Well, okay, I was always on the outskirts of London, like a Steppenwolf, and I don't really remember too much of the seventies-perhaps not enough to associate with the literature, music of the times anyway...but only perhaps. Those who know me will say: more like a child of the 1870's ! And there is some truth to that, or at least I like to imagine so. Something of that older world survives-even if it is a site of ruins..ancient heart, modern mind. Have I always been so very old?!
Or was it I who was the only one who wasn't serious?
We now think in terms of decades: the roaring twenties, the chaotic thirties, the permissive sixties, the greedy eighties and (perhaps C will correct me here) the fifties were a time when all was perfect in the green and pleasant land, when England was England. This decade, no doubt, will be summarised by that one event on 9/11-perhaps not unreasonably so. [Note: I can't even remember what the nineties were!]. But the seventies, what were they?
The Seventies marked the end of the Keynesian consensus, the birth of neoliberalism (the first 9/11 being a convenient starting date). Capitalism changes gears. Thatcher, on assuming power, changes number 10 so that it has a grander feel to it. The new always has to take on the forms of the past to assure itself, to construct around itself a halo of legitimacy. And so the interior is re-modeled on older forms: pastiche: the re-creation of the past. Is this because power is acutely aware of time biting into it, and that only buildings , space, can represent the continuity of power? The King is dead, long live the King.
[Incidentally, the White House is modeled on a country house to distinguish it from old Europe and monarchical power but is also a series of stage sets. Bush's theatrical performances in the 'reading room' are a case in point. The Kremlin, instead of being a springboard for power ends up entrapping those who would wield power..as if the very contours of space determine how one acts (this made me think of Kadare's 'Successor')]. But behind the facades, what insecurities! How the lips quiver below those grand mustachioed smiles (Elgar, Stalin)
Elgar: enigmatic music that seems to capture something that is quintessentially English, as if to say that the patterns of the landscape mirrored those of his soul. Freud's unheimlich..blood and soil.
The seventies is also the decade when history came to an end, when nothing happened. After the exuberance of the sixties what remained could only be the afterglow of the ashes, empty and vacuous, a reaction to the perceived dissolution of the sixties: post-history, post--modernity. A stark realism after the supposed innocence of what went before. In political terms: realpolitik. But there was also the appeal of the Edwardians in this decade. What was that but a nostalgia for an unblighted golden summer's afternoon before the looming shadows of the Great War had entered the soul? There is the projection of stability-even though the reality was one of highly contested issues- and clearly marked class divisions from which the poor can comfortably be excluded (costume-dramas would become immensely popular).
But everything about the seventies is fake, is porn. It is the beginning of a retro culture (modernism has exhausted itself in experimentation) and a time when conservative forces would be gathering strength (Iran, Saudi, Pakistan, America, India). Perhaps of more significance is the close neoconservative alliance with neoliberalism (economically) even as it remains culturally conservative (thus demonstrating the cultural contradictions of capitalism). But we also see the growth of a conservation movement (the environment, the heritage industry, the archival instinct, 'the countryside' [just as it is being dismantled], Brideshead Revisited).
But England is going, going.
Cemented over. The reflected lights at Blackpool dance and grin but the pleasure-seekers who once moved jauntily now all have the same mechanical expressions and gestures about them. The seventies are null and void.
One wonders if the depictions of a highly stratified society were not, in the final analysis, for the benefit of power or the elites -as a way of preventing the slide away from the old order of things -but for those who had been clamouring for change for so long-the left? In a time of consumer affluence (the share of the top o.1 % of the population had been declining for many years now) might not the idea of radical class distinctions further revolutionary politics? What impetus, what forward movement could the left have it if had actually succeeded in its political aims? [Nothing grates on the Marxist's nerves more than this lack of precision..peasants and the lumpenproletariat are always so inconvenient!]
In this sense , then, Thatcher represents not the restoration of power to a traditional ruling class but the second stage of capitalism, liquid modernity, where the very notion of class comes to be of little importance, where the self-made man is king and everyone is (potentially) that man. We're all working class now! (or, one could just as well say, we're all middle class now and we've never had it so good..so speaks the Eloi!).
The sixties, with its narcissistic exploration of the self would fuel the neoliberalism of the seventies and the 'me-generation' of the eighties.
C:
This blog being posted under Politics, I feel I have little to offer by way of comment BUT:The Fifties - Everything perfect in a green and pleasant land? Not in MY world. Mind you, things were going on smoothly enough: lots of gadgets were coming on stream, women's mags were full of good ideas for Home Improvement and DIY was becoming the leisure activity of choice. TV started to make an impact - even my gran had one in her Council house in Welling.
Fashion was fun: stilletto heels and shorter skirts, although (proper) young ladies still wore white gloves in summer. There was definitely a feeling around of the post-war pieces being picked up and of renewal. Generally, it was agreed: We'd never had it so good.' BUT THEN the rot set in: Teddy Boys appeared on the scene - my friend Rita fell in love with one and was expelled from school for flouting the uniform rules by wearing winkle-pickers and chopping six inches off her tunic. After Bill Haley and his Comets hit these shores it was downhill all the way.
But I'm really not the one to talk about the Fifties: by 1955 I was a sober-minded law student whose only nod to the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist was to advertise my Leftish tendencies by wearing the regulation black roll-neck sweater, black tights,T-bar shoes and a duffle coat - and haunting Bunjies coffee shop in Soho. All around me the chaps were discussing politics, while I was reading Gide, Tagore, Kerouac and Ginsberg. A poor effort, really.One recollection which is very clear is that as a student in the Fifties one really was poor - none of my group could have survived without Egg on Toast and Tea at the ABC cafe (one shilling and 6d) and the canteen on the top floor of India House where you got as much rice, curry and dahl as you could eat for 2 shillings and 6d. The canteen at Ceylon House in Queensway was cheap, too, but the curry there was so devastatingly hot we only went there occasionally.
Thanks. I didn't know what to put this under..and I didn't want to add any more labels! Maybe I'll add one called 'general rubbish' (don't say that'll mean I'll have to transfer most of the posts there! )
C, next time you're in town let's go tramping around to see if we can find any of those places..it can be part of the Molly Hughes search?
Kerouac and Ginsber..Gawd...I'll never here the end of this from Jonah! :)
I was thinking of the retrospective view of the fifties..how people see it now. Cricket and village greens and women who knew where their place was?
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
America Owns the Skies
If you break it, you own it.America owns the skies. Does she really! Has she forgotten that the meek shall inherit the earth?
Why the emphasis on ownership in the language of war? To that one can add the obnoxious phrase, "collateral damage." As Ubo reminds me, when an army person says a few lines have been destroyed he isn't talking of art but of human beings.
Hoorah! No more contact with the vile earth!
---Marinetti, 1905.
Stanley Baldwin, addressing Parliament, 10 November, 1932.
The bomber will always get through...The only defence is offence. Which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself.
[Why does this sound all-too familiar to us..pre-emptive war, perhaps?]
Of course, there is a great psychological comfort in imagining oneself pure and everyone else as 'corrupted', impure or 'backward'. And from this it follows that the clean will always have the right to smite the unclean. What else would one call the bombing of people from the skies, the impersonal and indiscriminate precise murder of the earth-dwellers, except, perhaps, clinical ? Huxley was right to remind us: the Anglo-Saxon, the Benthamite, love of straight lines, of tidiness..these are words that bring a shudder to our being: political hygiene.
What is so peculiar is that the end is almost willed in some circles in the first decades of the century. Inter-war literature is thick with it. Things have to get worse before they can get better. The Rites of Spring. And if the 'new man' cannot be borne then only violence can produce him. Perhaps this is a remnant of some deep-rooted apocalyptic tradition (the sky is falling on our head), some vestige of the deep awareness that we, like everything else in the world, are destined to pass. How strange that Darwinian thought could produce so much pessimism in Europe.
But when did it begin?
In 1915, 1916 Zeppelin bombs killed 556 people in Britain. Eighteen children in Poplar in June, 1917.
D.H.Lawrence:
In the winter of 1915-16 the city in some way perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors.
But when did it begin?
Perhaps it was always part of our imagination and technology just took time to catch up?
Lower Manhattan was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light lit the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the light of burning . . . Dust and black smoke came pouring into the street, and were presently shot with red flame...
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner...
As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead: men, women and children mixed together as though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese.
---H.G.Wells, War in the Air, 1907
But when did it begin?
November 1, 1911. The Italians on the Turks. But already the law had sanctioned the new world. At the first Hague Peace conference the medieval consensus that prohibited an attack on an unfortified town was abandoned. At the second, 1907, bombardment of undefended towns from the sea was permitted. In 1920 the threat of revolution leads to the Emergency Powers Act (sound familiar?) The chief of Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, writes a draft paper for Churchill suggesting that the air force might use limited bombing of English cities to quell the revolt. It is dropped, but when it comes to 'imperial defence'..that's a different matter...
Frightfulness becomes part of the official discourse. Shock and awe. Don't sound surprised. Bombs were used on the tribesmen on the Indian frontier from 1915 onward and Darfur (1916) and in Somalialand and Waziristan..why do all of these names sound so familiar? Churchill, it transpires, was all in favour of using poison gas on the 'uncivilised tribes'.
Bomber Harris in 1924,
The Arab and the Kurd ..now know what real bombing means, in casualty and damage; they know now that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out..with no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.
Forty-five minutes..where have I heard that before?
Auden, witnessing the Japanese bombing of Hankow would say, it was a cosmic offence, an insult to the whole of Nature, and the entire earth.The 'helmeted airman, ' like a hawk, was ready to kill from above, to suddenly kill as if from nowhere with the greatest of agility. The quickness of mind, the speed and agility of body..were they not bringing 'infinite justice,' these new gods of the sky?
'We in Europe heard the news of the bombing of Hiroshima on the evening of the same day. The immediate correspondences between the two events include a fireball descending without warning from a clear sky, both attacks being timed to coincide with the civilians of the targeted city going to work in the morning, with the shops opening, with children in school preparing their lessons.
Return to the summer of 1945. Sixty-six of Japan's largest cities had been burned down by napalm bombing. In Tokyo a million civilians were homeless and 100,000 people had died. They had been, according to Major General Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the fire bombing operations, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". President Franklin Roosevelt's son and confidant said that the bombing should continue "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." On July 18 the Japanese emperor telegraphed President Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt, and once again asked for peace. The message was ignored.
A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Radford boasted that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities - a nomadic people". The bomb, exploding above a hospital in the centre of the city, killed 100,000 people instantly, 95% of them civilians. Another 100,000 died slowly from burns and effects of radiation. '
---John Berger, The First Fireball
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Long Sunday
An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. ‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.
---Kafka.
Anyone who has lived in the west will have a sense of how true these words ring; the paralysing dread that accompanies the end of a Sunday morning. However, this unnameable fear is itself receding as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell one day from the other.
'This picture (Seurat's) is a single mosaic of boredom,...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box intensely pre-occupied. Hapless idleness and expressionless brooding..an internal (infernal?) utopia of distance...such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself.'
---E. Bloch.
The restlessness. A thousand projects started, all abandoned. Is it possible to imagine a simple happiness again, a life that is not burdened by the thought of incompleteness, by capitalism's false infinity? And what, exactly, are we to make of holidays that are marketed as 'an escape' , our desire for virtual realities, or the ever more daring demand for 'thrills'? Is this, ultimately, nothing but a sign of our profound boredom, a cry of desperation?
Russell is a timely reminder that there was once a time when the task of the philosopher was to say something about how one should live one's life and not just comment on what one can know or strive to appear to be intelligent (Zizek).
'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 terrestial 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.'
Casino Culture:
To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time-at least momentarily.
---J.Franzen.
---Kafka.
Anyone who has lived in the west will have a sense of how true these words ring; the paralysing dread that accompanies the end of a Sunday morning. However, this unnameable fear is itself receding as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell one day from the other.
'This picture (Seurat's) is a single mosaic of boredom,...vacant faces, the group of other forms for the most part wooden verticals, like puppets from a toy-box intensely pre-occupied. Hapless idleness and expressionless brooding..an internal (infernal?) utopia of distance...such a bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the landscape of a painted suicide which does not become one only because it even lacks resolution towards itself.'
---E. Bloch.
The restlessness. A thousand projects started, all abandoned. Is it possible to imagine a simple happiness again, a life that is not burdened by the thought of incompleteness, by capitalism's false infinity? And what, exactly, are we to make of holidays that are marketed as 'an escape' , our desire for virtual realities, or the ever more daring demand for 'thrills'? Is this, ultimately, nothing but a sign of our profound boredom, a cry of desperation?
Russell is a timely reminder that there was once a time when the task of the philosopher was to say something about how one should live one's life and not just comment on what one can know or strive to appear to be intelligent (Zizek).
'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 terrestial 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.'
Casino Culture:
To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time-at least momentarily.
---J.Franzen.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Individual and the Community
Love is a series of scars. No heart is as whole as a broken heart.
---Rabbi Nahman.
Quite often one will hear the words, 'the Muslim community'-a rather meaningless and trite phrase if ever there was one. It's not just that it represents belonging to an imagined, monolithic entity or that one's position on a particular issue is supposed to be explicable in terms of this identity, it's that the very notion 'community' is a construct of late capitalism, a reaction to the atomization that it produces, a warm after-glow set against the narrow (and false) individualism that is supposed to have supplanted it.
But in essence, these two terms, individual and society, are not so fundamentally distinct as to warrant a radical disjunction. In the reign of quantity, society is nothing but the accumulation of individuals. For Bentham society was a "fiction" or, as the latter-day saint would say: there is no such thing as society. And one could with equal reason say that the individual is a "communistic fiction" (Myrdal).
The community is a fictitious body composed of the individual persons who are considered constituting, as it were, its members. The interests of the community then is what?-The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.
---Bentham, 'An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation'
In modern consciousness there is not a common being but a self , and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, its unique, irreducible character, free of the contrivances and conventions, the masks and the hypocrisies, the distortions of the self by society.
---Daniel Bell, 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism'
The presiding idea of the individual against society is also the predominance of liberty over equality and solidarity in the western political tradition. the triumph of capitalism is one reason why one will rarely hear a western leader talk about politics in terms of Justice, Fraternity, or Solidarity. The language of justice is replaced by the language of the markets.
However, this only represents an accurate picture of the first stage, the solid stage of capitalism. In liquid modernity , the restraints of norms, society or bourgeois respectability- against which the avant-garde could press back- have dissipated. The problem for the individual (and art) now is not to break free but to ask what is meant by freedom when there is nothing to be free from. The problem now is one of leisure and boredom, how to kill time (the Eloi). There is no more tension between the market and the Republic, citoyen and bourgeois. The end of politics, the victory of the sea-gypsies. Remember, modernism starts with the profound desire to escape the earth (Marinetti).
The revolt against convention which was a sacred duty in the 19 th century is now, as a result of greater flexibility of society not obviously appealing.
From Iris Murdoch, 'Existentialism and Mystics':
Liberalism, then, destroys tradition through challenging authority. In a society where every man's opinion is equally valuable there is no unity of outlook [this is mirrored in art: the waning of a common symbolic order: C.Fuller]. This follows overspecialisation, the worship of techniques...Liberalism is a creed which dissipates and relaxes; and it prepares the way for that which is its own negation.: the artificial mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
'Existential political myth':
An age of anti-essentialist thinking, anti-metaphysical. A move away from all that is abstract: there is only the contingent..one might say, there is only the surface. For Hegel there is only the phenomenal show and nothing outside it (the pure immanence of reality..to be alone in Paradise!..Levinas: Gagarin, on reaching the limits of outer space says: "the re is no god here", thus confirming that man is the measure of all things, that man encounters no 'other', just himself or the products of his own mind).
The lived world is the real world (and therefore the best of all possible worlds) and has its own truth criteria within it. From now on the truth of life will have to be discovered from within history (what does it mean to say that truth is historical? Burckhardt). The way in which we picture the world becomes reality. So, the solipsistic individual, cut off from any transcendental truth-knowable or not-becomes our reality. There is no human nature or determinable essence, no telos, only eternal striving, only existence. Man is nothing (neant). Marx would say: Man is nothing, Time is everything. Only at the end of time is Man redeemed again. His aspirations are subject to no role external to itself or common to others. [see Motherland for the Russian tradition]
A universalist individualism is now impossible. So those who are morally sensitive and intelligent enough not to be taken in by capitalism embrace a solipsistic and hubristic individualism [on the shallowness of homo economicus see Mary Douglas, 'Missing Persons']
The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of savagery-that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behaviour and emotions. Comfort isolates, on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization.
---Valery
The cult of personality has deep roots in the Puritan and Romantic revolt against authority external to the individual. But it is also the desire to be free from nature or order, to invent oneself ceaselessly. Modern man is haunted by time, which is to say he is haunted by death.
The End of Politics, the End of Community.
What binds people together nowadays? "Organic solidarity"? what obliges me to open my hand to my brother? If politics is the site at which we are bound and free, the place where we are at once united and distinct, is it possible to still talk in terms of politics when there are only individuals, each with their own private, incommunicable vision of the good?
Nancy writes poignantly about how the death of Communism is more than the ceasing of a political system: it is the the demise of a horizon, a possibility, a way of thinking about community. Of course, it was a false community from the outset since it was, in essence, tainted by a 'western' and materialistic understanding, a revolt against the very traditions of the land (the Communists' love for the machine was no less than that of their capitalist counterparts..witness China now !).
But perhaps it is fair to say that in the very notion of community there is always a sense of loss, of a falling away? Why are we always harking back for some lost sense of unity? Is this a remnant of Arcadia or the Garden , or is it a longing for membership in a mystical body?
It is tempting to say that the end of the left marks the end of politics, perhaps the end of history even. but what of the disconcerting possibility that it has been the success of the left that has ended politics? Iris writes, the moral energy of the socialist movement was founded , or at least animated, by the desire for equality and efficiency and the revulsion towards all forms of exploitation. Surely the parliamentary labour party (along with the trade unions) have achieved their primary goal-that of political participation, to be counted amongst the ranks? And isn't labour, the standard of living, the measure of all value now? (It's the economy, stupid!) The Left, with its passion for modernization, its messianic desire to sweep away all that was remotely associated with the past, the imperative to tidy-up the messy world as it was and re-shape it to what it should be (whence the distrust of philosophy in favour of action), its contempt for limits and tradition, in this and so many other ways it was already in the camp of its opponent. Once the revolt against the Father is over, once the initial thrill of the frenzy subsides, the question remains: what is to be done? The warmth of any common purpose has drained away.
It is tempting to say that the demise of communism signalled the dissolution, the dislocation of community. This can hardly be denied. But it seems as if the roots of it go back much further: isn't Descartes' positing that of an isolated individual, isn't the enclosure movement already the destruction of the commons?
Can we now think of community except in negative terms, as something parochial, myopic in its outlook? Community as the place where everything is reconciled, as a false hope for wholeness, innocence, and completeness when we live in shattered time? But perhaps this is to formulate things int eh wrong way since it is to think of it terms of happiness, as a state of being where 'love stilleth the will'. Might it not be that it is the place where the death of the individual is not meaningless, a place beyond technopolitical domination or happiness? Might not community be the place where I find myself, where I am myself..a reformulation of the cogito: we are, therefore I think. There can be no 'I' without the 'other'..this is the cross we bear...
The problem for 'community' in the western tradition is that it is a community of human beings as producers, and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their own labour and work. What greater paradox could there be? Labour does not bring people together-unless it be admitted that a crowd is also 'political'. To labour is to suffer-and that is a private matter. What is this but an absolute immanence of man to man -a humanism-and of community to community-communism ?
Everything (including nature) is humanized (or "socialized"). But the individual is merely the residue of the experience of or dissolution of community...it is another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence. One cannot make the world with atoms. There has to be a clinamen, an inclination of one person to another, which is to be inclined outside oneself, over that edge which opens up its being-in-common.
To be ab-solutely detached, ab-solutely alone, is to be closed in on oneself , without relation (to other people, the land, or distant times)..it is to reject ecstasy (ex-stasis) and wonder (which is the ability to marvel and not appropriate, colonize all that is not 'I')
---Rabbi Nahman.
Quite often one will hear the words, 'the Muslim community'-a rather meaningless and trite phrase if ever there was one. It's not just that it represents belonging to an imagined, monolithic entity or that one's position on a particular issue is supposed to be explicable in terms of this identity, it's that the very notion 'community' is a construct of late capitalism, a reaction to the atomization that it produces, a warm after-glow set against the narrow (and false) individualism that is supposed to have supplanted it.
But in essence, these two terms, individual and society, are not so fundamentally distinct as to warrant a radical disjunction. In the reign of quantity, society is nothing but the accumulation of individuals. For Bentham society was a "fiction" or, as the latter-day saint would say: there is no such thing as society. And one could with equal reason say that the individual is a "communistic fiction" (Myrdal).
The community is a fictitious body composed of the individual persons who are considered constituting, as it were, its members. The interests of the community then is what?-The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.
---Bentham, 'An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation'
In modern consciousness there is not a common being but a self , and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, its unique, irreducible character, free of the contrivances and conventions, the masks and the hypocrisies, the distortions of the self by society.
---Daniel Bell, 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism'
The presiding idea of the individual against society is also the predominance of liberty over equality and solidarity in the western political tradition. the triumph of capitalism is one reason why one will rarely hear a western leader talk about politics in terms of Justice, Fraternity, or Solidarity. The language of justice is replaced by the language of the markets.
However, this only represents an accurate picture of the first stage, the solid stage of capitalism. In liquid modernity , the restraints of norms, society or bourgeois respectability- against which the avant-garde could press back- have dissipated. The problem for the individual (and art) now is not to break free but to ask what is meant by freedom when there is nothing to be free from. The problem now is one of leisure and boredom, how to kill time (the Eloi). There is no more tension between the market and the Republic, citoyen and bourgeois. The end of politics, the victory of the sea-gypsies. Remember, modernism starts with the profound desire to escape the earth (Marinetti).
The revolt against convention which was a sacred duty in the 19 th century is now, as a result of greater flexibility of society not obviously appealing.
From Iris Murdoch, 'Existentialism and Mystics':
Liberalism, then, destroys tradition through challenging authority. In a society where every man's opinion is equally valuable there is no unity of outlook [this is mirrored in art: the waning of a common symbolic order: C.Fuller]. This follows overspecialisation, the worship of techniques...Liberalism is a creed which dissipates and relaxes; and it prepares the way for that which is its own negation.: the artificial mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
'Existential political myth':
An age of anti-essentialist thinking, anti-metaphysical. A move away from all that is abstract: there is only the contingent..one might say, there is only the surface. For Hegel there is only the phenomenal show and nothing outside it (the pure immanence of reality..to be alone in Paradise!..Levinas: Gagarin, on reaching the limits of outer space says: "the re is no god here", thus confirming that man is the measure of all things, that man encounters no 'other', just himself or the products of his own mind).
The lived world is the real world (and therefore the best of all possible worlds) and has its own truth criteria within it. From now on the truth of life will have to be discovered from within history (what does it mean to say that truth is historical? Burckhardt). The way in which we picture the world becomes reality. So, the solipsistic individual, cut off from any transcendental truth-knowable or not-becomes our reality. There is no human nature or determinable essence, no telos, only eternal striving, only existence. Man is nothing (neant). Marx would say: Man is nothing, Time is everything. Only at the end of time is Man redeemed again. His aspirations are subject to no role external to itself or common to others. [see Motherland for the Russian tradition]
A universalist individualism is now impossible. So those who are morally sensitive and intelligent enough not to be taken in by capitalism embrace a solipsistic and hubristic individualism [on the shallowness of homo economicus see Mary Douglas, 'Missing Persons']
The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of savagery-that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behaviour and emotions. Comfort isolates, on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization.
---Valery
The cult of personality has deep roots in the Puritan and Romantic revolt against authority external to the individual. But it is also the desire to be free from nature or order, to invent oneself ceaselessly. Modern man is haunted by time, which is to say he is haunted by death.
The End of Politics, the End of Community.
What binds people together nowadays? "Organic solidarity"? what obliges me to open my hand to my brother? If politics is the site at which we are bound and free, the place where we are at once united and distinct, is it possible to still talk in terms of politics when there are only individuals, each with their own private, incommunicable vision of the good?
Nancy writes poignantly about how the death of Communism is more than the ceasing of a political system: it is the the demise of a horizon, a possibility, a way of thinking about community. Of course, it was a false community from the outset since it was, in essence, tainted by a 'western' and materialistic understanding, a revolt against the very traditions of the land (the Communists' love for the machine was no less than that of their capitalist counterparts..witness China now !).
But perhaps it is fair to say that in the very notion of community there is always a sense of loss, of a falling away? Why are we always harking back for some lost sense of unity? Is this a remnant of Arcadia or the Garden , or is it a longing for membership in a mystical body?
It is tempting to say that the end of the left marks the end of politics, perhaps the end of history even. but what of the disconcerting possibility that it has been the success of the left that has ended politics? Iris writes, the moral energy of the socialist movement was founded , or at least animated, by the desire for equality and efficiency and the revulsion towards all forms of exploitation. Surely the parliamentary labour party (along with the trade unions) have achieved their primary goal-that of political participation, to be counted amongst the ranks? And isn't labour, the standard of living, the measure of all value now? (It's the economy, stupid!) The Left, with its passion for modernization, its messianic desire to sweep away all that was remotely associated with the past, the imperative to tidy-up the messy world as it was and re-shape it to what it should be (whence the distrust of philosophy in favour of action), its contempt for limits and tradition, in this and so many other ways it was already in the camp of its opponent. Once the revolt against the Father is over, once the initial thrill of the frenzy subsides, the question remains: what is to be done? The warmth of any common purpose has drained away.
It is tempting to say that the demise of communism signalled the dissolution, the dislocation of community. This can hardly be denied. But it seems as if the roots of it go back much further: isn't Descartes' positing that of an isolated individual, isn't the enclosure movement already the destruction of the commons?
Can we now think of community except in negative terms, as something parochial, myopic in its outlook? Community as the place where everything is reconciled, as a false hope for wholeness, innocence, and completeness when we live in shattered time? But perhaps this is to formulate things int eh wrong way since it is to think of it terms of happiness, as a state of being where 'love stilleth the will'. Might it not be that it is the place where the death of the individual is not meaningless, a place beyond technopolitical domination or happiness? Might not community be the place where I find myself, where I am myself..a reformulation of the cogito: we are, therefore I think. There can be no 'I' without the 'other'..this is the cross we bear...
The problem for 'community' in the western tradition is that it is a community of human beings as producers, and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their own labour and work. What greater paradox could there be? Labour does not bring people together-unless it be admitted that a crowd is also 'political'. To labour is to suffer-and that is a private matter. What is this but an absolute immanence of man to man -a humanism-and of community to community-communism ?
Everything (including nature) is humanized (or "socialized"). But the individual is merely the residue of the experience of or dissolution of community...it is another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence. One cannot make the world with atoms. There has to be a clinamen, an inclination of one person to another, which is to be inclined outside oneself, over that edge which opens up its being-in-common.
To be ab-solutely detached, ab-solutely alone, is to be closed in on oneself , without relation (to other people, the land, or distant times)..it is to reject ecstasy (ex-stasis) and wonder (which is the ability to marvel and not appropriate, colonize all that is not 'I')
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Blunt
What thou lov’st well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’t well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were the halls of hell,
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin, pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.
‘Master thyself and others shall thee beare’
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun
Half balck half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
to have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.
----Ezra Pound
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’t well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were the halls of hell,
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin, pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.
‘Master thyself and others shall thee beare’
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun
Half balck half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
to have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.
----Ezra Pound
Property (I)
Warning: People who are less than eighteen years of age, libertarians, theorists, and fans of De Soto are strongly warned that the following post may contain material that is unsuitable to their weak disposition.
From E.P.Thompson's 'Customs in Common':
Custom binds the land. Custom is at the interface of law and practice; at one end: village by-laws enforceable at law (manorial courts); in the middle, sustained memory and oral tradition (parish church) and at the other extreme, undocumented, unwritten beliefs and norms.
'Agrarian custom was never fact [but] "habitus"-a lived environment comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules which determined limits to usages and disclosed possibilities, norms and sanctions...'
'Already in the 13th century common rights were exercised according to "time-hallowed custom". Customs are defined to be law or right not written; which being established by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practised. Common right usage and the oral traditions as to these rights, is as specific and local as are the geographic features.
But is such an unsystematic approach sustainable against the homogenizing forces of the state, the unification of wills? Also, in the vein of Platteau, demographic changes and economic pressures (growing demand for fuels, building materials, the marketable value of quarries, gravel pits, sand-pits, pat bogs) may mean the economic benefits of limited trades (greater information, lower enforcement costs) are outweighed by the possibility of more trades.
'In a parallel movement, the law was conforming with an age of agricultural "improvement" and was finding claims to coincident use-rights to be untidy. So also did the modernising administrative mind.'
The rules of the game are changed; the market is an instituted process. To look at the markets as a 'natural' process is to be at best naive, at worst, ideologically infected.
'Over time and over space the users of commons have developed a rich variety of institutions and community sanctions which have effected restraints and stints upon use.'
'So that custom may also be seen as a place of class conflict, at the interface between agrarian practice and political power' (the enclosure movement, for example)
'The tenurial system and the theory of the law converts communally held land into the private property of the landlord.' So, use-rights are supplanted by the law and tenancy (right). This is a historical process, not a 'natural' development. 'Yet within this rationality there was evolving the ulterior rationality of capitalist definitions of property whereas rights of grazing over pasture and waste were perhaps the oldest element in the common field system , descended from more extensive rights enjoyed from time immemorial, which Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders did not institute but regulated.'
'The right of use had been transferred from the user to the house or the site of an ancient messuage. It became not a use but a property..a hardening and concretion of the notion of property in land, and a re-ification of usages into property which could be rented, sold...'
'Usage and rights get attached to an office or place and are then regarded as "things" that could be sold, transferred. Reason now has more to do with the political economy of improvement than continuity, tradition, reasonable customs. the law itself may have been an instrument of class expropriation. '
'By raising to a reason at law the question of "improvement" it was possible to effect a marriage between legal terms of art and the imperatives of capitalist market economy, the rationality of which is to exclude from view both labour and human need in favour of the "natural justice" of profits which have become a reason at law.'
'The nature of property [now] imports an exclusive enjoyment..and how could enjoyment be exclusive if it did not command the power to exclude from property's physical space the insolent lower orders?'
'It is even possible, without sentimentality, to suppose community norms, expectations and senses of neighbourhood obligations, which governed the actual usage of commons; and such usages, practised "time out of mind,"were fiercely held to be rights.
From E.P.Thompson's 'Customs in Common':
Custom binds the land. Custom is at the interface of law and practice; at one end: village by-laws enforceable at law (manorial courts); in the middle, sustained memory and oral tradition (parish church) and at the other extreme, undocumented, unwritten beliefs and norms.
'Agrarian custom was never fact [but] "habitus"-a lived environment comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules which determined limits to usages and disclosed possibilities, norms and sanctions...'
'Already in the 13th century common rights were exercised according to "time-hallowed custom". Customs are defined to be law or right not written; which being established by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practised. Common right usage and the oral traditions as to these rights, is as specific and local as are the geographic features.
But is such an unsystematic approach sustainable against the homogenizing forces of the state, the unification of wills? Also, in the vein of Platteau, demographic changes and economic pressures (growing demand for fuels, building materials, the marketable value of quarries, gravel pits, sand-pits, pat bogs) may mean the economic benefits of limited trades (greater information, lower enforcement costs) are outweighed by the possibility of more trades.
'In a parallel movement, the law was conforming with an age of agricultural "improvement" and was finding claims to coincident use-rights to be untidy. So also did the modernising administrative mind.'
The rules of the game are changed; the market is an instituted process. To look at the markets as a 'natural' process is to be at best naive, at worst, ideologically infected.
'Over time and over space the users of commons have developed a rich variety of institutions and community sanctions which have effected restraints and stints upon use.'
'So that custom may also be seen as a place of class conflict, at the interface between agrarian practice and political power' (the enclosure movement, for example)
'The tenurial system and the theory of the law converts communally held land into the private property of the landlord.' So, use-rights are supplanted by the law and tenancy (right). This is a historical process, not a 'natural' development. 'Yet within this rationality there was evolving the ulterior rationality of capitalist definitions of property whereas rights of grazing over pasture and waste were perhaps the oldest element in the common field system , descended from more extensive rights enjoyed from time immemorial, which Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders did not institute but regulated.'
'The right of use had been transferred from the user to the house or the site of an ancient messuage. It became not a use but a property..a hardening and concretion of the notion of property in land, and a re-ification of usages into property which could be rented, sold...'
'Usage and rights get attached to an office or place and are then regarded as "things" that could be sold, transferred. Reason now has more to do with the political economy of improvement than continuity, tradition, reasonable customs. the law itself may have been an instrument of class expropriation. '
'By raising to a reason at law the question of "improvement" it was possible to effect a marriage between legal terms of art and the imperatives of capitalist market economy, the rationality of which is to exclude from view both labour and human need in favour of the "natural justice" of profits which have become a reason at law.'
'The nature of property [now] imports an exclusive enjoyment..and how could enjoyment be exclusive if it did not command the power to exclude from property's physical space the insolent lower orders?'
'It is even possible, without sentimentality, to suppose community norms, expectations and senses of neighbourhood obligations, which governed the actual usage of commons; and such usages, practised "time out of mind,"were fiercely held to be rights.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
Sacramento Blues
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there.
---Gertrude Stein
The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show.
----Zizek.
The Sacramento papers, however, simply mirror the Sacramento particularity, the Valley fate, which is to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.
---Joan Didion.
Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
---Saul Bellow
Go west. You will find yourself. But behind the push outwards is also a desire to escape from what one is. I am not what I am. The appeal of Houdini, the quintessential escape artist, in a century that will worship the self-made man, the man who can re-invent himself. We are the result of a series of journeys, of decisions made by other people. What happened to those parts of us that stayed behind, the dead branches of our future?
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
And on this journey, those at the end of it are handed down, from generation to generation stories and words and particular gestures that are borne amidst those harsh tribulations: a frontier mentality. The womenfolk pass along delicate heirlooms, reminders of a lost world, whilst the men, preserve an ethos whose identity depended on the vigilant assertion of boundaries. All the time, things accumulate, like the debris of history, stored for use later on.
He was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collections of nameless things it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man is for...
(Bellow)
Each child born into such a lineage, that of the sea-gypsies, those who pine for the open road, was himself a radical new beginning. they would always remain marginal people, looking in from the outside, quirky, eccentric, utterly unreconciled to the larger movements of the times, the consensus of history.
Starting in the 1940's , linked booms in aerospace and real estate were turning millions of newcomers into Californians..[they] tended to see the land as subdividable , not hallowed and bet their lives on the future.
But the conservative part of us was resolute, it was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. From now on there could only be obsolescence, a style of soul that is out of sync with the times. Style is character, the place where the self meets the world. And if the world moves on?The times , they are a changin'. In the speculative booms, those who choose to remember the past also fear being buried by it. The dark memory of the sea, that loss of life that haunts the present.
Southerners are people who find strength in the maintenance of ritual-those who insist against all odds on remembering. The northern mind, on the other hand , is restless, abstract and despises the sun-and-wheat-consciousness of the brown-eyed ones. And yet, something tugs at the heart of the traveler: the tragedy of too quick an unmooring from the past. How much of the past do we, should we, carry forwrad. Too many lives have gone into making this one. Is the only reality the journey itself?
The afternoon heat would bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializin; there was the sense that to close one's eyes on a Valley town was to rsik opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which hasd blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible.
...
...
--citations: Joan Didion, New Yorker
---Gertrude Stein
The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show.
----Zizek.
The Sacramento papers, however, simply mirror the Sacramento particularity, the Valley fate, which is to be paralyzed by a past no longer relevant.
---Joan Didion.
Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.
---Saul Bellow
Go west. You will find yourself. But behind the push outwards is also a desire to escape from what one is. I am not what I am. The appeal of Houdini, the quintessential escape artist, in a century that will worship the self-made man, the man who can re-invent himself. We are the result of a series of journeys, of decisions made by other people. What happened to those parts of us that stayed behind, the dead branches of our future?
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
And on this journey, those at the end of it are handed down, from generation to generation stories and words and particular gestures that are borne amidst those harsh tribulations: a frontier mentality. The womenfolk pass along delicate heirlooms, reminders of a lost world, whilst the men, preserve an ethos whose identity depended on the vigilant assertion of boundaries. All the time, things accumulate, like the debris of history, stored for use later on.
He was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collections of nameless things it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man is for...
(Bellow)
Each child born into such a lineage, that of the sea-gypsies, those who pine for the open road, was himself a radical new beginning. they would always remain marginal people, looking in from the outside, quirky, eccentric, utterly unreconciled to the larger movements of the times, the consensus of history.
Starting in the 1940's , linked booms in aerospace and real estate were turning millions of newcomers into Californians..[they] tended to see the land as subdividable , not hallowed and bet their lives on the future.
But the conservative part of us was resolute, it was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. From now on there could only be obsolescence, a style of soul that is out of sync with the times. Style is character, the place where the self meets the world. And if the world moves on?The times , they are a changin'. In the speculative booms, those who choose to remember the past also fear being buried by it. The dark memory of the sea, that loss of life that haunts the present.
Southerners are people who find strength in the maintenance of ritual-those who insist against all odds on remembering. The northern mind, on the other hand , is restless, abstract and despises the sun-and-wheat-consciousness of the brown-eyed ones. And yet, something tugs at the heart of the traveler: the tragedy of too quick an unmooring from the past. How much of the past do we, should we, carry forwrad. Too many lives have gone into making this one. Is the only reality the journey itself?
The afternoon heat would bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializin; there was the sense that to close one's eyes on a Valley town was to rsik opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which hasd blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible.
...
...
--citations: Joan Didion, New Yorker
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
We stood a moment so, in a strange world.
And the Blue flames of love
Mourned the loss of the Red.
So close the book now,
For what be, let be unsaid.
Indestrucitible stars,
coldest of flames.
A frost-starred heart
still spells your name.
To whom shall I speak,
Then what shall I write?
Is it still day
Or is it now night?
Each mortal thing has its own double,
and each its own law.
But in love's dark mirror,
I perceived its one flaw.
Gentle moonlight sighs
And peach-blossoms wait.
Disappear to eternity,
remembering their fate.
Their true life, then
This brief moment's fall.
My heart breaks too
In the heart of these walls.
-----b
And the Blue flames of love
Mourned the loss of the Red.
So close the book now,
For what be, let be unsaid.
Indestrucitible stars,
coldest of flames.
A frost-starred heart
still spells your name.
To whom shall I speak,
Then what shall I write?
Is it still day
Or is it now night?
Each mortal thing has its own double,
and each its own law.
But in love's dark mirror,
I perceived its one flaw.
Gentle moonlight sighs
And peach-blossoms wait.
Disappear to eternity,
remembering their fate.
Their true life, then
This brief moment's fall.
My heart breaks too
In the heart of these walls.
-----b
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Rabbits, Witches and the Axis of Evil
The last witch to be convicted under the 1735 act was Helen Duncan, 1944. Above, is another. Other news: there is some concern about the fate of Robert, the giant rabbit sent to North Korea. It appears that he has gone missing and there is some speculation that the Great Leader has polished him off in one of his grand banquets. So much for hearts and minds!
I was terribly busy. All I thought about was my small circle, my own life.
---Leni Riefenstahl
One wonders how much of the evil of the times we live in comes from such thoughts, such an orientation.
Sickness and Unreason
It was interesting but rather deflating to follow the recent 'hostage crisis' unfold. The Iranians are are intensely nationalistic people -whence the constant and pathetic reference to seven thousand years of civilisation. On the other hand, the so-called newspapers here were full of "bring our boys home" and , just a week before that, we're not a nation of apologisers (this, with regard the slave trade).
And all the time this jingoism, this tribalism, was beginning to grate on my nerves. The media circus in full swing ..now that they're selling their stories it transpires that the concerns on this front were only that it was the Iranians who were pulling the strings behind the images.
It is never asked what our boys are doing there, whether the death of other people's children* means anything..shock and awe and daisy-cutters bring Infinite Justice. Gandhi was right on one thing at least: western civilisation: a very good idea. No clearer indication could there be that the Enlightenment aspirations of universality and reason are utterly meaningless and superficial. Unless an idea is incarnated it remains superficial, incidental to one's whole outlook. No fire burns in self-consciousness, in a life that is rooted to its own image.
For the moderns it would seem there are only two options: identify with the cold state (Simone Weil) and her narratives or return to the pre-political, the warmth of community, of animal bonds (as Becket says in a fantastic line). Blood and soil and the idolatry of History and Life.
*
Their deaths among the uncountable
masses of dead might be real to those who
don't dare imagine death.
Might burn through the veil that blinds
those who do not imagine the burned bodies
of other people's children.
.....
Just feeling human
the way a cloud's a cloud..
Human, free for the day from roles assigned,
each with its emblem
cluttering the right hand..
Human, a kind of element, a fire...
.........
The same war continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives.
Our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the grey filth of it:
the knowledge that humankind,
delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,
whose music excels the music of the birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifest designs
fairer than the spiders most intricate web,
still turns without surprise, without regret..
We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines 'mercy',
'lovingkindness'; we have beloved one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good-
who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is swelling..as I write.
Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;
our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm
of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
----Deise Levertov.
Imagined communities
And all the time this jingoism, this tribalism, was beginning to grate on my nerves. The media circus in full swing ..now that they're selling their stories it transpires that the concerns on this front were only that it was the Iranians who were pulling the strings behind the images.
It is never asked what our boys are doing there, whether the death of other people's children* means anything..shock and awe and daisy-cutters bring Infinite Justice. Gandhi was right on one thing at least: western civilisation: a very good idea. No clearer indication could there be that the Enlightenment aspirations of universality and reason are utterly meaningless and superficial. Unless an idea is incarnated it remains superficial, incidental to one's whole outlook. No fire burns in self-consciousness, in a life that is rooted to its own image.
For the moderns it would seem there are only two options: identify with the cold state (Simone Weil) and her narratives or return to the pre-political, the warmth of community, of animal bonds (as Becket says in a fantastic line). Blood and soil and the idolatry of History and Life.
*
Their deaths among the uncountable
masses of dead might be real to those who
don't dare imagine death.
Might burn through the veil that blinds
those who do not imagine the burned bodies
of other people's children.
.....
Just feeling human
the way a cloud's a cloud..
Human, free for the day from roles assigned,
each with its emblem
cluttering the right hand..
Human, a kind of element, a fire...
.........
The same war continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives.
Our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the grey filth of it:
the knowledge that humankind,
delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,
whose music excels the music of the birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifest designs
fairer than the spiders most intricate web,
still turns without surprise, without regret..
We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines 'mercy',
'lovingkindness'; we have beloved one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good-
who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is swelling..as I write.
Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;
our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm
of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
----Deise Levertov.
Imagined communities
Friday, April 06, 2007
1923
The world came to an end in 1923 - or so I'm told. This is the year that extremists march in Munich and the street stopped being a street, when a poet saw his ideal in the absurd dreams of Dali. The wastelands have been reached, they were prophesised; the philosopher concedes truth to science and vows silence; that first generation lives under a black sun, a dazzling dark, an earth black and heavy with the dead. A storm is on its way from somewhere and the birds of space shed their wings, anticipating the need for lightness, the need to keep oneself to a bare minimum, to find the quintessential once again.
"The fact, however, is that the inner turmoil which the nations of the world are going through today, and which we are unable to regard objectively in as much as we ourselves are affected by it, is the forerunner of a social and spiritual revolution of very great magnitude. The Great War of Europe was a catastrophe which has almost wholly destroyed the old world order. Out of the ashes of civilisation and culture nature is now building up a new humanity and a new world for that humanity to live in. We can catch a glimpse of the new world order in the works of Professor Einstein and Bergson. Europe has seen with its own eyes the dreadful consequences of its scientific, moral and economic pursuits....
There is, indeed, a danger that the minds of nations may not be subjugated by that time-worn and devitalizing escapist mentality which cannot differentiate between the thoughts of the head and the feelings of the heart.....
The East, and particularly the Muslim East, has opened its eyes after having slumbered for centuries. The Eastern people have, however, realised that life cannot effect a revolution in its environment before it has had, in the first instance, a revolution in the inner depths of its own being, nor can a new world assume external form until its existence takes shape in the hearts of men. That immutable law of the Universe which the Qur'an has enunciated in the simple but comprehensive verse:
God does not change the destiny of people unless they change themselves.
[Q: xiii. 11] "
---Allama Iqbal, Message From the East, 1923
The Allama was wrong, since now there is no "East" and there is no "West." Is China 'eastern' any more, is Japan, India? Who now would write an East-West Diwan?
Ghosts are the lives we do not lead, they follow me about everywhere...the roads not taken. Already I see in my mind's eye the dust accumulating on my books, I look for the underlined words and wonder why the swami has chosen one word and not another, why this page alone has its corner turned...so much will remain unread, unsaid.
I have lost the ability to name the trees. That is true, there is no denying it. But friends still point me there. The world is still the scattered tent of stars. More than that, there is a deep state, a way that always somehow remains open, beyond the tribulations of history, beyond the dissolutions...in exile one learns how to survive, how to cherish. This is the only world I know and I am grateful.
Ghosts are also the lives and thoughts of our ancestors that live on in us, reminding us that we were not the only ones to live in time:
If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others.
---Q: 3:140
We look in the mirror and see the shadows of a parent , of a grandparent. My hand gestures are those of my cousin, the surprise in my voice is my uncle's ..and these melancholy eyes..are they really mine? A way in which a word is pronounced, the intonation, a particular gesture, all that is fragile survives..miraculously. They abide beyond the vicissitudes of the times. Love is not lost, only forgotten.
"The fact, however, is that the inner turmoil which the nations of the world are going through today, and which we are unable to regard objectively in as much as we ourselves are affected by it, is the forerunner of a social and spiritual revolution of very great magnitude. The Great War of Europe was a catastrophe which has almost wholly destroyed the old world order. Out of the ashes of civilisation and culture nature is now building up a new humanity and a new world for that humanity to live in. We can catch a glimpse of the new world order in the works of Professor Einstein and Bergson. Europe has seen with its own eyes the dreadful consequences of its scientific, moral and economic pursuits....
There is, indeed, a danger that the minds of nations may not be subjugated by that time-worn and devitalizing escapist mentality which cannot differentiate between the thoughts of the head and the feelings of the heart.....
The East, and particularly the Muslim East, has opened its eyes after having slumbered for centuries. The Eastern people have, however, realised that life cannot effect a revolution in its environment before it has had, in the first instance, a revolution in the inner depths of its own being, nor can a new world assume external form until its existence takes shape in the hearts of men. That immutable law of the Universe which the Qur'an has enunciated in the simple but comprehensive verse:
God does not change the destiny of people unless they change themselves.
[Q: xiii. 11] "
---Allama Iqbal, Message From the East, 1923
The Allama was wrong, since now there is no "East" and there is no "West." Is China 'eastern' any more, is Japan, India? Who now would write an East-West Diwan?
Ghosts are the lives we do not lead, they follow me about everywhere...the roads not taken. Already I see in my mind's eye the dust accumulating on my books, I look for the underlined words and wonder why the swami has chosen one word and not another, why this page alone has its corner turned...so much will remain unread, unsaid.
I have lost the ability to name the trees. That is true, there is no denying it. But friends still point me there. The world is still the scattered tent of stars. More than that, there is a deep state, a way that always somehow remains open, beyond the tribulations of history, beyond the dissolutions...in exile one learns how to survive, how to cherish. This is the only world I know and I am grateful.
Ghosts are also the lives and thoughts of our ancestors that live on in us, reminding us that we were not the only ones to live in time:
If a wound hath befallen you , a wound like it hath already befallen others.
---Q: 3:140
We look in the mirror and see the shadows of a parent , of a grandparent. My hand gestures are those of my cousin, the surprise in my voice is my uncle's ..and these melancholy eyes..are they really mine? A way in which a word is pronounced, the intonation, a particular gesture, all that is fragile survives..miraculously. They abide beyond the vicissitudes of the times. Love is not lost, only forgotten.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Limestone
If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places..
---Auden
Before Aristotle, it seems, people believed that the soul was a material element or a combination of them. I like this idea, this notion that earth and spirit are connected once again and wonder about my own friends and family, if I could, like Primo Levi, draw up a Periodic Table and place each of them in it, thinking closely about how the properties of the element matched their souls..and what that would say about me!
About 3 & 1/2 people read this blog so it shouldn't be too difficult. Let's see...
C: ....
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places..
---Auden
Before Aristotle, it seems, people believed that the soul was a material element or a combination of them. I like this idea, this notion that earth and spirit are connected once again and wonder about my own friends and family, if I could, like Primo Levi, draw up a Periodic Table and place each of them in it, thinking closely about how the properties of the element matched their souls..and what that would say about me!
About 3 & 1/2 people read this blog so it shouldn't be too difficult. Let's see...
C: ....
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Parallax View
Notes from Zizek:
Short Circuit: to see an interpreted text through a minor voice, a minor key; not with the aim of 'lowering' but of 'decentering,' of bringing to light the unthought.
Transcendental illusion: that the same language can be used for different phenomenon (see Cavell on Kierkegaard).
Parallax View: A constantly shifting perspective between two points that share no common space...a parallax gap. Cannot reduce the transcendental constitution to creation (God is not a concept..the world is).
Thought emerges between communities,from the exile.
The particular and the universal: ethnicity is a private use of reason..even though it is communal it remains private. Is the 'jump' a move away from false homes (idols) to a search for our real home, firm ground? Kant: we remain forever split between the two dimensions, freedom and causality, gravity and grace, a donkey with angel's wings. If we can reach out then we can only do so in a leap of faith, not on any grounds. Knowledge and Faith. the latter may be possible but we can know nothing of it. [Eventually, why should we even care about the metaphysical, what is , strictly speaking , non-sense?]
Homeless: the world-citizen...but this does not engage our particularity (see Raymond Williams: militant particularism). Abstract identification.Reason is only truly public when the singular individual identifies with an ethico-political principle. Each individual must identify with the universal law.
Subject/Object verbs: passivity: to subject oneself to the necessary..a higher fatalism , is not heteronomy. Object: resistance , movement.
Can antinomies be reduced to the terms of the other: a synthesis?
The transcendental-thing-in-itself is not just a thing beyond our grasp of reality; it is the 'beyond the grasp' , the gap, that constitutes it as a transcendental thing. The gap, the dihliz, cannot be reduced to inner or outer..zahir and batin..what is meant by 'and' here? Tafrah!
The transcendental is the gap between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Where does one begin..and where does the other end? The third man, the barzakh?
To move beyond this gap would be to lose one's humanity ( I can't help reading this in the minor key of Islam...the miraj). Beyond the gap one is either an animal or a god. Without the gap would we have hope? The absence of God is what allows God to Be, allows us to be (aniconism)..time is the space between me and You. We are marked by what we are not.
Be careful of what you wish for...we live in an age of leisure, when the pressure of immortality has fallen away. there are no more gaps: 'instant living.' For us, for us moderns, the disappearing of the gap is equivalent to the utilitarian subject who acts mechanically on his desires, who is a slave of his desires. desire and technology, mechanism, are brought together. There is no expectation, no imagination...only the calculus of pain and pleasure. Are we free only in that gap?
Freedom of the will: Duns Scotus...
In some readings the mistake of metaphysics is to subordinate that we are-the mere fact of our being- to an essence (a goal, a principle), to what we are. Ontological difference would be to de-centre us, to free us from any such essence..to just be.
The ontological difference is, now, not between man and a higher entity, something Beyond-being, a transcendent 'other, but within the phenomenal itself, within being. The Real is simultaneously the Thing which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access: the noumenal and the gap. The Real is that which fragments reality, that which is only perceptible-if at all- in the movement between perspectives...it is what accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real.
The Real is also something that can be glimpsed , retroactively, through the fragments since it is an absence. Kant does not fully destroy metaphysics since the noumenal still exists, out there, whereas Hegel introduces the distinction , the gap, into the very heart of reality (immanence). there is no need to overcome the gap. The problem is the very search fro infinity, for a transcendental realm. The shift in perspectives is the Real (al-Haqq)...Reality is caught in the movement of our knowing it....
Short Circuit: to see an interpreted text through a minor voice, a minor key; not with the aim of 'lowering' but of 'decentering,' of bringing to light the unthought.
Transcendental illusion: that the same language can be used for different phenomenon (see Cavell on Kierkegaard).
Parallax View: A constantly shifting perspective between two points that share no common space...a parallax gap. Cannot reduce the transcendental constitution to creation (God is not a concept..the world is).
Thought emerges between communities,from the exile.
The particular and the universal: ethnicity is a private use of reason..even though it is communal it remains private. Is the 'jump' a move away from false homes (idols) to a search for our real home, firm ground? Kant: we remain forever split between the two dimensions, freedom and causality, gravity and grace, a donkey with angel's wings. If we can reach out then we can only do so in a leap of faith, not on any grounds. Knowledge and Faith. the latter may be possible but we can know nothing of it. [Eventually, why should we even care about the metaphysical, what is , strictly speaking , non-sense?]
Homeless: the world-citizen...but this does not engage our particularity (see Raymond Williams: militant particularism). Abstract identification.Reason is only truly public when the singular individual identifies with an ethico-political principle. Each individual must identify with the universal law.
Subject/Object verbs: passivity: to subject oneself to the necessary..a higher fatalism , is not heteronomy. Object: resistance , movement.
Can antinomies be reduced to the terms of the other: a synthesis?
The transcendental-thing-in-itself is not just a thing beyond our grasp of reality; it is the 'beyond the grasp' , the gap, that constitutes it as a transcendental thing. The gap, the dihliz, cannot be reduced to inner or outer..zahir and batin..what is meant by 'and' here? Tafrah!
The transcendental is the gap between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Where does one begin..and where does the other end? The third man, the barzakh?
To move beyond this gap would be to lose one's humanity ( I can't help reading this in the minor key of Islam...the miraj). Beyond the gap one is either an animal or a god. Without the gap would we have hope? The absence of God is what allows God to Be, allows us to be (aniconism)..time is the space between me and You. We are marked by what we are not.
Be careful of what you wish for...we live in an age of leisure, when the pressure of immortality has fallen away. there are no more gaps: 'instant living.' For us, for us moderns, the disappearing of the gap is equivalent to the utilitarian subject who acts mechanically on his desires, who is a slave of his desires. desire and technology, mechanism, are brought together. There is no expectation, no imagination...only the calculus of pain and pleasure. Are we free only in that gap?
Freedom of the will: Duns Scotus...
In some readings the mistake of metaphysics is to subordinate that we are-the mere fact of our being- to an essence (a goal, a principle), to what we are. Ontological difference would be to de-centre us, to free us from any such essence..to just be.
The ontological difference is, now, not between man and a higher entity, something Beyond-being, a transcendent 'other, but within the phenomenal itself, within being. The Real is simultaneously the Thing which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access: the noumenal and the gap. The Real is that which fragments reality, that which is only perceptible-if at all- in the movement between perspectives...it is what accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real.
The Real is also something that can be glimpsed , retroactively, through the fragments since it is an absence. Kant does not fully destroy metaphysics since the noumenal still exists, out there, whereas Hegel introduces the distinction , the gap, into the very heart of reality (immanence). there is no need to overcome the gap. The problem is the very search fro infinity, for a transcendental realm. The shift in perspectives is the Real (al-Haqq)...Reality is caught in the movement of our knowing it....
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Is it possible for us, moderns, to think in circles any more? Perhaps Sunni triangles, or Shia crescents, but circles? No, we increasingly think in terms of straight lines: mine or thine, us or them, black and white, "Friend" or "Enemy" or linear progress: a line that extends into infinity.
What would it be to think in circles again, to recognise that thought can take place within faith (Anselm), that reason is bound by the Law, that we live and think with what is given to us. To think in circles is at once to reformulate the cogito : I am , therefore i can think..or, better still, we are, therefore I can think, but it is also to express one's gratitude for this possibility being opened up for me.
To think in circles is to accept the gift and pass it on. It is also to see that all of nature moves in circles and place oneself at its heart. Of course, there is at one level a discontinuity with nature, but perhaps we should also see thought arising from within nature. For the moderns, at least before Darwin (and even post-Darwin , for all practical purposes) the dull cyclomania of Nature is something to escape at all costs. She is so much "dead matter". Only we are truly alive.
Hospitality, Derrida.
One must be ready to be not ready, be prepared for the unprepared. To welcome someone who is known is not to truly welcome; to welcome someone without a smiling face is something else as well..as if one could welcome someone grudgingly! The stranger is not just an other but radically other, someone beyond our conceptions, distinctions of 'the same' and 'the other'.
Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':
Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerbale people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is a s if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.
Massignon.
'Prospect of the Human Person in Islam'.
Forgiving, the supreme act of hospitality. To forgive is to welcome in, to allow a return back into the fold. But one must also forgive oneself for a lack of openness, for the inability to give oneself fully. True hospitality is always aware of a lack of hospitality. How can I welcome what is beyond my capacity (the infinite)?; how so the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, the utterly unpredictable?
What would it be to think in circles again, to recognise that thought can take place within faith (Anselm), that reason is bound by the Law, that we live and think with what is given to us. To think in circles is at once to reformulate the cogito : I am , therefore i can think..or, better still, we are, therefore I can think, but it is also to express one's gratitude for this possibility being opened up for me.
To think in circles is to accept the gift and pass it on. It is also to see that all of nature moves in circles and place oneself at its heart. Of course, there is at one level a discontinuity with nature, but perhaps we should also see thought arising from within nature. For the moderns, at least before Darwin (and even post-Darwin , for all practical purposes) the dull cyclomania of Nature is something to escape at all costs. She is so much "dead matter". Only we are truly alive.
Hospitality, Derrida.
One must be ready to be not ready, be prepared for the unprepared. To welcome someone who is known is not to truly welcome; to welcome someone without a smiling face is something else as well..as if one could welcome someone grudgingly! The stranger is not just an other but radically other, someone beyond our conceptions, distinctions of 'the same' and 'the other'.
Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':
Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerbale people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is a s if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.
Massignon.
'Prospect of the Human Person in Islam'.
Forgiving, the supreme act of hospitality. To forgive is to welcome in, to allow a return back into the fold. But one must also forgive oneself for a lack of openness, for the inability to give oneself fully. True hospitality is always aware of a lack of hospitality. How can I welcome what is beyond my capacity (the infinite)?; how so the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, the utterly unpredictable?
Monday, March 19, 2007
From the Archives: The Ongoing Moment
There is a tendency to want to see everything from every point of view.
Sometimes we need to see clearly only one thing from one point of view..to arrest the ongoing moment.
The world moves on. Death may give us pause for thought but then other words, other thoughts carry us forward. Herein lies the tragedy of life, herein its saving grace. Death is just a memory, a memory that awaits us...
As I write this blog other writings will be consigned to the archives, out of sight, out of mind.
Time is the healer of all things.
What if time is the problem?
To write is to forget, to displace other feelings, other words; it is to send some words to oblivion, and to elevate others at the same time. To say a word is already to lose it. When one writes one ceases to be what one was prior to doing so. To say a word is to give something of oneself away. Tell it, but tell it slant.
How reassuring those bleak and blank spaces we inhabit. To be interested in everything is to be interested in nothing. To cite other people's words is to deflect attention. Like Zeus, we want to and do not want to be known.
When we live we occupy a certain space.
And when we die?
Even then the space is haunted by the memory of us. Like signs or messages that appear but whose sense leaks from them.
'His life was tragically cut short'.
All life is cut short. We can never be finished, even if try. To complete was to compromise. Always the archivist's urge to catalogue overcame the editor's obligation to discard and dispense with.
The artist and the degenerate share a love of-and need for- anonymity , darkness, obscurity. People living out their lives in obscurity. The street is not a street of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognisable, but of sheer emptiness.
He saw life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.
--citations from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment'
Sometimes we need to see clearly only one thing from one point of view..to arrest the ongoing moment.
The world moves on. Death may give us pause for thought but then other words, other thoughts carry us forward. Herein lies the tragedy of life, herein its saving grace. Death is just a memory, a memory that awaits us...
As I write this blog other writings will be consigned to the archives, out of sight, out of mind.
Time is the healer of all things.
What if time is the problem?
To write is to forget, to displace other feelings, other words; it is to send some words to oblivion, and to elevate others at the same time. To say a word is already to lose it. When one writes one ceases to be what one was prior to doing so. To say a word is to give something of oneself away. Tell it, but tell it slant.
How reassuring those bleak and blank spaces we inhabit. To be interested in everything is to be interested in nothing. To cite other people's words is to deflect attention. Like Zeus, we want to and do not want to be known.
When we live we occupy a certain space.
And when we die?
Even then the space is haunted by the memory of us. Like signs or messages that appear but whose sense leaks from them.
'His life was tragically cut short'.
All life is cut short. We can never be finished, even if try. To complete was to compromise. Always the archivist's urge to catalogue overcame the editor's obligation to discard and dispense with.
The artist and the degenerate share a love of-and need for- anonymity , darkness, obscurity. People living out their lives in obscurity. The street is not a street of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognisable, but of sheer emptiness.
He saw life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.
--citations from Geoff Dyer's 'Ongoing Moment'
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The Fanatic
Life on the periphery, renouncing centre.
---Ammons.
The radical individual has no name, only a purpose, a Cause. And what happens when this too fails, when the Will itself is paralysed?
The unique individual expunges all sense of belonging and cannot be defined, he resists the easy classifications of the bourgeoisie, the soul-destroying abstractions of powerful elites. No nation or land binds him, his being is infinitely malleable: he can become anything.
.
P.Valery:
.
The ..being of the immense cities returns to the wild state-that is, to a state of isolation. because the social mechanism allows him to forget the need for community and to lose his feelings of connection to other people, which were once kept alive by his wants. Every movement in the social mechanism renders useless certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes to communal life.
.
From now on there will only be one act, one clear and decisive movement of the Will that will crystallize his very essence: Die Tat.
.
Man no longer had a profile, the man from the underground, the egoist denies all dependence, but every sort of dependence is a root, terrestial or celestial.
.
The shapeless mass, vagabonds and prostitutes, the alienated, incapable of class loyalty, rootless from the womb, violent, inarticulate, disrespectful enemies of labour and learning ..an underground emerging into the open.
.
But in this day and age everyone in the city will claim to be a nomad-from the disaffected intellectual to the global citizen to the richest entrepreneur: all touch the earth only lightly.
.
The ruined proletarian, the pauper, the slum-dweller without fixed abode, has an energy that cannot be chanelled into historical progress (from the Marxist perspective). The wretched of the earth, every sort of obscure and marginal existence is a counter -revolutionary (Rosa Luxemborg). The anarchist is like an intellectual (Lenin): declasse.
.
Cut loose from society, norms, customs, social conventions, place, what else is this individual but a terrorist ?
Black Square
At the centre of the British Library is a black square; at the heart of that centre is an inner chamber where the treasures are stored. In that heart there is a central glass chamber where a few books are kept: Blake's notebooks, Mozart's musical notes, as if the essence of the world and its creativity had to be stored here. But at the core of this centre was the quintessential, a splendid page of the Qur'an in Kufic , majestic, weighty words, verticals in authority. And beyond them was a voice, "If all the sea were ink for my Sustainer's words, the sea would indeed be exhausted ere my Sustainer's words are exhausted! And [thus it would be] if we were to add to it sea upon sea" [Q:18:109]
Star, Crescent, Emerald City
One of the heartaches of supporting the Pakistani cricket team is that they can be the best in the world one moment, all tremendously stylish and flamboyant, and the very next they will flop into a farcical display of comical absurdities and amateurishness. Brilliant and pathetic seem to follow one another like night follows day. But it is more: When driving in Lahore the only 'law' is: expect the unexpected!
Ubo reminds me that a supporter died of a heart attack when a player was given out for 99.
'So, what's so surprising about that?,' I ask.
'He was the first'.
Many die of heartache in this country.
The Irish beat us. It must have been in the stars. If there's anyone more fatalistic than us it is the Irish..and so good luck to them! There's something in the land that does it to us. As Ubo is fond of saying, somewhere down the line there's something wrong with our blood. Or as the swami would say: we are intelligent, it's just that God put our heads on the wrong way round. It derives, I think, from getting bored very easily. We must have a new government every few years or some sort of crisis. The country wouldn't be what it is without crises and the village gossip that accompanies them. We perpetually live on the edge. And if we don't like it, then (as the cricket team did last summer) just say: sod it, and walk away. If things turn out well then it was our kismet, nothing to do with us, and if not, then not (as the saying goes). If someone criticises our country you can be sure that a Pakistani will jump in with ten more criticisms-and they'll be better ones than those of the farangi!
At the embassy I realised that I didn't have Ubo's signature. What to do? There was no way I was going to trudge all the way back home for it. the instincts took over. There are only a few options open. Feign some fatal illness or try and dominate, make my presence known with some made-up high connections; however, I find this invariably works: act like a complete retard. The man at the desk winked, saying 'you could always sign it yourself, who would know, who can say what the truth of the matter is'.
Who would know? The question is meaningless in Pakistan.
What to say? Maybe there was a Hindu conspiracy, maybe the players were betting again. I can hear the dark rumours swirling in the dusty streets of Lahore now since nothing gets them worked up like such useless talk:weren't these Irish Zionists, after all?
Who can say what the truth of the matter is?
Ubo reminds me that a supporter died of a heart attack when a player was given out for 99.
'So, what's so surprising about that?,' I ask.
'He was the first'.
Many die of heartache in this country.
The Irish beat us. It must have been in the stars. If there's anyone more fatalistic than us it is the Irish..and so good luck to them! There's something in the land that does it to us. As Ubo is fond of saying, somewhere down the line there's something wrong with our blood. Or as the swami would say: we are intelligent, it's just that God put our heads on the wrong way round. It derives, I think, from getting bored very easily. We must have a new government every few years or some sort of crisis. The country wouldn't be what it is without crises and the village gossip that accompanies them. We perpetually live on the edge. And if we don't like it, then (as the cricket team did last summer) just say: sod it, and walk away. If things turn out well then it was our kismet, nothing to do with us, and if not, then not (as the saying goes). If someone criticises our country you can be sure that a Pakistani will jump in with ten more criticisms-and they'll be better ones than those of the farangi!
At the embassy I realised that I didn't have Ubo's signature. What to do? There was no way I was going to trudge all the way back home for it. the instincts took over. There are only a few options open. Feign some fatal illness or try and dominate, make my presence known with some made-up high connections; however, I find this invariably works: act like a complete retard. The man at the desk winked, saying 'you could always sign it yourself, who would know, who can say what the truth of the matter is'.
Who would know? The question is meaningless in Pakistan.
What to say? Maybe there was a Hindu conspiracy, maybe the players were betting again. I can hear the dark rumours swirling in the dusty streets of Lahore now since nothing gets them worked up like such useless talk:weren't these Irish Zionists, after all?
Who can say what the truth of the matter is?
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Middle England, Glamour, and the End of Irony
I always hear the term 'Middle England' used in a pejorative sense (I'm not sure if there's an equivalent Americanism: Hicksville, perhaps?). When one thinks of Middle England one never thinks of the working class but, rather, of a vast swathe of silent and deeply frustrated whingers and complainers. It is everything that is the opposite of metropolitan; a hinterland largely untouched by the currents of modernity, it dreams nostalgically of old (rural) England -though it doesn't have the faintest idea of what the countryside really is!
Middle England is suburbia, ground zero, heart of mediocrity and pagan conceptions of happiness. Every issue is a moral one and though the people of these strange lands could never be described as extremists or Puritans there is a niggling fussiness and pedantic strain to their natures.
And yet, Middle England is also the norm, the median voter: Essex Man, Mondeo Man that politicians find so appealing. To the extent that we live in an increasingly homogenized world, does it even make sense to talk about 'class' or 'chavs'? Middle England is nothing but a statistic, our reality.
For the Chinese the 'middle people' had a central role; the Middle Kingdom always conveyed a sense of balance and equilibrium. Middle England, on the other hand , oscillates between a mind-numbing 'averageness' absorbed in its own petty dramas on one hand and an unbalanced, angry, unhinged mass at the heart of society on the other, a mass that tends to be suspicious of Culture and intellectuals or anything foreign. King and Country. Sure. But beyond the masks what lies beneath?
Harvie Ferguson:
The decline of public life has meant that identity is now not associated with the public world but, increasingly, with inwardness and personal traits. whence the emphasis on "depth." And yet, of the contemporary age it can be said: Now the soul is exposed, open, spread flat like the page of a book...there is no disjunction or rupture upon which irony can get to work..identity [now] displays itself in a vortex of disconnected experiences. What is left but the surface and the glamour of the personality?
Social and personal identities are reconciled in the unity of fashion. Personality is shiny, mirror-like, constantly in flux: the surface is the reality. there is no interior to express or actualize.
R. Ford:
I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.
The drifting soul of the contemporary world, unsure of what's next (existence precedes essence) : pleasure without identity.
All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life (the American future...Americans don't 'do' irony). Lightness that is boredom, a directionless life (Larkin,Death is no different whined at than withstood) and an ubiquitous sense of drifting (we live an an age of surfers).
For Robert Musil the abandonment of the personal past means that identity for a person without qualities becomes a more or less arbitrary matter of social relations. Social identity is in terms of superficial signs: clothing, style of life, and the dominance of advertising are indicative of how far the surface gloss, the spectacle , has come to dominate.
Glamour is exciting, in it the self loses itself , abandoning itself to appearance. Is this the only way in which innocence can be regained? Identity now is only transitory selfhood..an infinity of points of view ..thus we escape all one-sided centrismes and recover the impartiality of justice and reason. (Thomas Mann)
Middle England is suburbia, ground zero, heart of mediocrity and pagan conceptions of happiness. Every issue is a moral one and though the people of these strange lands could never be described as extremists or Puritans there is a niggling fussiness and pedantic strain to their natures.
And yet, Middle England is also the norm, the median voter: Essex Man, Mondeo Man that politicians find so appealing. To the extent that we live in an increasingly homogenized world, does it even make sense to talk about 'class' or 'chavs'? Middle England is nothing but a statistic, our reality.
For the Chinese the 'middle people' had a central role; the Middle Kingdom always conveyed a sense of balance and equilibrium. Middle England, on the other hand , oscillates between a mind-numbing 'averageness' absorbed in its own petty dramas on one hand and an unbalanced, angry, unhinged mass at the heart of society on the other, a mass that tends to be suspicious of Culture and intellectuals or anything foreign. King and Country. Sure. But beyond the masks what lies beneath?
Harvie Ferguson:
The decline of public life has meant that identity is now not associated with the public world but, increasingly, with inwardness and personal traits. whence the emphasis on "depth." And yet, of the contemporary age it can be said: Now the soul is exposed, open, spread flat like the page of a book...there is no disjunction or rupture upon which irony can get to work..identity [now] displays itself in a vortex of disconnected experiences. What is left but the surface and the glamour of the personality?
Social and personal identities are reconciled in the unity of fashion. Personality is shiny, mirror-like, constantly in flux: the surface is the reality. there is no interior to express or actualize.
R. Ford:
I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.
The drifting soul of the contemporary world, unsure of what's next (existence precedes essence) : pleasure without identity.
All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life (the American future...Americans don't 'do' irony). Lightness that is boredom, a directionless life (Larkin,Death is no different whined at than withstood) and an ubiquitous sense of drifting (we live an an age of surfers).
For Robert Musil the abandonment of the personal past means that identity for a person without qualities becomes a more or less arbitrary matter of social relations. Social identity is in terms of superficial signs: clothing, style of life, and the dominance of advertising are indicative of how far the surface gloss, the spectacle , has come to dominate.
Glamour is exciting, in it the self loses itself , abandoning itself to appearance. Is this the only way in which innocence can be regained? Identity now is only transitory selfhood..an infinity of points of view ..thus we escape all one-sided centrismes and recover the impartiality of justice and reason. (Thomas Mann)
Friday, March 09, 2007
The Perfect City
In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself. In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its ‘ideal type’, and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of going through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the ‘ideal’ for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities.
This is a perfect description of Dubai:
But in the desireforperfection whatgets repeatedaswell isnot the 'idealtype', but thenegativeoftheideal; the darkunderisde ofthe eternalcity, an infernalcity. Here,only a blacksun dimlyglows; is it day, is it night?
MikeDavis: PlanetofSlums: wordscrampedlikepeople
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Black Sites
There are places on the earth that no human eye knows; these are the black lands, the people living under a black sun, unredeemed. Sometimes in an Empire of Liberty an excess of light can seem like none...
http://www.virginialawreview.org/content/pdfs/91/1425.pdf
'Supreme Emergency Exemption'.
"This exemption allows us to set aside -in certain special circumstances- the strict status of civilians that normally prevents their being a direct attack in war. We must proceed with caution here. Were there times during World War II when Britain could have properly have held that civilians' strict status was suspended, and thus could have bombed Hamburg or Berlin? Possibly but only if..."
This is Rawls, mind you. Not some incidental voice , but one of the great philosophers of the last century.From 'The Law of Peoples' , page 98. (drawing reference to Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars, chap. 16, pp255-265 for this idea of 'exemption').
In this regard, it is also worth looking at Agamben's work, The State of Exception. Here is an excerpt.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html
And shall we go back to Hobbes? As far as I understand him, if a people is conquered by violence and then sues for peace that new rule is legitimate. i.e violence is sanctioned within some western political theory itself. (see Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' for a discussion).
http://www.virginialawreview.org/content/pdfs/91/1425.pdf
'Supreme Emergency Exemption'.
"This exemption allows us to set aside -in certain special circumstances- the strict status of civilians that normally prevents their being a direct attack in war. We must proceed with caution here. Were there times during World War II when Britain could have properly have held that civilians' strict status was suspended, and thus could have bombed Hamburg or Berlin? Possibly but only if..."
This is Rawls, mind you. Not some incidental voice , but one of the great philosophers of the last century.From 'The Law of Peoples' , page 98. (drawing reference to Walzer's 'Just and Unjust Wars, chap. 16, pp255-265 for this idea of 'exemption').
In this regard, it is also worth looking at Agamben's work, The State of Exception. Here is an excerpt.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/009254.html
And shall we go back to Hobbes? As far as I understand him, if a people is conquered by violence and then sues for peace that new rule is legitimate. i.e violence is sanctioned within some western political theory itself. (see Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' for a discussion).
Thursday, March 01, 2007
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