blue notes on the end of the south

.. ;imagined suddenly the vast companies of humankind journeying from birth to death through the trackless wastes of time since the world began. Tears spilled...'
--Marjorie Ann Watts

There are some lovely stories here.. 

Southend on sea tomorrow. 

blue peninsula

'Absence is a form of presence.'

The human heart, stranger with time.

The blank mirror, the faceless clock: memory lovingly holds us still. A world in a box, a life in a single block. Stay within the {parameters}.

The chain of being: driftwood..the stars are adrift, our star, too. The sands of time. 

The hotel as a metaphor: the decaying luxury within..through the revolving doors, a new person emerges. "How long will you be staying, Sir?"

"Keep it on hold".

Finders, keepers. 

Rummage though the second-hand stores, the heat oppressive for this time of the year.. this suit material is far too thick; hand held at an oblique angle, to protect your eyes from too much sunlight..like a captain looking out to sea. To find the right shore.

The journey to the city on the old tracks. red noW. Matisse!

The brilliance of the light in our lives unmistakable, though we are sadder than we know.

Maps. If only there was a map of the human heart. The fine balance of the dancers, the performers. The delicate human gestures honed to precision after so many years. I wish I knew what to say. The bewilderment with each passing day. The great human endeavour to match ephemera with permanence brings astonishment.

The small life that is ours. The quiet hours lost, lost. Keep silence. The blue peninsula was here all along, nowhere else.

'May I run, run, and never find.'

London Extremism

'A three-year-old child from London is one of hundreds of young people in the capital who have been tipped as potential future radicals and extremists.'
--The Independent.

The first day of winter

The  first day of winter, in the middle of summer, reminds me of all that has been lost, flitted away. For gods and beasts there are only blue skies; for us, the many shades of pink and grey. All of a sudden you are reminded of something you cannot name..and if it was named it would be lost again, in a worse way. The quality of light is the quality of our attachments.

'Human life is like a day in the existence of the world. '

K. Irby.

I see it now before me and it's like that early morning mist has always been there, a constant presence and all you could do when you put your head to it was wait for it to clear.  This hour in the wave neither yours nor mine. This old way of speaking is not mistaken.

An old friend, down on his luck, his mind calmed by medication, can only sadly reflect on the years...sometimes floating, sometimes howling. There's no bringing it back.. And worse, not much to bring back since so much time has been consumed. 

Up near the top of the house, the high-world, with no false note: look up at a sky with no stars. A procession of a thousand clouds, icebergs floating, marching, drifting..a tortoise, a declining Greek goddess, a crouching tiger..all catching a reflected and refracted city light..another kind of beauty emerges, artificial but true. The myriad strands cut loose, aimless, fluttering gloriously like a flag or the kites we used to fly; sip it slowly, take the image in without greeting it because you're empty and don't understand any more.. 

Catch a hold. "Do you remember when...". Childhood no more than a small box now. The bones sense it somehow, miraculously, he thinks to himself. Light the fires, keep a few frail lights going.. Can still feel your way around the old house like a blind man. Don't understand the words no more but I could swear the voice..

Small fires in August, yeah, that was it. The smoke sharp, hands dry as hell..that warmth we mistook to be from within. Days shorter. Brief days, hardly get your bearings as you stumble out and it's half gone. Stay strong. Won't break like A..no, not like that. Christ.

London, 1862-2012

Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the world-historical import of what he was witnessing. “You become aware of a colossal idea,” he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase of an all-conquering material culture: “You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.”

Russian writers from Pushkin onwards had already probed the peculiar psychology of the “superfluous” man in a semi-westernised society: educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority and envy.

The sacral sense – the traditional basis of religion, entailing humility and self-restraint – has atrophied even where the churches, mosques and temples are full. The spectres of power reign incontestably where no gods are...So extensive is the rout of pre-modern spiritual and metaphysical traditions that it is hard to even imagine their resurrection, let alone the restoration, on a necessarily large scale, of a non-instrumental view of human life (and the much-despoiled natural world).

[T.S Eliot] asked if “our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises” was “assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?”

---Pankaj Mishra.

post-notes

The sense of an ending has probably been with us from the beginning. But, no, this time.."life is short...". What does it say about the times we're living in when a robot can kill a man for no apparent reason; a company can promote infidelity; and people can get excited by a pointless expedition to Pluto (isn't that what defines Man, after all, the detractors will say: knowledge for knowledge's sake, art for art's sake, the anti-utilitarian philosophy..."just do it").  

[ A brief flicker of optimism: they've found a planet not too unlike ours in the sense that it has all the conditions to sustain life. Ironic, really. It's a billion years older..which makes you think: they could have developed the technology to visit us by now but, maybe, just maybe, thought against it.]

Post-colonial, post-industrial, post-natal, post-modern, post-religion, post-nature..we're so far past the post that 'post-' itself now seems outdated. Once everything has a date it is only a matter of time before it becomes outdated.

What has emerged this week is that we may also be post-Labour. Socialism and the left is now really, at best, the centre. The metropolitan attitude to it all, as foreseen by Simmel is, predictably: "yeah, like, whatever". In the grey century, the grey evenings of the mind, we secretly pride ourselves on our grey neutrality.

The devil's and the Tories' greatest trick is to convince you that you will never miss what you once held in esteem.

'The confident centre is, I think, unrecapturable.'

'Our forward motion is immense and obvious' (technology, say) but the idea of a future isn't. Not just the idea, the very possibility of it (post-Copenhagen the coastal cities might still be drowned) . Does anyone still seriously believe in the great linear narratives of progress, 'advancement'? What we want to know is what happens post-apocalypse. For what may I hope?

Store everything up on a cloud because for the life of us we cannot remember what all the fuss was about in the first place. Post-book, post-literacy, the modern Eloi content with Ibiza and unlimited variety of fat and sugar.

As with addictions there is no end-except exhaustion; the moment is all there is (the "raw nerves" of the present, isolated from reality). 

The university, as we once knew it, is also to all effect 'gone'.  In a post-university era you will be able to get an 'education' using your smart phone and probably, dispensing with the need for words, be able to represent all you know (accumulated) in a series of images or cartoons.

Everything now comes to us through a screen. Post-reality. 'No previous society has mirrored itself with such profuse fascination.'

Can there be a coherent society, a sense of continuity and meaning, without 'shared recognitions' or a 'common symbolic order' (P. Fuller)? Without them does culture become a museum piece, something to be staged, an "event"? Post-culture.

'Already a dominant part of poetry, of religious thought, of art, has receded from personal immediacy into the keeping of the specialist.'

'An archival pseudovitality surrounding what was once felt life...Academy and populism. the two conditions are reciprocal...between them they determine our current state.'

Remember off by heart. "I swear and hope to die". How many words, figures of speech drop away and how many human actions or possibilities fall with them? "I give you my word". Who, today, can utter such a phrase?

'The catastrophic decline of memorization in our own modern education ..is one of the crucial symptoms of an after-culture.'

'Increasingly the word is caption to the picture'. Snapchat.

'The electronic alphabet of immediate global communication and "togetherness" is not the ancient, divisive legacy of Babel, but the image-in-motion.

'More and more of the informational energy required by a mass-consumer society is being transmitted pictorially.'

'The classic speech-construct, the centrality of the word are informed by and expressive of both a hierarchic value system and the trope of transcendence.'

All music can now be heard at any hour, at any place, as background setting. 'Place' gives way to a "space of flows," a vacuum that can be filled by the latest marketed product. In an amazing Newsnight interview much was made of a new gimmick that would allow listeners/customers to freely move about while attending a classical musical concert. The presiding idea being: we need to attract younger audiences (Bob on the overgrownpath has written a lot on this) and given shorter attention spans, given that so much else is 'happening', well, why not? Why should someone be stuck in one place? And what is all this false reverence for silence? The constant and ceaseless flow of images and music (noise) also signals the end of reading (if not the book). Privacy and the claim to silence are what at once most suspected.

'Conceivably, the ancient circle is closing'.

Time, perhaps, to revisit Guenon. The sign of the times.

'Analogue and digital computerization are transforming the relations of density, of authority, between the human intellect and available knowledge.'

'The struggle of our generation'

“It cannot be right,” he said in the same speech, “that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths.” That’s true – and it applies as much to Eton as it does to faith schools in Birmingham. On social media, Cameron’s Bullingdon Club photograph is circulating, attached to another quote from his speech: “There are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here.”

“The rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its wellbeing except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.” We suffer the same curse: a ruling class whose wealth lies offshore, and which identifies more readily with a transnational elite than with the other people of this nation. 


~

'Almost all other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be great crises are slight and evanescent when held up against the steady trickling away of our subsistence.

The avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all. Our insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and water, but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only by people who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are therefore unaware of the contingency of existence.'

--G. Monbiot.

Game Theory

'I wonder whether a yet further mechanism might not be doing most of the damage. Philosophy and economics are both distinguished from similar disciplines by a marked tendency towards scholasticism. Much work in both subjects focuses on technical minutiae whose relevance to larger issues even the experts are hard pressed to explain. Of course, serious academic work need not always be transparent to the general public, but much in philosophy and economics isn’t even of interest to those in adjacent sub-disciplines. One doesn’t have to be an enthusiast for “impact” to suspect that the main point of much of this technical work is to enable young scholars to display the kind of super-smartness that their elders so prize. Placing a premium on brilliance creates a pressure to work in a style that requires it.

This may turn women away from the brilliance-prizing disciplines, not because they can’t play the game, but because they won’t. Most young people come into philosophy and economics because they want to address important issues, not to make the next move in a technical exercise. When they discover that they need to dance on the head of a pin to get a job, women and men are likely to react differently. Where many men will relish the competitive challenge and enjoy the game for its own sake, many women will see it as the intellectual equivalent of putting balls in pockets with pointed sticks, and conclude that they could be doing something better with their lives.'

--TLS.

Human beings: the animal that specializes in the pointless.All one great diversion, really. Exploration to the furthest reaches of outer space-because inner space is, well, so 19th century. What are the spin-offs except, perhaps, better non-stick pans.Found Pluto- but no-one's heart is really in it any more.It's too late..never really in the game. It's status has been downgraded anyway and we now finally realize that like some god-damned immigrant it doesn't really belong here..was just on our trajectory, in one of our loops, like so much other rubble. Caught our fancy for a while, this dark unknown star but there's so much else out there and life is short...

Stray thoughts

    Late at night, the last train on the hill above, the dull thumping of its engine, a single drumming heartbeat as it disappears. It's later than you think.

    In the early morning hours a sound that is a clear as it is piercing. Are these gulls or geese? Do geese fly that low? Sibelius.

    'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed'

     --S. Blackburn.

    The situation is fluid. The false openness that is dreamt up by the machine: anything is    possible..."find your beach".

   A great aunt, austere and imposing, unknown, really, once said: Life is a closed envelope. Leave it like that.

    'In our age Man is not defined by his specific nature-which cannot be defined otherwise than  in a divine context...'

   --F. Schuon.

    It is true to say that in a former age there were far more many limitations; life everywhere  was narrower, more confined. The hierarchies of class and gender dealt a crushing blow to  individuality. But now that the 'self' is a surface illusion, a collection of trivial thoughts,  riddled with confusion and anxieties, it is worth doing a bit of accounting: what has been  gained, what has been lost?

    In a conversation with the mighty Q: the deep cynicism of politics is reflected in how the only perspective that is of any importance is the one that promotes my own interests. "That's precisely," he adds, "what you learn at public school". The only principles worth espousing are the ones that serve my interests. But it's not just politics and the media which have been thoroughly corrupted. In banking or higher education it's essentially the same thing, namely: gaming, showmanship, the relentless jockeying for position, pettiness    magnified to the nth degree by the delusional belief that one stands, somehow, above the fray.

   Of course, you thank your lucky stars: you couldn't have survived for a single day in the so-called real world. But it's always been a temporary respite, a refuge and not a home. Really is a  grand fraud. To live a life negatively, as a form of escape from the shallowness of the times, mere survival..this may be the only option open to us, but it is the possible starting point of something else. To find a centre elsewhere is, from the mainstream perspective, to be an ec-centric.

   All the tidy photo albums, the pictures carefully and securely placed therein...how we crave order in our lives! We think memory, that bag of tricks, will do the trick.

      Dennis Potter says there is only 'now' and that is true. But the present is only present to us when it is bound by the future and the past (bound not in the sense of being hermetically sealed since the boundaries are porous). Without a sense of the past and the future the present is lost too; it becomes something light, open, empty, a pure succession of fragmentary moments that cannot be stringed together. We imagine the passage of time for an animal is something not altogether different. 

    Everything in capitalism works to break up narratives, to destroy the notion of a coherent self. The inner form of life is replaced by a kaleidoscope of shifting images. The profound challenge of our time, to paraphrase Cameron, is to cast off the deep shadows cast by Thatcher, to undo the knot in our heart, and find our time again.

The BS Machine

If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.

The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.

I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach...

Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter. To the BS machine, the only value of a book is its current salability. Growth of capital depends on rapid turnover, so the BS machine not only isn’t geared to allow for durability, but actually discourages it. Fading BSs must be replaced constantly by fresh ones in order to keep corporate profits up.

This fits well with a good deal of reader desire and expectation, since to many readers much of the value of a BS is that it’s new: everybody’s reading and talking about it.

Once it’s less read and talked about the BS is no longer a BS. Now it’s just a book. The machine has finished with it, and it can depend now only on its own intrinsic merit. If it has merit, reader loyalty and word of mouth can keep it selling enough to make it worth keeping in print for years, decades, even centuries...

Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

---U. Le Guin (from her blog)

It is a rare thing to hear anyone today write or speak in a way that isn't somehow affected by all the claptrap that has entered the mainstream since Thatcher.

Not just the old working class sensibility, but the easy-going pluralistic style of thought, the old-world mannerisms of a surer and more relaxed milieu, now seem to a younger generation to not just be dated but to be positively incomprehensible.

A common world, common sense, dissolved under the glittering surface of a false ideology.

Still, in our time 'in our time' survives.

  

Dennis Potter - Conversations in B&W from Mike Saunders on Vimeo.

The time of the sun

'One day we’ll look back on it       the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now'

---Jules Supervielle.

translation by The Flat Cap

In time we find distances, paths that no-one has used. 

'I stand and watch the rain

Falling in pools which make

Our grave old planet shine;

The clear rain falling, just the same

As that which fell in Homer's time

And that which dropped in Villon's day

Falling on mother and on child

As on the passive backs of sheep;

Rain saying all it has to say

Again and yet again, and yet

Without the power to make less hard

The wooden heads of tyrants or

To soften their stone hearts,

And powerless to make them feel

Amazement as they ought;

A drizzling rain which falls

Across all Europe's map,

Wrapping all men alive

In the same moist envelope;

Despite the soldiers loading arms,

Despite the newspapers' alarms,

Despite all this, all that,

A shower of drizzling rain

Making the flags hang wet.'

trans. D. Gascoyne.

In time we found distances the ordinary stuff of existence, stepping stones that we were unsure of. 

We've gathered and collected for so long now. Through brambles, down past old houses from the 1930s that to be frank would look more at home near the seaside, through the well-worn path reduced to straw and dust, past the electricity grid-is this safe, Ubo?-you make your way to the huge shelter and containers. A thin old man from Goa, all smiles and bobbing face, directs us. 

We walk back, the old sun on our backs but an old memory, from the summer of '76, is something we cannot get rid off.   

Fox

when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars

from the creeds of difference and the contradictions

       that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications

as long as it lasted until something that we were

       had ended when you are no longer anything

let me catch sight of you again going over the wall

--W.S. Merwin.

The fox knows many things, many things. But in time they were a broken image, dappled light.

The Roding has been flowing for hundreds of years. In summer, nearly drained as the reeds extend four or five feet high, it dreams of winter's fullness. In summer: high clouds and the gentle ringing of church bells, the whole vastness of time flowing on on its back. This constant alternating, drawn from the various cycles of time: the year's most concentrated one, close at hand, still comprehensible to us, all the way to ones that are measured in the thousands, participating in the universe's timeless time.

We stand, today, at the centre of a broken circle.

A poem, recalled by Ubo, after forty, fifty years...

'Thine's a summer, mine's no more

Though repeated to threescore

Threescore summers, when they're gone

Will appear as a short as one!'

And my father's father, sitting quietly in his cool, dark corner of the brightly sunlit house, waistcoated, eyes downcast, blinded, faithless, only one word on his lips ("Lord, forgive me"). We shook hands, I think, the only meeting of our worlds or that I can remember now. He said, in his old-world English, the type of voice one hears (or used to hear) on the old HMV gramophone, a simple sentence that he must have drawn from his previous life of extensive travels (Madras, Kashmir...).."Hullo, pleased to meet you".

There are fewer old ones left. Little h will remember nothing of this in years to come.  Our lives run on, a tangent to the circle of previous lives.

How quickly summer has passed! And we sit, bewildered, before the idols of the day. 

If this is man..

If this is man then perhaps it would be better not to be man.

Last night, some harrowing images. First, 'Escape from Isis' which had some heart-wrenching interviews with Yazidi women who had been forced to convert to Islam, gang-raped and sold on as slaves. The few that were brought to safety were taken to the temple (above) to bring them back to their faith. 

What can one say?

Earlier, snatches of a programme on the role of Britain in the slave trade. And this never fails to amaze you: America harps on all the time about freedom but was based on the near genocide of the native peoples, a century of slavery and a century of segregation. And how much of Britain's wealth was founded on this dark, dark trade?

The bookkeeper of Auschwitz. Not actually part of the mass killings (according to him) but complicit. Pictured above, Eva Kor who was experimented upon at Auschwitz. (One has to read those words slowly to get the full force of them..experimented upon).

~~

The swami, who watched this programme aghast, recounted a story...back in 1947 in Lahore or was it '48, a man was going around the markets with a pair of scissors, telling women and young girls that "two" pigtails was un-Islamic (one, apparently, was okay). He cut the hair of three women. Perhaps this was just the case of a lone, frustrated madman (incidentally, a few years ago there was a similar story of a man roaming around Liberty Market telling women to cover themselves until he was beaten up). But I think what she was getting at was that the impulse was the same, even though at a vastly different level. 

Then she told me of her own aunt who was being followed by some spook who told her that her dupatta was not on properly.At which point she threw it off completely and said, "I don't want to wear it now, what are you going to do about it!"

~

To think of Cordoba or Baghdad now makes you wonder if they ever really existed. In any case, that's over. What we're faced with now is something very dark. What, you wonder, would the fundamentalists make of:

Combine Arabic faith, Jewish intelligence, Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and the Sufi way of life - this would be the perfection of humanity.
---The Brethren of Purity

A staggering moment of failure

The last days of summer

The last days of sunshine, and I can't remember the first.

The day is marked, in many places, the day on which things turn, the longest, the shortest, since time out of mind. The first question in a child's heart, the whisper of winter in autumn shadows. 

In this house we lose twenty minutes each day and it is a constant struggle to keep the right time. We live in our own time, carry other faraway senses of it with us-like childhood's long drawn out afternoons, and the old world time that was spent on verandas, in a crumbing house,or on balconies watching the monsoon rains flood the lawns. 

'And all the clocks struck widely different hours'.

~

'He might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one...'
--Cheever.

'A perfect summer day. Like we used to have...All the summers of childhood, of her youth, of her life with Rupert, seemed united in this one moment and eternally.'

--(some Marjorie Watts for you, C).

Time catches up with us, passes us as we stand still, timestruck. 

The last days of summer, and we crazily think of checking departure times, remembering all the hours that have slipped by. What is it that you wanted to say? Rummaging through old papers we find ticket stubs, yellowing photographs of a few days spent on a beach, academic articles on how the ancients thought that all change was death and how it could only be staved off by preserving the myth of eternal return, the rituals that allowed us to open our hands, let go...

~~

...

A robot killed a man for no apparent reason. There is an inquiry. Will the robot be questioned?

A deal, after 17 hours (Greece), after 12 years (Iran). Old Benjy thinks it is a staggering, historic mistake. The towel-heads are fretting, too. And the so-called Republicans think of some line from a western to show how the world really is partitioned into the good guys and the Injuns, goddamnit!

~

All the long negotiations we make, looking for a settlement.Translate, translate again, until the word is worn down, paper thin, and I hear your voice.

  

VP (Versuchspersonen)

What is a human being..and what colour is he?

Why the insistence of British values, on proving one is British or French or whatever? A true patriot. For King and country(blood and soil?).Sign up to the American way of life if one wants to have a life. Refugees now represent-at best!- a humanitarian crisis and not a political crisis. What rights, exactly, do they have?

All sounds a bit sinister...

Back in 1915 the French ("Je suis...)kicked it off with their attempts at to "denationalize" enemies of the state. The Belgians soon followed, then the Austrians (1933). On what grounds can you be 'stripped of your  citizenship'? (The word 'stripped' is instructive since it means being reduced to bare life, a life on the heath, a lone wolf).

Before the Jews could be sent to the Camps they had to be denationalized since then "anything became possible" (Arendt).

Today's news in the Guardian: a damning report saying psychologists should not be part of interrogations at Gitmo.

The no-man's land. Is that just a place of Utopian/dystopian experiment?

But when did it begin...

~

From the New Yorker's review of K.L.

Indeed, it’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army, and the factory...

The K.L. was defined from the beginning by its legal ambiguity. The camps were outside ordinary law, answerable not to judges and courts but to the S.S. and Himmler. At the same time, they were governed by an extensive set of regulations, which covered everything from their layout (including decorative flower beds) to the whipping of prisoners,..'

Anarchy and order. The use of chaos as a 'form' of order. Kadare, in 'the Successor' writes of something similar-in a different context- as does Bettleheim (from memory) in 'the Informed Heart'. This is, of course, what no-one wants to talk about. Extremism in the heart of Europe; something so vile that as a defence mechanism you have to call it a throwback to the medieval or religion..but it seems far more accurate to try and explain its links with modernity. 

Not just colonialism and the attitudes to inferior races; not just how work would set you free, the valorization of technology and the scientific method with the attendant scant regard to values; No, I think we need to talk about things that are related to all three: eugenics and the 'politics of life', what Foucault calls biopolitics.

This, to me, is one of the keys:

'Here, again, the camps’ sinister combination of bureaucratic rationalism and anarchic violence was on display.'

Or to put it differently: the body and its forces, energies becomes an object to be studied, analysed, controlled, dispensed with. A number. And this is all in line with the instrumentality of rationality that dominates not just the social sciences but large strands of modern thought. 

Modern power, as Foucault reminds us, is not purely 'extractive'. The power of the Prince was to extract tributes, taxes, resources but he stood above the processes that generated them (in this sense colonialism is just another form of the land grab).

But then something changes and power is now concerned about endless growth, population (and its normalization),life, health, education, productivity. The body and life that once stood outside the political are now incorporated into the nascent political-economy. What was once hidden in the oikos (reproduction) has to be transformed into production. Household management, home economics-except now the household is the government, now the state is the political body.

This is a starting point. Think about how we now unselfconsciously talk about education as if it were 'human capital'. And once you go down that line you are immediately reminded of what is of disvalue, the negative: superfluous humanity, useless capital (or, as the Americans are wont to say: "losers").

Think about how the political goal of every state is to maximize growth, improve the standard of living.

And think about how more and more aspects of life-from care of the elderly, to surrogacy, to sexual services- are commoditized.

Finally, Foucault's formulation puts it in perspective. Nazism was state racism. Think of both of those words coming together, the linking of state practices and management with the biological...the birth of a nation.

Illich: the idolatry of life.
Arendt: the unnatural growth of the natural.

And these haunting lines:

'Once a prisoner ceased to be human, he could be brutalized, enslaved, experimented on, or gassed at will, because he was no longer a being with a soul or a self but a biological machine. The Muselmänner, the living dead of the camps, stripped of any capacity to think or feel, were the true product of the K.L., the ultimate expression of the Nazi world view.'