More likely still: they've come to the end of their time and are addicted-like us-to this scrum of half-finished thoughts and throwaways.      

Bob, Sam & Dave

Bob often writes about the importance of live music (lived music?). These guys and live performance..well..

Too Many (Black) Muslims in America/Europe/the World

Gonna Have A Funky Good Time - James Brown by BEZBAR-rekordz

You wonder if Australian blogger and her friends will be rooting for Trump?

You walk in the early morning fog, one step at a time, hardly visible to anyone, most of all yourself. You hear the crows in the trees or hopping amongst the dead leaves, and imagine their movements. Even when the crows are no longer with us still they will exist in our minds, as they have done from time out of mind.

Past an old guard who walks slowly, head down, ponderously, perhaps contemplating the great mysteries of life-or maybe what's for breakfast. You look up now and then to see a bright white light glowing with individual brilliance, some fallen star, or a porch light left on and still shining from the previous night. Like a light out at sea, engulfed in the mist. With a stronger heart you'd resist the temptation to think this meant anything.

In the distance another guard rooted to the spot, crestfallen. But no, only a small tree, dark and sombre. 

For a moment you could be Marcovaldo, walking on to an airport runway or balancing precariously on a roof ledge. Your legs and your thoughts like an old machine, the only solidity in this light, surreal world. For a moment you recover a way of being without books or words, some ancient balance. But perhaps I'm only talking to myself after all, or maybe I've already died.   

made to withstand time

Books of the Year. A wonderful kind of ritual that survives-for now-even at this late stage of the game. I wonder if anyone ever thinks about an alternative question: which book will be read by the next generation?

In other words, is there still such a thing as a classic? (Someone wrote that Bill Murray's new film is an instant classic). What will we be watching, reading, listening to in thirty years time (you use that figure, assuming the world and yourself still be around!). What in a hundred years?

Once posed like that you realize how ridiculous a question it is for no-one can tell how things will pan out. Continuity between the generations has all but eroded-you can talk about human material enduring but what we're really talking about here is a certain cultural perspective, ways of thinking and being in the world that are learned, passed down, mediated via institutions (schools, religion, the family, etc.). In that sense the 'material' isn't just automatically inherited. Inheritances need to be preserved, maintained, tended to, cared for.

The belief persist that there is some book 'out there' that has been unfairly neglected or simply forgotten but promises to throw light on our current condition (that is, after all, what a classic is supposed to do, isn't it?). 

What people think is great or wonderful can, even after a few years, seem rather silly or "dated". Given the pace of technological change, the adulation of speed, change, fashion, innovation and novelty can anything even be allowed to have the space to slowly grow? Flexibility and openness instead of solidity are the keywords of our time.

Things will also be forgotten because of the sheer scale of 'production'. This is not just about the sheer vast amount of books that come out each year (including those that are translated) but the proliferation of other media (films, music, images, etc.) that in some sense compete for our attention. And if our own working lives are full of so much flux it makes it more difficult to discern (as well as perhaps appreciate) anything that resists the merciless onrush of time. 

If our own lives are a mere flash in a pan there may be a kind of resentment to anything that outlives us. This line, from Benjamin, struck you:

"The aim is not that it should keep forever but that it should burn brightly."

Stoner is rediscovered. In its own time Memoirs of Hadrian will be too, you suspect. But the whole cult of "rediscovery" is really more about market shares rather than any genuine interest in greatness. 

Of course, the dougal would say that people still read Shakespeare and Bob, no doubt, would chip in that Bach is timeless.

True, but I think the main point is still worth considering: can we even imagine what the outlook and interests of people in the future will be? (This is an important question in the welfare analysis of climate change). What is we don't cut back on emissions so that the future generation is a lot richer but also lives in very poor climatic conditions. Perhaps those future generations will not value a clean environment (over income) in the same way that we do (or are supposed to).

In 1929 readers were asked who they thought would be read in 2029..who would stand the test of time. And their answers were? Guess.

Glasworthy, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Kipling and J.M. Barrie.


  

Pensacola

There's this scene in the film Contact where we see a place that is somehow more real because it exists as a memory. It also reminds you how spectacularly beautiful the earth is (as does the picture above). If I was a Buddhist in a previously life that might explain why I'm so drawn to that photograph. What is beautiful always reminds of you something else that is beautiful, perhaps from some former time, by some former self. Muslims would say, I think, that we live in the shadow of the Garden. 

The second picture is a stark warning of the shape of things to come. What happens in Greenland, some say, is a litmus test for the impact of greenhouse gasses on all our lives. 

~

Pope Francis: "In the prevailing culture, priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional."

Keynes, on the money as usual:

" Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are largely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexity and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols."  

Perfect rationality, perfect foresight and, therefore, perfect control. Except that's not how things work. Since we live (and die) in time there is no position we can take that is completely outside it. There is no thinking from the point of view of the universe, or a view from nowhere.

The impulse to transcend time is, perhaps, always with us but it leads to delusion if it isn't tempered by the mundane realities of daily existence. If we want to 'intuit unity' then we always resist doing so as well. Everything, you think, lies in the hyphen that at once connects and separates: I-We. A bit like &.

Perhaps the very essence of what is beautiful is drawn from this tension between the ephemeral and the permanent, as if one couldn't exist without the other?

~

the private life

""Do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, legs..elbows, hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known. Known as a child is by its mother."
--J. Berger.  

There is something oddly fascinating about Josh Cohen's book. 

The end of the public world. All of that is seen as fake, disingenuous, lacking depth or substance. All reality has been drained from it so it lies like a dead carcass washed up on the beach: you can see straight through it. Honour, glory, and making a name for oneself are seen, ultimately, as nothing but expressions of a vain and self-seeking ego.

In an age of Gnosticism, as ours surely is, the outer world loses all its sparkle and is viewed as so much dross, flotsam drifting here and there without any reason. There is no more trust in the public world or public officials..and the growth of conspiracy theories fits that narrative: you don't actually believe that bullshit, do you? The truth always resides behind the facade and at times of a collapse in the social world you see it as a facade. 

All the rules, institutions and norms that were once thought of as meaning something, the background which was taken as a given and against which one could make sense of one's own individual life, are now viewed as nothing more than the result of a cynical attempt to foil the "real" you from flourishing. No-one-friends, family- is genuine any more and words, too, are a flimsy mask. words never get you there, never convey what you really feel. The real, authentic "you" lies buried somewhere deep down, a spark amidst all this darkness. 

Except the destruction of the public world has resulted in the demise of the "inner," private self as well. It was if appearances and reality cannot survive without one another (Nietzsche?). 

Cohen writes persuasively about how the obsession of the modern west to reveal all, throw light on the most obscure core of our being is manifest in our fascination with celebrities. This theme resonates with Crary (24/7)..how late capitalism cannot allow space and time for sleep and daydreaming. Everything must come out into the open and be organized (the manufacturing of the American Dream). This is another way of saying that "life," which was previously hidden, is now subject to political and economic control: biopower. 

State invasiveness is, in that sense, nothing new. 

And yet could this fascination with the minutiae of the everyday (in the sense of being hooked to gossip, celebrity shenanigans, and the incredible desire to confess all on t.v. shows) really just be a cover for our own fascination with ourselves: as if to say, what really holds us spellbound is the fact that we will never be known? 

Like Zeus, we want to, and do not want to, be named.

To pry into the intimate lives of other people. Perhaps in the vain hope that someone will find your own life that interesting. What could be worse in an age of self-advertisement and circuses, to miss the show, to not be inquired of?

This desire to unveil, to see face-to-face. One cannot but help think of religion. You remember reading that what really got to the settlers was the incredible reticence of the Red Man when it came to talking about religion. There was something secretive, sly, distrustful about the Red Man. Why was he always so silent, why did he always tell it slant? Isn't this the time for plainspeaking, ya sonnabitch?

Cohen also made me think about the fascination in many circles with the veil. Do we see here the same desire to rip it off so that the real human being can emerge into the light, can cast off oppression? (As if to deny, with our own blind spot, that an excess of light can also be oppressive?). 

This desire to see into the inner recesses of being. To get to the root of it. Cut out all the secondary things. Science, of course, is based on this idea: there is no "mystery," there are no miracles. Every realm of experience is open to its mode of inquiry or else it is nothing, nothing to speak of. One result of that has been that the inner self has retreated to a bare point, a ghostly presence in a world of matter-in-motion.

There was this line by Ibn Arabi that you always found startling (and somewhat distasteful): the prying into Nature's secrets is like looking up one's mother's skirt.  

It's not just the newspapers that want to reveal all. How else can one explain the ubiquity of porn? The mechanical act, or the coupling of animals..is that the legacy of Descartes and Darwin? Equally invasive, though, is the idea that we can, like a voyeur, gaze at the daily, intimate activities of another person (Degas), as if the question of power, the question of what is appropriate, could be dismissed in the name of some higher truth (I'll come back to this).

But maybe Cohen's got it wrong in some respects. The idea that we harbour, and need to protect, this unfathomable inner self may itself be a decoy. What if when it comes to it, we realize that like Oakland, there's no there there? And our fascination with trivia and the meaningless details of other people's lives is a way of deflecting attention from the fact that our own lives are made up of precisely the same stuff? In that reading we're hooked to the private lives of other people not because deep down we're reminded that there is a central, dark core of our being that we want to know, we want other people to know (or even God to witness); no, plausible though that seems, could it be precisely the opposite at work here? We don't want anyone to know that there isn't much to know? Our lives are insufferably boring, made up of so much dross. How much depth can there be to a life that is spent in pursuit of commodities? 

The whole trajectory of modernity has been about-whether it was consciously sought or not-to debunk a certain image of Man (a religious image). Men and women are no longer the centre of the universe, or the centre of creation. Further, it's not clear that thy're even in control of their own lives, driven as they are by unconscious desires (Nazism and Communism would seal the idea that human beings were, after all, nothing worth talking about). Can anyone today still talk about rationality without raising the spectre of totalitarianism?

A higher truth. 

What strikes you about Cohen's book is the sheer arrogance of the perspective. More men in pointed hats telling other people how it really is (and to question their perspective is really just to reveal one's own latent conservatism or suppression..the inability to face a truth which is too uncomfortable to be brought out in the open).

The psychoanalyst somehow-like the scientist-manages to stand apart from the fray and pass judgement. Religion, too, is just another datum in his "analysis". The higher truth, he seems to want us to believe, is that there is no higher truth. 

So, when he writes, "Somewhere in you, the distinctions between sex and affections [between the parent and the child], between one and another mode of loving ..have yet to be learned."

Says who? Since there can hardly be a science of the unconscious-and science is the only true measure, isn't it?-then how is such a view substantiated? What if one were to turn this around and say that the psychoanalyst's viewpoint stems from his own fucked up childhood? But there is the need for a further step and that is to see the whole project from a historical perspective, as a way of helping dissolve the bourgeois, stable self and reveal it to be a mass of tangled and conflicted desires. 

The Master is not at home. Good, because that means we can be driven one way or the other by the mass delusions of the state or persuaded by the market to believe that commodities can-temporarily- put an end to our insatiable longing for recognition, power, love...

Edward Bernays, one of the first PR men for capitalism, happened to be a nephew of Freud. Co-incidence? In the century of the self, a century in which the self has simultaneously vapourized under the weight of the 20th century's irrationality, the economist's idea that desires (or preferences) are simply 'given,' what remains of the private life?

Walser: I came here to be mad, not to write.

open living

"There is a certain kind of contempt for what I would call unconscious life in our culture..for the idea that there is anything in us that can't be quantified, externalised, instrumentalised."

--Josh Cohen.

Who am I to demand a partner never again indulge a crush, share a kiss at a party, or take someone to bed?

--Kate Iselin, The Guardian.

The end of the public world is, strangely, also the end of the private one as well.

This is not just about the replacement of one form of communication by another but the erasure of the necessary conditions that allow for the possibility of communication in the first place. What sense of the self can there be in a rapidly shape-shifting world? Only a smidgen of private life remains when we are so in thrall to confession, 'exposure,' instantaneous gratification, global connectivity and breaking news. For anything to grow there has to be a period of silence, a realm of darkness, distances, an essential gap between the self and the world. The rapid succession of one moment after the other destroys any chance of repose, which is why the distinctiveness of Sunday (or the Sabbath) is so important to maintain.  

We flee from one extreme to the other: I am the word, or the world is everything. The ordinary, bourgeois concept of the self lies in tatters. This goes back to a fascinating talk yesterday over on Start the Week. Can we imagine ordinary, everyday pleasures and enjoyment as being as important as forbidden ones?

In terms of intelligence Lane Fox came across as too fusty to be interesting (I think I'm prejudiced because they're hailing his new biography of Augustine to be the new marker in scholarship and I can't fathom the thought that anyone could surpass Peter Brown's wonderful book, written in his twenties!).

Adam Philips sharp as ever, a bit too sharp perhaps. Larissa M, though, strikes me as someone who is deeply intelligent in a way that escapes most academics. I'm not quite sure why, but her essay on Derek Parfit is perhaps the best advertisement for a way of thinking that is both open and 'alive'. 

the way of the future

A good representation of likely outcomes:

here

There is much talk of the barbaric times we live in. Certainly, there is something so horrifying and sickening in the sex-slave practices of Isis, for example, that you have to seriously wonder what the point of human beings is. 

But the 19th and 20th centuries were surely the darkest chapters in human history? Empire is still celebrated in ol' Blighty (or at least looked at with a certain nostalgia). And Belgium and the heart of darkness? I wonder if there's been any admission of the horrors it committed?

You can harp on all you want about civilisation. To be quite frank, pathological behaviour accompanied by sophisticated toys and 'rational' forms of organization a civilisation do not make.  

moments of listening

K


Is there a kind of broken silence that only winter can reveal? Was your life but a moment after all?

Life slows down; the still point of the heart contains the memory of many, many summers. The time that is lost holds us together. Yearning, Augustine said, makes the heart grow deeper. 

In the clear morning skies wisps of silver clouds return; the brick wall remains the same. All else has changed, an age has passed, my hands grow darker.

Distinctions

In life, love and friendship there is an understanding that one has to let go and, more: that it is good to do so. To hold on can just be the ego at work. as always, what to hold on to and what let to go off-and when-is the kind of training that is not provided by theory.

Iris M.

The good is not an abstract concept but something that moves us (the will). Choice is not an isolated act of the will. Commitment and character can determine or influence one's choices (Hume: Annette Baier). One can act "out of character". The idea of a narrative unity is antithetical to the operations of late capitalism. The fragmentary is no longer an unequivocal liberating force.

But we do see though a glass darkly. And the desire for "fullness" or perfection can be a sign of hubris. How to negotiate the tension between the two perspectives or inclinations? (Nussbaum on Calypso is instructive here: Transcending Humanity).

A full life, you read Ibn Arabi saying somewhere, is a life that includes imperfections, incompleteness. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said a rabbi. A life that imitates fullness and always grasps for it or falsely believes it has achieved it is often, therefore, really broken, imperfect, because it has created an idol. 

"In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground."

There is something beyond 'life' and that is a dark unknowing, cannot be spoken of. 

Charles Taylor: we walk away from the field into the forest. There are fewer markers, boundaries..a clearing, an open space. But the field is always with us. In a similar sense, the unknown always structures our way of being.

There are a few old tracks but these are unrecognized or put down in a script we can no longer read. Is this really the same place, even? We need a new introduction (some would deny the forest altogether). That is the profound discussion in Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope.  

The Black & Green:  renunciation and affirmation; austerity not as a turning away from life but a rejection of absorption in it.

To say "Thy will be done" is to enter the forest. 

Be careful of substituting words for the real thing. Be careful of falling in love with words. Life, no matter what you do or think, is always full of some kind of imperfection, an awareness that something is missing and always will be, said Ubo, my father, my Jew.

~

Ah, the folks at Coke..you have to love them!