Capitalist Realism

"Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-honoured teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.

On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche."

Some very interesting thoughts on burn-out, the future and the conversion of culture into museum pieces (which is reminiscent of Agamben's great essay).

--Mark Fisher.

Well, that's how it is. The book is over, as are slow reading (Haldane) and slow food. Cut to the chase, get to the bottom dollar.

Defeatist? Maybe. It's not a question of pessimism or optimism though. Just about thinking, in a cool and calm fashion: if that's the way it is, then what next? What next for you?  De-linking, withdrawal- as much as possible? Illich's question haunts you: what would it be to live a life that wasn't so structured?

I don't think 12,000 years of neolithic logic can be upturned. If history is cyclical-as the great traditions teach- then isn't there a point where the wheel stops turning? The Kali Yuga? 

And then nothing happened

Scruton writes, very interestingly, about the impossibility of mourning. Of 'closure', as the Americans would say. The specific case of Germany and Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen. 

Mourning as a way of accepting-somehow coming to terms with-loss. But what if that's not possible and there's no way, no human way, of making sense of it? And there's no sense, partly, because one is at fault, one is already guilty. How can you get out of yourself, so to speak, so to speak? Obviously we cannot forgive ourselves and only the victims-that much maligned word- truly can. 

There is almost something absurd in the idea that we can forgive ourselves. But in general parlance we do say: "don't go too hard on yourself" (or "don't beat yourself up about it").

Here, though, this is different because of the enormity of what was done. What category of thought or feeling would allow us to move on? Isn't the sign of us wanting to do so simply another aspect of our failing?

Plenty Coups:

At the reservations time has come to a standstill. There's no way of getting around this. Conceptually, he's all at sea. There was no way of preparing himself or his people for the loss of meaning, the loss of even an appropriate way of thinking and feeling about loss.

And then nothing happened.   

~~~

Hiding Behind the Screen. 

Not shyness (or not just that). The inability to encounter the real world. The construction of that inability. On the internet a friend can be discarded at the click of a button. How convenient! If you're not enjoying the conversation or are switched off by it then you can, literally, switch off (and you assume, incorrectly as it turns out, that there are no costs involved).

{This is not about me R, just in case you were wondering}

And, also, you simply 'collect' friends on the net. Tally them up. What do you really know of someone if you haven't seen their face or heard their laughter? And an online friend is just another distraction, another form of entertainment to keep you from being bored to death. Of course, there's the added thrill of anonymity when chatting with or engaging with someone of the opposite sex. What is that charm of it, though? Is it that one is free of responsibility, accountability? A bit like when you go to a hotel on holidays..or the Ibiza experience..you can be no-one and let go of all the false images of yourself that you've carried around with you for so long. No more social constructions, just words and still images. Just a body, just a mind. Never the whole person, as you simply are, warts and all. 

The narcissism of investing so much of your time online. Of course. 

{This is not about me, just in case you were wondering}.

But how do you interact with real people or the world around you if you've been conditioned to responding (or not responding) to online friends?



    



   

'The cultic animal'

'Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment,..

And the fate of all those zillions of messages and images, in their casual brightness, was to be equalized, to pour forth in an overwhelming glut.. 

The very act of collaging is a city act—the compacting, side by side, of a swarm of different images which, like people in a city, have little or no common history: the essence of the act of collaging is that the things should have no prior relationship to one another; all they have in common is their presence in the same work of art, just as what all city dwellers have in common is their presence in the same city.'

The bawling pressure of its images—rocket, eagle, crowd, street signs, oranges, box, insect, crowds—creates an open-ended inventory of modern life, a series without a final term, the lyrical outpourings of a mind satiated by what was quick, daily, and real. Its subject is glut.'

--Robert Hughes.

~

Anyone who has lived in a big city and been drawn to city life will immediately realize the appeal of those words by Robert Hughes (whose Barcelona and Shock of the New are hugely interesting. His t.v. programmes are also excellent (though the one on Goya was a complete dud).

And the appeal lies precisely in the 'fragmentarines' of city life, the ability to avoid the imposing narratives of religion, village, tradition and the family. Also: there's a hint of something radical about the equality of strangers, something exhilarating about the final victory of nominalism over metaphysics. 'A series without a final term' is a nomadic thought. Finally, to love without a sense of belonging or even a need for belonging: sovereign becoming. Half of modernity is, of course, this relation to the contingent, the fleeting..this desire for escape from 'boxes' (Houdini), to not be named, to fall in love with the person sitting next to you on the tube. 

To put on any other hat is to given in to conservatism, the religious sensibility or, worse, nostalgia for some long-lost unity in your life when there is in fact only bewilderment.

No-one can deny-in so far as they are alive to the times they live in- that there is something liberating about the return to daily, ordinary life..to the notion that there is something spiritual here, right now, right here. 

But I want to question that because all the hype about the transitory, the ridiculous appropriation of the idea of nomadism, is itself a product of a late capitalist mentality. In fact, it might be said that religious fundamentalism is itself the other, bastard half, of that mentality and that the two are profoundly intertwined. Instead of talking about the 'essence' of religious fundamentalism why no talk about it as a historical phenomenon? Nostalgia and tribal belonging, narratives of national and cultural identity are not merely a response to the temporality of modernity; they are its vital 'other'!

The relative stability of family life, gender subservience, 'social capital' and a culture of restraint are all aspects of a life that stands 'outside' of capitalist relations and from which value can be extracted, accumulated (up to a point). Without limits, border controls, the game is over. That 'standing outside' is not mysticism but a mystique constructed by capitalism. 

{Aside: one example that is relevant today: the 'wild man' Ishmael, outside the centrality of history, beyond the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the perfect foil to the reasonableness and gaiety of modern man..of course, at other times, the accusation was precisely the opposite: Muslims and their religion were too worldly, too obsessed, like the Jews, with the law instead of the purity of the heart}. 

We no longer can think of what we hold in common without being labeled reactionary. That's been the remarkable success story of neoliberalism over the last forty years. The equality we esteem is, when you think about it, really the formal equality of the market (that this rests on deep substantive inequalities is nobody's business).

But why the cult of the fragment and not just the fragment? If one thinks about that word then you begin to wonder whether the cult is something that has been cultivated, produced, manufactured. 'Cult' suggests a technique of management: the organization of the image as an endless, flickering and disrupting glow. Quickness, lightness (Calvino) is the story. The end of the story is the story.  

Glut suggests superfluity. We live in an age of excess, which means redundancy as well. There are too many Muslims, too many religious people, too many immigrants and yet there are no more borders! In the old days we could simply expel them, like lepers or mad people, to beyond the city limits. 

It's not just that world has lost its balance-and the impending ecological crisis is surely an indicator of that; it's that the lack of balance is something to be celebrated. Surrounded by a glut of things, things that ultimately bore us to death, the only response is to cheer on the production of more junk, collect it all and represent it, make a cult of it.

Life, Illich once wrote, has become an idol.  

MOOCs Shmooks

I think I went to see Turner (and some Blake) but stumbled across this and it caught my attention because it reminded me of the old country.

And that's the thing with bookshops and galleries: you don't always find what you're looking for; there's always the element of surprise. In an age where we're being directed (by communications technologies and the huge second-hand, derivative industry that is made up of reviewers, analysts, gurus, pundits and experts) to like and choose what we ought to like and choose it is difficult to genuinely think for yourself or discover something that hasn't already been summarized, packaged and marketed for you. Even authors you hadn't heard of must be sold as 'the-greatest-author-you-never-heard-of''. 

Anything from the past can be plundered, taken out of context (wasn't that Benjamin?), dusted down and staged for your comfort and consumption. "We aim to please, Sir!"

Back in the land of the pure there are some people making a fuss over Massive Online Open courses (MOOCs). Your first instinct is to ask: who is pushing this, academics or administrators, corporations and the geek brigade? W.D. (Excellent Sheep) writes, there are people out there who are interested in dismantling higher education and selling its parts. In England they go by the name of the Tories. And it's not just higher education. Looks like the NHS will go too. Obviously, someone's going to make a killing here. Crony capitalism (but why not just say capitalism?).

Anything that endures, that represents a sense of place, continuity, must not be allowed to stand in a time of liquid modernity, flexible accumulation. Of course, one has to acknowledge that the old conservative attitudes and the institutions that embodied them were replete with deep and unsettling hierarchies (class distinctions, misogyny). But that is not all that can or should be said about them.

And these so-called 'communication technologies' are just one part of the attack: instantaneity and homogenization..travel light, skim the surface, 'experience' life as an ever revolving sequence of images and spectacles. I say 'communication' but in reality they're more of a mechanism for furthering narcissistic attitudes.

I can eat on the go; and now I can get a university education on the go as well with the help of my trusty mobile phone, as long as I can keep myself away, that is, from the 10,000 books I have on my kindle and the endless t.v. programmes that I've downloaded on my ipad. I can even record my whole fleeting life slipping away and then watch it again on HD.

The University of Nowhere

'The real world has its limits; the imaginary one is infinite.'
--Rousseau.

The techies, accountants, engineers and other dullards get very excited when it comes to technology and its "application" to universities. On-line learning, massive on-line learning. Sandel has a thousand students in his philosophy class. That's awesome! Massive. Give it up for MC Sandel. Stanford can educate 165,000 kids at the switch of a button (er..except they're too busy fornicating or tripping to take advantage of this bright new world).

Of course, they are just the minor players in the game, the foot soldiers, as it were. As with so many other things nowadays: follow the money! (I'd mistakenly written follow, then money..which is also correct!)

Is it teachers, educationists, parents or students themselves who are pushing for these changes? Perhaps they are. But it's much more likely that it's "educational companies" (what are those, for Pete's sake!), Silicon Valley, corporations interested in 'Big Data', data mining. The wonderful online world of data surveillance and corporate greed! All sing together now, and with meaning: Je suis...

The brilliant Monty Python sketch from the Life of Brian: a mob gathers and says in unison: "we're all individuals". From the back a lone voice can be heard: "I'm not!". Classic.

Individualization as a way of control: 'subjectivization'. Choice, choice is what it's about, goddam you.

Why nowhere? Because attachments to a place, to an identity, to tradition eventually slow down the system, prevent the flow of goods/ideas/knowledge/capital. There's no place like home. 

You have to let go of things and acquire others if you wanna grow (with a twist this sounds a bit like that charlatan, Deepak Chopra). It's called the 'natural propensity to truck and barter'. And what's natural has to be right, right? 

Universities aren't the last bastion of resistance against capitalism. They've already been co-opted. The knowledge economy, the research grants, the "research" interests, the predominance of economic thinking in various disciplines, the managerial techniques of the administration, the go-getting, cost-benefit attitude of the students and parents. Universities now sell themselves like brands: think Harvard, LSE, NYU. Also, a journey to the deserts and the mystical east will show you that there's big money involved here. Even Saudi is getting in on the act. The global university, ..we aim to be a 'world-class' university, promote 'excellence', 'innovation' ...this is all a cut & paste job from some third-rate business journal from the 1970s.

guns and information (or the future that never was)

We can push it at twice the speed, get 10 times the data.

"And when do you think you will find some new particles?"

There's a good chance that in three years we will. What still troubles us is that we can't explain 95% of what's out there.

~~

95?! You just blew it, bro'.

Space 1999 was this dark and mysterious programme, back from the old days, the old country, when we could still think about the future and ask ourselves the quintessential question: how old will we be when the future comes.

Of course, it never did come. That is the subject of Graeber's brilliant chapter in his latest book (and earlier online article, 'Declining Profit').

What was so mysterious wasn't the special effects -which always numb modern sensibilities and stifle the imagination- but the idea that human beings were these fragile creatures surrounded by vast and impenetrable oceans of darkness (and there was always the more than significant lurking fear that it was really the darkness within that mattered).

You got to outer space, to the limits, and there was no God there. There, there. We should have know that: when you get to Oakland...or: draw back the curtain and see OZ is really just a fake. All that excitement about escaping earth and what? Dark matter. 

What was it all about? The frontier spirit..going where no man has gone before (but, of course, the reality in the 'wild west' or Israel was that there were men and women there all along!). We wanted to imagine a wilderness then, escape from ourselves. Virtual reality, second life.

A cathedral to man's endless endeavour to pursue useless things. How do you live? Forget that, and dig the hole.

Solaris: he looks in the mirror and asks or is asked: do you know who you are?

"As much as anyone"

Kelvin. Cool. Zero degrees.

~~

So, why the fuss? Well, what else are you going to get enthusiastic about? Science, the road..don't know where it will lead us, but at least it's a road, right? We convince ourselves that if at least we're not the rational animals that can be set apart from all the other dud animals then at least it's our creativity, our boundlessness, our free-floating imagination ("weightlessness") that marks us out (down?up?. A donkey with angel's wings..the blue-eyed ones, not giving a jot about the law, the rhythms of terrestrial life...in the end, finding a way out of time itself. Science and abstraction, like a religious impulse to the timeless.

~~

Higgs-B. What do you hope to learn, then, Professor Higgins?

"Well, you know, how it all began, life, universe, everything"

42 you mean?

Yeah.

Then what's the question? Didn't see that, did you? But, no, tell me: how will it end?

~~

CERN wouldn't work in rat-infested London. Plus, there would be delays due to falling leaves or the wrong kind of snow on the tracks. There would be strikes, or concerns that immigrants were trying to sneak their way into the country through the tunnels. Terrorists would be thinking about it. The Americans might use it as a dark site. Homeless people would want a share. There would be buskers playing "Hey Jude" on an out of tune guitar. It would be closed for repairs for much of the year. Elvis, Diana, Osama B, they'd all be down there, kept in some silent chamber. All the mad people, too, since there was no more money to house them.

The mad, the irrational have always been kept on the outskirts. Taking the place of the lepers or the untouchables in other societies, other times. the dreamers, the barbarians, the refuseniks, the nomads against the order of society, the rationally intelligible cosmos.

But of course, it was the excesses and extravagances of reason that produced the most horrific acts of violence..wasn't that the 20th century, the ordered chaos? The sleep of reason..which, on one interpretation is not the lack of reason but the dreams of reason..reason imagining it can control everything: pure extension, dumb animals, women and Jews.

~~

Distraction

'Harvard Magazine describes how “faculty members across Harvard are exploring and inventing new ways to engage students and reimagine education in today’s global, digital, and fast-changing world,” (there are those catchphrases again!) and “adding a digital twist [...] to enhance teaching and learning on campus and beyond.”

We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” (to use Thomas Friedman’s word in a 2013 Times column) for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it. [...] We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.'

--A. Winer.

~

There's that dreaded word: capitalism!

Much of the analysis of the effects of the internet is about the psychological impacts (on the ability and desire to read, say) on the individual. Skimming, surfing, procrastination, attention deficit, verbal hyperinflation, the lack of silence and stillness in our lives. But, again, it's very much the individual and not really about society. Fair enough. But what you'd rally like to see is an analysis of how this fits into the narrative-economic and political-of capitalism. 

'Still, we and our ways of living are dying all the time. The tech giants will continue to ply us with their addictive products, personal devices will proliferate, and we’ll keep looking for ways not to feel alone...techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building.'

It is game over; you know that in your heart of hearts. The things you take seriously are a laugh; and what people take seriously you can't but help feel amused by. Sounds patronizing, I know. 

In the time that remains. D'Est.

Today, the ancient light falling all around you; the darkness of your hands. 

Pathologies of the institutional life

One of my greatest desires has to be the desire to be left alone (not to be alone, which is quite another thing).

At the university one increasingly hears a lot of jargon, bullshit, fakery, pseudo-serious posturing, a lot of old malarky, and codswallop dressed up as sophistication, and so on. We will "produce" (that should be a giveaway for starters): "leaders", "world leaders",..we will be "a centre of excellence" (well, yes, who is going to say we'll be a centre of mediocrity or just-getting-through?). Critical thought, critical reasoning..our students will be "global citizens" in a multi-cultural, fast-changing, technology-saturated, false world of soundbytes and meaningless aggression. Ethics 101, business ethics 102, will guide students on how to come across as, well, "ethical".

We believe in racial/sexual/gender/ethnic/ physical/religious and all other kinds of equality (except we don't). We must "look forward". The knowledge economy, for Christ's sake. In the space of 140 characters describe your contribution to the university. Absolute subservience, I would say, Sir!

Let us set up a committee to decide on the value of committees. Aha, communism lives on in the uni.

We must "empower" the students today, the leaders of tomorrow (and bollocks to all of you in the past). There is zero tolerance for zero intolerance. We must "equip" our students with the "skills" that will enable them to navigate an ever-changing future, but also prepare them for the worst (that they will not have a future thanks to us).

We must produce generalists for the market..that is what the market wants...people who are so general that they don't know or can't be bothered to answer any questions. We must move to massive online education. Why not multiple choice questions (they work so well for SAT)?

Descartes was:

a) a town in rural France
b) left back for France
c) an 18th century prostitute
d) I do not know.

Partial credit will be awarded for all rough work. Only answer in the space provided. This is a closed book exam, though you may phone a friend. Do not write in pencil. Do not write in pencil...Do not write...

pixelation nation

"The new American dream is to build a really (cool) personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour's large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium -- to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what's real and what's not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers' virtual scrims."
---Michelle Orange.

The way of the future: 24/7; a blank, block of time, broken down into bits but with each moment blurring into the other.  We move through time (or it moves through us); it is there as a constraint ("time is money"), something to be overcome, never integrated into anything deeper in our lives than shopping, consumption or staging ourselves. 

Average number of hours slept by an American:

1900: 10.5 hours
1950: 8 hours
2000: 6.5 hours.

We are supposed to be "all there"...even when asleep we're floating just under the radar..the slick movement of the hand following the eye in a friction-less world. "The sleep of reason brings forth..."

The ancient alignment of the body with the rhythms of our Earth. The seasons, replaced by dry-as-dust abstractions, pleasures that offer no repose or replenishment.

Bertie:

'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.  

timescape

The purpose: to keep time together. Everything is working against this.

"The lived duree is not a question of length but of depth or density."
---J. Berger.

Fractured times. Return, again and again, to the small things and places you know, against the tide of what you don't. 

There is a locked-in quality to the day. I sit all day reading about the dissolution of time and before I know it the morning has passed and it is late afternoon. I sit all day without a cinnamon roll (yes, hard to believe, Roxana!) and am oblivious of the quality of light outside. 

No-one believes in walls any more and yet still we stand naked to one another as strangers. 

When time is money...I realize I'm very poor.

Keep it together. Time is abstract, empty, quickening and thinning by the day. Watch the trailer, read the review, get the gist of what's going on, skim an article, get to the bottom dollar, "keep it brief and simple", read a guide book, a guide book for dummies...Marx in less than 100 pages, cut & paste, chicken soup for the soul, instant coffee, scroll down or fast forward to the good bits. Is there such a thing as soft-core porn nowadays? Send an sms, receive a "like", every site trying to grab my attention, flog me something. Plug in, tune in, get with the flow.

....

....

....

You walk slowly down from Monkham's Place, down past the leafy chestnut trees and the cricket field at the corner. The summer dust is mixed with sweat. Up again past the one-storied houses, flat and painted pale blue like temporary shelters. Up to the old railway bridge with its darkened stone near the Roding and you look out for miles ahead, see the land parceled out (by capital?) into an abstract pattern. The land, time out of mind. A church spire. The church empty, no doubt. It is hard not to think of other people before you who have stopped at this point and caught their breath or how others will walk on with heads down in the future. We walk in places nowadays without any sense of continuity or connectivity.

The high summer grass, the light from your childhood which blissfully never changes, the golden light from 1976 like cells or seeds of time itself. The way the light and the seasons change, the moon finding its old position every number of years or so, the ancient sway of the universe and down here in this corner too. One finds in a narrower perspective a wider perspective. As if to say, by being nothing everything can be seen, reported. A bit like Walser or Pessoa, those artists of the small zero.

"Wider, too, the passage of time, the turning seasons, all the lush liveliness that comes and goes and comes again, nature that abides."

---Lawrence Weschler.

You wonder about the lives of your readers, the people who have come and gone from the black sun. How do their lives go on; have they aged, for instance? And what do they have for breakfast? I shall try and remember.

The purpose of time is to keep us together as companions. But, in truth, if that happened time would be timeless, time would cease to be time; time would be space and I would find your name.

~~~

Everything that is good is perfectly still.
(after Zeno)

what I expect to learn

Searching for an essay by Annette Baier you come across scores of websites which have summaries or analyses of her work in general or of the particular chapter you're looking for. Invariably the post starts of with "what I expect to learn" and quickly proceeds to a number of questions:  "Who is Annette Baier?", "Why does she reject Kantian universalism? " and so on.

Everything is out there: notes, commentaries, links, references, quotes, fragments of the essay..everything, that is, bar the actual bloody thing! I'm sure the chapter and the book actually exists in tangible form somewhere in the real world, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an online version floating around amongst the trillions and trillions of blogs and webpages. But what I learn is that what I expect to learn cannot be found-no matter how powerful a "search engine" you have. The simple notion of a book, the possibility of being able to slowly read something in one's hands and not be ceaselessly and frantically always searching for it...this seems like a skill that will be lost on future generations.

Instead, we grasp at-almost in desperation- some quick fix, some immediate illumination, or easy to swallow sugar-coated palliative, as if we could become wise with better technology, greater "access", quicker fingers and eyes: glancing, skimming, dipping into, this huge accumulation of data and information. We 'grasp at', but rarely grasp. Why should I always expect to learn, understand? Yes, but also: why should  I expect when there is no effort? Thirdly, what can I expect given the levels of distraction and sensory overload, the lack of stillness in one's life?

~~~

What do women want from moral theory? Do they even want theory? Has ethics narrowed its vision by focusing on a particular set of questions and approaches: what obligations do I have to other people and what are the grounds for them? Can we still, today, talk coherently about the good life, and do we need a shared notion of it or is a purely subjective assessment all we can reasonably expect and/or all we should really aim for?

What is the role of love, friendship, sociability, dependencies, relationships, and care in the good life? Is this an area of 'thought' that has traditionally been neglected by men? Is there another form of cleverness and is it gendered?

Iris M., P. Foot, A. Baier, S. Wolf, M. Nussbaum....

Is there an underlying anti-Utilitarianism in their thought?

Something that is perhaps related: Carol Gilligan-whose book looks fascinating- on the distortion produced by men thinking about relationships (Freud, for example).

The limits of abstraction, of "theory", of seeing things in the cold light of the day.

The lone, isolated (heroic) man, fighting against everyone, against the world, pitting himself against the elements, negative space, time and dissolution, the entropy of the world. The searcher, the hunter, the man of few words, impassive, resolute, the mystic-seeker-who will find God on his (His) own.

Western man, who must climb a mountain, escape from himself to find himself.

"Why?"
"Because it was there"

Freedom = freedom from.

But what of the gatherers? What of those who acknowledge there is mystery in life itself. Natality.

notes from the underground

As a child you thought of trolls as being quite frightening. When you grew up you realized that they still are!

Of course, there was the initial excitement of encountering your first genuine troll. For a while you felt a bit out of sorts. But then you remembered the first few pages on Pepys and how, despite losing his balance, he managed to keep a small area of calm and impartiality in his mind from being disturbed by the events he was surrounded by. And by writing about it one could distance oneself from one's momentary and instinctive feelings.

Then a kind of sadness to it all and you reserve judgement-at least for the while. It is genuinely disappointing to see people with half-decent minds acting so silly, so childishly. You think to yourself: there are some people out there who need some kind of help. Of course, there is a more extreme form of trolls, those who heckle and harass women (why do you suspect that most trolls are men? Because of their aggressiveness, their cowardice?).

But what is it about trolls? Is it ultimately their loneliness and social ineptitude, their lack of grace and etiquette that makes you think they're interesting-at least for a short period of time?

Does the internet and anonymity bring out some of the pent up hatred and frustrations of people?  These very same people would not dare utter such comments in a face-to-face conversation (which makes you think that they are either bullies or the childhood victims of bullies).

How does one deal with a troll? Ignore them, reply to them, try and understand them? Quite frankly, I see enough crazies to realize that there is often an insurmountable barrier between normal, reasonable people and those who write notes from the underground. It is incredibly draining trying to put yourself in their shoes (did Smith write on this?). What kind of powers of imagination and sympathy does one need, and can there be a limit to one's abilities to comprehend difference? How, for example, does one talk to (and not talk at) a racist, an anti-semite, a misogynist, a fundamentalist or a troll? In a similar vein, can we understand madness or those afflicted with some sort of pathology?

You begin to wonder about your troll. West Midlands. Could just be some fucked-up desi (most likely). Or a bitter middle-aged man whose life is disintegrating all around him. You think how hatred and bitterness can reduce a grown person to a child-like or primitive state. You could refer him to your psychologist friend, of course, but you fear he might attack her. Then you think: trolls aren't that interesting after all. Goodness and kindness...yes, now that is something that is endlessly fascinating. 

lower case, movable type

'The novel is encyclopaedic: all of the different manners of expressing oneself in words can find their place there...Surrealism is always non-academic, always looking for the source of human activity, looking into the back alleys and the darkest clearing in the forest for excitement. 

There are places that have an unbroken tradition, stretching thousands of years back, of telling the same stories over and over again. Mostly here in the West we have lost the ability to protect our culture orally, and maybe we are in danger. What will happen when all the books have flared up and all the Kindles lost their battery power?'

---Sjon. 

~~~

No more elites, and don't fret about it; we're all lower case nowadays. The end of capitalization/capitalism/K. Universal equivalences: everything can be exchanged for everything else, stood in its place, so to speak. Relative prices equals relative evaluations. And to the extent that labour, too, becomes a commodity...well, then you have superfluous labour: I am you and you are me. More: this machine is worth 5 'hands', has so much 'horse power'..bring it all down to some common unit: energy or money. 

Pushpin is as good as poetry. Every place starts to look the same, everyone starts to speak in the same affected way. 

The great publicizing machine that must find some lost long manuscript, drag some obscure author out of hiding, or reveal the most intimate details of a celebrity-and you ain't no-one unless you're someone-all so that it can be forgotten the very next day, repeated with new characters in the oldest game in town. But I'm repeating myself. Like Gaddis. 

The great machine, churning out 'research' papers and commentaries and second-hand exegesis and scraps and quotes and heavy tomes of deep criticism and marginal analysis...deconstruction, revisionism, distillations, concatenations. But by the time it's done you realize it's all been done before or you wonder to yourself what the whole point of it was in the first place. Another game, another diversion of the mind from life, another bit of 'play', which isn't so far away from entertainment and being an 'event'. 

With so much out there, drowning out the silence, the space for reflection, you must hoard the fragments or, better still, gloss them as they pass over you like so many flickering images on a screen. 

~~~

Gutenberg: the Reformation, scientific treatises: the move away from authoritative voices, the finding of one's own individual one. To be with a book, alone, is a kind of freedom. 

At the same time: standardization, the move to vernacular languages, and the book as the first commodity. What is the political importance of this (the twofold meaning of 'subjectivity')? Nationalism and markets. From now on everyone is the same, in some fundamental sense. To stand outside the market, beyond or below state definitions (of your own free will), is to be a heretic or at least an eccentric, a degenerate outsider.

~~~

A very interesting piece by Andrew Winer here.

How to find chance encounters again, how to escape technology? Is technology just a way of replacing ritual? In another sense, though, its allure is that it offers endless possibilities, indeterminacy-when what we wanted or needed was something more rooted, more specific.

...the way techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building to the way we keep “handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control” every time we reach “for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember.”

~~~

 


'A letter always comes from the past, from elsewhere, rather than from the ever-insistent here and now of the digital. Thinking about writing a letter is different from thinking about writing an email.'

~~~

'The purity and beauty of failure' (which resonates with the Walser/Pessoa theme of the last few weeks).
Amit Chaudhri.

 

red

"...the Great Dutchman's severe, subdued study, no longer of nature but of reality."

---Z. Herbert.

"red, as an infinite task."

---Iris M.

~~~

The (f)utility of electronic communication:

Over the last two weeks a number of online conversations(?) have ended abruptly with statements such as:

1. Obviously I thought we only differed over semantics, let's meet over coffee so I can clarify my points.
2. I can explain myself if we meet in person. Let's have lunch.
3. "We" need to define our terms more carefully. I'll do that later. I haven't got time now.
4. I write because I write.

Now, this might be seen in a positive light in that the participants have realized that communication over the net misses out on a lot and that personal, face-to-face conversation is needed. On the other hand, I find it hugely frustrating and really a cop out since in all cases it was more like a get-out clause, a way of not having to explain anything or really engage with the other person. Instead, there is an indefinite and vague deferral to 'some other time', a casual indifference which basically means: "yeah, like, forget it." And that's the way the net works: one can unplug, disconnect, ignore others whenever wants to. A kind of freedom, yes, but something that in real life is not looked upon in a favourable light.

~~~

In front of you, a driver with a dark tanned and leathery face, hours of concentration worn deep into it, a profound sense of being deep in the world and yet also, strangely, free from it. In the grassy island between the two roads an old woman with thick spectacles stands patiently by her paraplygeic son who sits in a wheelchair under a tree. She waits, waits for someone to hand her some money as their cars crawl to a halt before the nauseating red of the traffic lights. I think of that woman's decision to buy those glasses, necessary in order that at least one of them can carve out some space in the world for themselves, which in this case simply means: merely to survive. When you read the words "the noblest function of things is to to be contemplated" you realize how much stupidity there is in the world.

If religion or philosophy teaches us that the highest end of men and women is contemplation then two hurrahs for the death of religion, the death of philosophy.

~~~

For tens of thousands of years human beings have been praying to some Being, some higher spirit, asking for forgiveness or that they and their loved ones be protected from evil, or asking, in desperation, for some kind of help. Is that making good "use" of God? Only someone without a religious sensibility would ask such a meaningless question or think of the divine in such a narrow light. For how can God open a door if we do not knock?

On the other side of the road is a beautiful remnant of old Lahore, a house that seems quiet and peaceful deaspite all the chaos beyond its outer boundaries. There is a beautiful old brick wall, parts of it painted in thick paint, and in the inner courtyard some dusty old trees, filtering the light, creating patterns of light and shade as old as time itself in the inner space.

I think of these old places, soon to be destroyed in the name of progress and development, as the last breathing spaces of the city, like dark wells in a desert, places of imaginings and final memories that will soon be torn up and thrown in the air, like so many fluttering scraps of brightly coloured paper.

Red is the colour of our memory and of our myths.

The English Major

There's a wonderful post about the importance of the English Major by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. But what immediately struck me was this photograph. Now, this may just be a reflection of my own state of mind, but it does seem to me that this image is deliberately provocative. England might not be sexy, but English is. I don't know if anyone has noticed this but there do seem to be a lot of adverts on the sidebars, (dating ads, from what I can gather) of skimpily dressed women or cartoons with the caption 'undress me' etc. All seems to be quite normal.

It may be that images affect men and women differently. A woman looking at the picture above might look at it quite innocently.

To be honest, I think we'd all be a bit better off with fewer images, less music, and less noise. What chance of judgement is there when we are bombarded with 'information', when the imagination is given free play? 'Taste' has now come to mean-except in a few rarefied circles-the same thing as raw, unrefined,wanton preferences or desires, an expression of pure subjectivity. The irony being, of course, that the desires themselves are in large part constructed by the big corporations. But to talk of standards, norms, or understanding when it comes to taste is to at once be accused of snobbery and elitism. To talk of the dangers of images, the abuse of language, is to open oneself up to the accusation of being an old fogey, a prude.

But isn't reading a pure escape, a flight of the imagination that mirrors, even if darkly, the writer's creative instincts? Yes, in some ways the hyperinflation of words, the exponential growth in the printed word (or the electronic word) also has similar effects, but you wonder if we aren't talking about different mechanisms here, and if the ancient contract between word and world doesn't set up all kinds of resistances.Perhaps ebooks will change that as they alter our physical experience of reading-the texture of the texts, the notion of a fixed place and reading (as opposed to reading on the go). Mobility, speed, flexibility, the quickening of the eye, lightness, the undesirability of 'boundaries'...all of these things, so essential to the domination of capitalism, will no doubt make the book, silence, the commons, the Jewish/Islamic aniconic attitude or temperament less palatable. Instead, the deluge. The major will become a minor. Preserved, no doubt, for nothing today can allowed to die in a natural way, its memory stored somewhere in the land of google or in a 'cloud'.

The ancient skills of looking carefully, of looking away, of letting things rest, of not reaching out to grasp everything..the ability to say "I do not know", or "I do not want to know", all of that seems lost in an age that prizes the tearing away of veils. Open access, 'the knowledge economy', the super highways of the net, instant access, free downloads, live streaming, the porn shop of the heart where you can get whatever you want. You are 'one click' away from nirvana. Yes, that's it, our lives streaming away. That blur in the photograph, that was me...I think.  The revolution will be televised. The revolution will be television. Dumb it down, check out.

Drink up, Khayyam. Our bones are old, our soul is out of style.