A world of contrasts. On Saturday morning I ventured out (now that the awful smog seems to have cleared a bit). Visited an "organic" farm on the city outskirts and picked up some sage, tarragon, chicory and other stuff not usually available in the land of the pure. From there it was a short drive to hell on earth.

This place is three or four km of junk: forklifts, electric generators, scrap metal, anchors, chains, presses of all sorts, commercial pizza ovens, etc. Things are sold by their weight. So, a coffee machine was weighed and its price determined. The junk comes from Germany, America and France. Found a lovely wooden box, some mountain boots, but didn't buy anything. Soul-destroying or what. a worse indictment of capitalism I couldn't imagine. At one place there were hundreds old monitors (from a hospital?) and they were just stacked up there in the dust, sinking back into the dry earth. Jesus! (Next time will take photos).

And then, amazingly, amidst all that "stuff" I found a solitary bookshelf. It was crammed with books that were literally drowning in dust. I reached out to pick up a book and the pages nearly crumbled in my hands. It was a bit like that scene from The Time Machine. 

I've seen the future..

Things are going to slide.

どんなに白い白も、ほんとうの白であったためしはない。一点の翳もない白の中に、目に見えぬ微小な黒がかくれていて、それは常に白の構造そのものである。白は黒を敵視せぬどころか、むしろ白は白ゆえに黒を生み、黒をはぐくむと理解される。存在のその瞬間から白はすでに黒へと生き始めているのだ。

だが黒への長い過程に、どれだけの灰の諧調を経過するとしても、白は全い黒に化するその瞬間まで白であることをやめはしない。たとえ白の属性とは考えられていないもの、たとえば影、たとえば鈍さ、たとえば光の吸収等によって冒されているとしても、白は灰の仮面のかげで輝いている。白の死ぬ時は一瞬だ。その一瞬に白は跡形もなく霧消し、全い黒が立ち現れる。だが　　

どんなに黒い黒も、ほんとうの黒であったためしはない。一点の輝きもない黒の中に目に見えぬ微小な白は遺伝子のようにかくれていて、それは常に黒の構造そのものである。存在のその瞬間から黒はすでに白へと生き始めている……

....

.....


.......

....


.....

(only kidding, fff)

.....

However white a white may be, it never is a true white. In a white without a single bit of cloudiness, invisibly miniscule black is lurking, and that is always its constitution itself. A white does not regard a black with hostility, but rather it is understood to contain a black, because a white by its nature fosters black. At the very moment of coming into existence, a white is already beginning to move toward a black.

But in its long process toward a black, however many gradations of gray it passes through, a white does not cease to be white until the very moment it is totally black. Even when it is infiltrated by what are not thought to be attributes of white such as, for example, shadows, dullness, or absorption of light, a white is gleaming behind a mask of gray. A white dies in a flash. In that instant a white disperses, leaving no traces, and a total black rises up. But —

However black a black may be, it never is a true black. In a black without a single speck of gleam, an invisibly miniscule white is lurking like a genome, and that is black’s constitution itself. At the very moment of coming into existence, a black is already beginning to move toward a white . . .

--Tanikawa

The Last Days

(Alejandro Kirchuk)

(Santiago Arcos)

In the last days, the last hour, the human hand gives itself away.

In the morning, light and colour return, objects- and life itself- take shape: a smile, spilled milk, your face turned away from me, the sleeping child, sharpened pencils, ironed clothes, mirrors, Van Gogh's Sunflowers...

The sun brings forth all these things but it is, after all, only a burning star and, like our days, a wisp of smoke.

~

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates the animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020.
--The Guardian.

F.R.

The darkness in this hour, the loose thread of string curled in on itself on the wooden floor. "Do you remember?" and "Do you remember?" the little one says. Light the fire, light the small fires in the early hours, to keep memory going (from going).

Excess

'Men are now associated in the modality of reciprocal dissociation, unified in the elimination of every interest that is not purely individual, artificially united in their subtraction from community.'

Not the concord but the union of many men.

'The state is the de-socialization of the communitarian bond.'

No other association, but that of the false unity of dissociation, must be allowed. The market, with its false sense of universalism, riding on its false premise of universal self-interest. No association internal to the state. Which explains: for king and country, my country: right or wrong, the 'subjectivization' of the person. From now on you're an individual and this soon means that one becomes or can become a number. The statistical life within the bureaucratic machine. But more: we now monitor and regulate ourselves by numbers!

Hyper-normal

But to unite the moments of life in simultaneity, just that is the task. 
--Kierkegaard

Watched Adam Curtis's new documentary and realized what a monumentally difficult task it is to make sense of modern times in any production. This is an age which revels in the fragmentary and doesn't even desire any unity (even if it could imagine it).

But the documentary has its moments! The basic idea is this: old forms of power (by which he means, I think, those connected to industrial capitalism and politicians) have been overtaken by finance and the net. The new form of power is about living in a virtual or fake world and the illusion of freedom whereas all along real power remains undisturbed. In fact, since everyone is so absorbed in these modern circuses- facebook, twitter, snapchat, talent shows, exercise, porn- there is no real chance of any collectivity forming a mode of resistance to the system. Resistance itself gets swallowed up and marketed by capitalism: rebel sell, hipsters flirting with "dangerous" ideas, geeks in some garage uniting everyone with a system of "likes"..yeah, that will do it.  

Given that, it is not hard to see why religion must be reduced to "spirtuality" (the idea of an organized way of life that opposes materialism in an organized way must be dismantled). Instead, religion is one choice amongst others, a part of academic studies, something one thinks about now and then, a concept, part of the nostalgia industry (at best..at its worst we it is hooked up with many of the psychopathic forms of violence we see around us).

Finance: what is the real economy when the dreamworld is everything? There is no solid, bourgeois individual accumulating possessions any more. No society, no nature, no God, no human essence. Human freedom is defined by a set of negations. In liquid modernity there is just a meaningless frenzy, a shape-shifting world of 24/7 exposure, chatter, laughter and sarcasm. Lighten up, dude. Travel lightly. Ride the tiger. Go with the flow. The journey is the destination, grasshopper. 

The Arab Revolution, the Orange Revolution, the Velvet Revolution, Prince's Purple Revolution. All brought to you live, sponsored by Coke International. The online community (of perverts, stalkers, abusers). The online community that realizes that when it's got to Oakland, got there, there is no there there. 

Politics as theatre (Putin..is Trump for real?); politics as deliberate confusion where no-one knows what is "up" and what is "down". Gadaffi is a villain, hero, villain. Saddam is our sonofabitch until he isn't. Sex up the dossier. wheel in C. Powell to present some kind of mickey mouse evidence of WMD. Cartoons? We like cartoons, boss.

Rap music: authentic gangsterism brought to you by the corporations. Keep it real, bro' (because we can't). 

Disneyland is the ideal. A casino is the ideal. Raw flesh under this artificial light is all I am or ever will be (Francis Bacon).

Politics as "risk management" or "perception management". No-one is quite sure what is real and what is an image any more. Conspiracy theories proliferate. Studies in academic departments concentrate on 'the body' because that fleeting existence is the only reality (see Mark Grief's wonderful online essay, 'Against Exercise') Faculty at the university have to apologize beforehand if they even think of 'value judgements'. Art for art's sake. 

The first reaction of many people, 9-11:

"I thought I was watching a movie".

Someone wrote you write like a blake,
a knife to the throat"
Dead or Alive.
At any given point in time
more dead than alive.

An ant said my life is like a dream.
In the early hours it was on my upper lip,
after all the sweetness. 
In the darkness the voice collapses,
the eye still bright,   a bridge.

Each clock in the apartment strikes a different hour.
No-one find the other in time.
Time loosens up, moves quicker in mirrors.
What is left of my face?

The black hat and the black dog. Do you know the name?
The morning passes speaking only four words, three cups of tea.
The night in the deserts, the rains in the sea.
Oh, imagination, how I need you!

You in your forest-world
with the dark trees of your love.
In an unknown hour sadness falls.
A grain of recognition: the cracked
hands of villagers, digging graves in the city,

The dead trees in your heart, just so you know.
North by north-west: this soft heavy weight resting on grass
The statue's face on the sea bed.
Everything returning, going.

The crow that dreamed himself a star,
jumped, latched on, and straight out of the world,
leaves autumn, leaves counting, leaves reflections

but leaves no word. 

Contract theory

(Photo courtesy of Tom over at tomclarkblog.blogspot.com )

The consolations of philosophy

'My own eyes know because my own hands have felt.

'--quoted in Stephen Marglin, Losing Touch.

At the university the dominant way of knowing is via abstraction. A theoretical, epistemic approach that is detached from history, tradition, the passage of time, experience, an inter-action with other people; it is negligent of both specific places and the lived quality of time.

It is analytical, technical, dressed-up (or down) in mathematics which give it the illusion of complexity, the prestige of being 'scientific'. Cerebral and apparently universal, it offers little scope for judgement and plurality. This is what counts because, well, because it counts. Which is not to say that a system of knowledge comes to the fore because of its own internal coherence or its ability to explain things; quite the opposite! It is given prominence because it chimes with, and gives support to, the dominant forces in society (Keynes's point).

Is this just another version of the ancient war of philosophy against poetry? Religion can be poetical but it can also be philosophical. To the extent that it resembles the latter it can often assume the role of a system that stifles human creativity. Religion as a lived experience, away from the scholastic frame of mind, tends to be sceptical ("I don't know", "I'm not sure") and encourages discovery. 

Of course, this is too extreme: techne and episteme can also interact with one another (the one doesn't necessarily have to crowd the other one out)  

What do you actually know apart from a few tricks? A head stuffed with quotes and fragments, some slight technical understanding but in the larger scheme of things only a shallow understanding of human psychology (your own and that of others), only a dim awareness of what goes up to make a good life. there is no or little habitual reflection at the university on what the ends of knowledge are (beyond a stepping stone to even more useless knowledge or a certificate which allows you to make money). 

Can philosophy console in the face of so much uncertainty, tragedy, suffering or is it really like a false idol, offering what is in reality a tawdry consolation to the vagaries of life but that is often in practice taken to be a superior kind of awareness?

What kinds of problems does philosophy address and with what methods?

No country for old men

Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming, and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads about it—often by skipping a great deal of material and absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience, sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are reading settles in and makes its full impact.

How many book lovers among the young has the Internet produced? Far fewer, I suspect, than the millions libraries have turned out over the last hundred years. Their slow disappearance is a tragedy, not just for those impoverished towns and cities, but for everyone everywhere terrified at the thought of a country without libraries.

--Charles Simic.

~~~

It is a culture uninterested in qualifications and concerned only with satisfying raw emotional need.
--The Telegraph.

Dylan! FFS! Now, I've got nothing against white people per se (some of my best friends are white) but, come on. Seriously? "A great poet in the English-speaking tradition". Okay, if Obama can win a Nobel for, well, for just being black, I suppose anything is possible.

Michelle nailed it last night. Pure cynical politics at its finest. For a while I was taken in and thought she was actually serious but when she started off on "the need for healing," harping on about how Hillary is the person to unite a "divided nation" I rolled over laughing at my own gullibility. The machine is going for the jugular and with Wall St. behind her Trump ain't nothing but a small-time, small-town chump. American democracy is WWF taken to another level! There ain't no business like show business. 

Beginning's End

The end of the road is another road. At the end of the road is another road.

The Present Age

This was locker-room banter, a private conversation..

Notes and quotes from Kierkegaard.

"Everything is made into a joke." 

"The individual ceases to be singled out by religion."

The desire to buy something second-hand, on the cheap, rather than first-hand, the real deal.

Modern techniques of control: the Press and the media: looking for laughter [thrills, shocks, the breaking of taboos.."nothing is sacred," said Rushdie]. The need for pranks, distraction, superficiality, gossip, to kill time. Laziness, indifference, ..this "meaningless grin". 

"Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life."

"When people's attention is no longer turned inwards, when they are no longer satisfied with their own inner religious lives, but turn to others and things outside themselves, where the relation is intellectual, in search of that satisfaction..When nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together..that is the time for talkativeness."

Modern conversation: what one is going to do, what we would have said on a certain occasion, which particular girl one is going to make love to..."

Gossip, trivialities, spice, meaningless banter, idle talk.."a manifestation of emptiness."

Brilliant shams. Deception. Dodgy dossiers. "Up" is "down" -and we're all free. 

Flirtation: the lack of courage to follow through. To stay in the middle and never venture anything. Both evil and the good are avoided. since you know it will never amount to much you can flirt with anything or anyone.

[You can do anything]

[Is that what most men really think?]

"In Germany they even have phrasebooks for the use of lovers..in fact, there are handbooks for everything."

[' __ for Dummies,' where '__' stands for anything: Islam, The Theory of Relativity, Hobbes...another version of '60 second news'..or,a s the Yanks would say: get to the bottom dollar]

"One man is curious about another. Everyone is undecided."

But if truth be told no-one is really curious about another person. We are curious about all the accidental features, never the essence, because that would lead us to reflect upon the question: what is our own individual essence? 

Now it's autumn, but
you would never know.
-- J.Ceravolo.

Came across Ceravolo (like Ungaretti) thanks to Tom. It's nice to have these thick books by your side, work through them, which means not working, accepting, intuiting since you don't have the high skill or the fine perception. Reading by the evening light. Kenenth Irby, too. Where have we got to there? The early 1970s, I think.

Today I'm told it's a full eight degrees hotter than the average for this time of the year. The seasons usually turn by the 15th of the month: the dry summer days of blinding light and suffocating nights give way to the monsoon by July 15th; autumn is supposed to roll in, pinching the mornings and evenings with its cool fingers by Sept. 15th; Spring is officially declared on the 15th of February. 

But now everything is out off kilter. Everything is doing its best to break down the light, filter it to something more manageable: the dust, the tree branches, the crows dancing, human memory...

Frank speech, the Greeks said (not freedom of speech). As if to say..avoid abstractions in favour of reality. 

If there was time we'd speak; there'd be no telling. Where to start, but the middle. The words from the early years: experimental. Learn to find your own voice, rhythm,    silences. The old country lettered with arching old-stone bridges. What do you have to say for yourself? 

Begin in the middle of Ceravolo, pick out the page on which it begins. The book traveled a couple of thousand miles to reach my incomprehension. We lived a life like that, not knowing. From your house on Vere Street five roads radiating out. None took you there, for all you knew. How many miles have you walked in your life? Honestly.

There isn't an anchor anywhere, the drift of the world, the drift.   

[I'll begin again]

It was too late. The autumn light fell at wide angles on your face, revealing what you always were. In front of you, though you don't look at it, a map, an ancient forest, green time, a cafe latte. "I am in the middle of my life", am passing through it. Another summer has sunk and my heart with it, all those heavy, ripe hours now distilled to a clear moment. And I am here. You still know how to kill me, she thought, silently, the most inward of her dreamsongs always coming to her from a lofty distance-and then checked herself to make sure her lips hadn't moved. 

"I am more composed than him," she mused, as a shadow fell on her bare shoulder. There is no turning now, only one continuous season. Now it's autumn, but you'd never know. I will become a statue, and wait. I've done that before. The drift of the world, oh the drift...  

Egyptian Blues

(Photograph courtesy of Roxana)

Once you had a secret love: seeing
even her photo, a window is flung open
--after Frank B. 

There is a kind of perfect light, more measured and less abrasive, the old light from the 1970s, a time when I think to myself I must have died. 

There is a type of light that hung about in the top apartment, where old Malika used to live, The Egyptian aunt with one good eye and a gold tooth, she adopted you because so sad for a child, and she would feed us endless sweet-dishes. God, how the Egyptians love their sugar! With their tea "2" spoonfuls means 4; "3" means 5. Nothing means what you think. A lesson never learned. 

He would return, uncle Saleh, a small-time fisherman from the lowly backstreets who'd found his way to the big sea and a big ship. He'd return for a few months in the year. He'd return and still be gone, listening to recitations of the Qur'an on a tape recorder with the windows flung open, the sound of the verses always more mysterious and direct thatn the printed text. And he would wonder to himself: what had happened to my life, how had it been traded away so easily? 

If a wound had befallen you, a wound like that had already befallen others.
--Qur'an. 3:140 

He would bring us back coins and stamps from places we'd never heard of before. Some of those countries didn't even exist (Rhodesia). But I don't actually remember him saying a word. A few greetings in Arabic and stock phrases which Ubo knew, but that was all. His mouth was always full of tobacco, his teeth deeply stained; his gaunt face, lean body and tired, profound eyes; his ability to sit still and speak only necessary words left an impression that makes you wonder, even today. 

Flowers die from too much light, or too much shade. 

~~~

There is a kind of light that balances all time. In summer, in the south, the light is constant for many hours of the day and cannot be faulted, dimmed or disturbed, adding a bright edge to everything. In the north-or conditions approaching it-the light and time flow together: A moment of absence, a drifting cloud. And the land is dark with shadow again. There is a late flaring of the light, the second chance that we all crave, the "late sublime" of an old man who sees everything is beautiful in its own time, with its own specific charm. He looks out of his tall window-for how many more winters?- down, down towards some woman and thinks of his own youth and the sea. Only the chant of the sea remains. But even regret can seem to have its place in a life if your head is tilted at the right angle to the universe. Remorse, destroys the human world. 

~~~ 

Hopper and the 4 o'clock feeling, the third hour in a row of silence between them. 

~~~
At Essex, in those black-bricked monolithic towers, those monuments to the disasters of socialism and the tides of history, the high windows were sealed to prevent suicides. Bertrand Russell had seen a spate of them. There is no "why" here.

  
A said that when the light fell on her skin it was perfect. "If only I could marry again," he said, meaning: "If only I could bed her." 

~~~

A poem by Ungaretti, translated by Tom (I can't say T.C. without thinking of Benny and officer Dibble), stopped me in my tracks, left me spellbound. Traced down three other translations but here is the first:

His name was

Mohamed Sceab

Descendant

of emirs of nomadic tribes

took his own life

because he had lost

his Homeland

Loved France
and changed his name

Was Marcel

but wasn't French

had forgot how

to simply live
sipping a coffee

in the tent of his people

where the little singsong

of the Koran is chanted

And didn't know how to

give

his separateness
a voice

I went along with the concierge

from the hotel where we lived

in Paris

following his body

down the dingy alleyway

from number 5 rue des Carmes

His remains

rest

in the cemetery at Ivry

dolorous suburb

that always brings to mind

the day

a fairground comes down

It may be I alone
still know

he was once alive

The New Yorker state of mind

C.W. Mills

Its sophistication is one of tone rather than ideas: in it, the New Yorker style of reportage has become politically triumphant.

I'll come back to C.W. M. later but his thoughts on being "outside the whale" (on the necessity of being outside) struck me as very pertinent. Of course, Edward Said picked up on this as well in his discussion of the need to be an amateur, or how one should always write from the margins (in Representations of the Intellectual). 

And that brought me to a lovely little chapter by Bauman and Donskis. Actually, most of it is quite clunky and, though I hate to say this, I think Ziggy has lost it slightly. Be kind to old men, though. I still read his part once out of deep admiration. But Donskis, who I'd never heard of before, really does get to the crux of the matter. Some excerpts and notes:

We are all individuals now, but more by default than moral choice since the individual is really shaped by global forces beyond his control.

"Radically changing everyone's field of reference and system of concepts [by the introduction of a new language, New Speak] would make it easier to take away the dimension of the past...a memory-free world deprived of public historical archives and the humanities in general.."

"Memory uncovers its essence as a conscious effort to continue or prolong the existence of what deserves to exist."

"What has happened [to the universities] is a revolution by the bureaucrats speaking in the name of freedom and competition but each day tearing these values down."

[The only hope] is that universities preserve the logic of intellectual and creative slow food."

"The capitalization of of universities and the de facto libertarian model of their development, imposed from above by the state bureaucracy, is something so grotesque...It is academic capitalism without freedom, a species of technocratic and bureaucratic tyranny implemented in the name of freedom and progress."

"What does academic freedom mean for the bureaucracy and a political class symbiotically related to it? No more than an impediment to a technology-enabled form of social control that requires teachers and researchers to submit standardized accounts of their activities...Academics who don't kowtow, and think they're not beholden to anyone are worth keeping in ignorance and permanent tension in order to make them realize who is master of the situation and work off their debt to the university, programme or department...Then they duly become vassals and pages, and forget all the rhetoric of freedom and autonomy."

"If students never see a free professor who will prostrate himself before no-one, or a researcher who follows the principle pauca paucis (a few for the few), where will they learn to recognize and respect freedom of thought and intellectual integrity?"

"Today governments and bureaucrats deliberately hold academic communities in a zone of ambiguity, obscurity and insecurity; they permanently reform and deform universities and thereby take away scholars' sense of security. Permanent change becomes a perfect form of social control."

"[A lesson learned by our political technocrats]: The enemies of the prince continue to live without living. They are unable to examine or enjoy life; nor are they in control of any intimate aspects of reality any more. Exile becomes a fact of life without showing itself as a form of punishment or as a form of discipline...Exile as a perfect means of control and of 'pacification'.."

C.W.M.

For the intellectual administrators ..the memorandum is replacing the book.

Foundations like to give money for "projects that are large-scale and scientific with a large S-which often only means 'safe' by being made trivial-for they do not want to be made the subjects of political attention." 

The younger recruits, research technicians [of abstracted empiricism] rather than social scientists, young men who come from "the intellectually impoverished background of the American High School."

"I have seldom seen one of these young men ..in a condition of genuine intellectual puzzlement. And I have never seen any passionate curiosity about a great problem, the sort of curiosity that compels the mind to travel anywhere...

These young men are less restless than methodical; less imaginative than patient; above all they are dogmatic...

Much of the propaganda force of bureaucratic social science is due to its philosophical claims to Scientific Method; much of its power to recruit is due to the relative ease of training individuals and setting them to work in a career with a future. In both instances, explicitly coded methods, readily available to the technicians, are the major keys to success...

Once a man has spent three or four years at this sort of thing, you cannot really talk to him about the problems of studying modern society. His position and career, his ambition and his very self-esteem, are based in large part upon this one perspective, this one vocabulary, this one set of techniques. In truth, he does not know anything else.

They are among the energetic and ambitious technicians whom a defective educational routine and a corrupting demand have made incapable of acquiring the sociological imagination."

Wow!

It is a strange thing to contemplate, but does an excess of freedom (or, more accurately, a particular kind of freedom) lead to a form of thought-slavery? And is that formal freedom (in exchange) actually based on co-ercion, exploitation? The underlying power structure, the social relations in production, remain. Quite simply: I have time, an education, capital; you have your increasingly redundant physical labour, are time-bound, debt-ridden. Stephen Marglin's question from his classic paper gets to the heart of things: What Do Bosses Do?

We do not exchange with one another on an equal basis and in production there are people with power to make decisions while the rest of us simply obey (as wage slaves and as slaves to the notion that ever-greater consumption will bring us fulfillment). More than that, the lifestyles of the rich are based on a whole army of unseen workers-either in the host country or, increasingly, from the "third world"- who live in appalling conditions. The whole system has always depended on the "availability" of cheap inputs from non-market sectors: natural resources, the affective (and unpaid) work of women, the labour of slaves, the resources from colonized countries. No, let's stick to the idea of free trade! Let's keep the old Edgeworth model of exchange: I've got some wheat, you've got some potatoes, y'know... 

If freedom is autonomy then what control do we actually have over the kind of life we want to live? The more radical critiques of capitalism (back in the early 19th c) looked at issues of the meaning and purpose of work and its products (and not just the distribution of a 'given' pie). The uncomfortable fact may be that, actually, democracy and capitalism are not ultimately compatible. Economic democracy, for instance, is diametrically opposed to the vast inequalities generated by capitalism (and economic theory is not actually concerned about equality per se).

What role does the 'thin' theory of the individual play in all this? This is the atomistic-universal-disengaged individual who has no nature to speak of, no essence..a man with no qualities whose formal freedom resides in the fact that he eludes all social and metaphysical determinations. A veritable Robinson Crusoe living just enough for the city. 

I am determined and willing to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies.

--Sasha Grey, porn star.

~~