'Religion is full of colour'

Philosophers have destroyed what they have found.

--Feyerabend.

There is silence. Why alter it by a jot or tittle? Not the blank, white space, which is just another abstraction of the mind, but the place that is full of wild ways, the tracks that appear even after many seasons have passed and been forgotten. 

The immense power of the sun-solar generosity (Larkin); it is there early in the morning, hours before everything else, cloud and leaf, faint morning breeze and shadow. It has been there with the distant stars through the night! And for thousands and thousands of years after we are no more and the grass grows long again. 

Our words will cease to be lyrical, there will be no time for flourishes or abundance; and the spare, linear and elegant sentences we spoke will come to seem like so many treasures from a foreign land or an unused Norman canal network that reminds us of a time of simpler energies.  

Could it be that we were mistaken all along..the Tree of Life..life, life itself, living..

Have we not fooled ourselves? Have we not always? There has been a surplus from time out of mind.

What would we trade for more time? Only the sage says with equanimity: my time has come, my time is done, though we wonder if that's the full human response, as if to say: there is more perfection in imperfection.

Did I really know anything? I have forgotten and cannot say if I am the worse for it. 

Nostalgia for the light

The clouds in the morning are tired, straggling, empty and vacant-looking. The amazing newness at each instant. Or maybe this pattern is repeated every ten thousand years and we're not just here to witness it. Perhaps there are signs already of nature carrying on without us: the great silence of the oceans already in us, the distances between us opened up, as if love never existed, the scattering of human beings to distant corners..and when someone asks you where home is you have to stop, look her in the eyes, and say, originally? 

A crow stands in the shade, gasping. Another puts its beak close to a water tap trying to suck out the last drops. All around the light presses down on you and the sun burns your skin. Somewhere, a long time ago, lies buried an idea of north, my childhood..

Old places that have been lived in for many years have the feel of being at one with the land, or at least not too opposed to it. The way stones are haphazardly heaped to form a wall.  

Then and Now or: A frontier civilisation

Tom Clark has these words to say, both harrowing and precise:

"It feels sometimes as though history had turned back upon itself toward an earlier stage of things,..a scattering and reaping, awful to behold." 

Mention of "a scattering" makes you think, of course, immediately of the Qur'an.

~
Watched parts of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything (after having read about half of the book). Think the students liked it too.

My opening thoughts were as follows:




~

Followed by a great lecture by a physicists on energy as enclosure. The most fascinating thing about the talk was, for me, the overlap between physics and economics (which is the theme of Mirowski's book, as it happens). How we moved from "vernacular" energies (plural) which were embedded in society's way of organizing life to "Big-E" energy, an abstract notion that allowed for commensurability between all the other forms. So, in theory and in practice, different types of energy could be translated/transformed/reduced to abstract 'E'. In a similar vein, everything must be viewed as an argument in a utility function and real-world markets play the role of establishing a system of equivalences. Which is another way of saying that money becomes the measure of everything.

Economics, for its part, has relied on concepts of equilibrium, comparative statics and efficiency- and so was quite accurately called an 'engineering approach' to reality by Amartya Sen (Ethics and Economics)

What's important to think about, then, is how ecology and capitalism are deeply intertwined, right from the beginning. The enclosure of land and the enclosure of energy are necessary for capitalism to thrive. And here's the contradiction: on the one hand there is a greater and greater tendency to commodification (land, labour etc must become commodities); but on the other hand, capitalism, in order to thrive, needs non-commodified sectors in which it can appropriate value (think about slavery or the work by women). Add to that, now, nature which is an unaccounted for "input" into the commodification process. 

One thing the neo-liberals have been able to see with some great clarity: the red and the green go together. There is no solution to the environmental crisis without thinking about justice, sociality, and the commons. 







~

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world. Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. 

From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society. In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the"death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras(500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action. With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. 

But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void.

----Ivan Illich

The non-book book

The TLS has this as its lead image on its website, referring to-of course-a very serious book about porn. Is the book industry just a version of porn anyway?

Alice Spawls has a really interesting blog on non-books. She writes,

"Gifts now seem to take up as much space as books, at least on the tables, where the prettiest paperbacks are distributed among Orla Kiely pots and enamel cups...

Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-bookproducts too, word-based diversions, colour-me distractions, bucket lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn't make a book, and putting them on shelves doesn't make a bookshop." 

At which point you felt like saying, thank God, the cavalry..

~

Over here in the land of the pure you come across so many books by charlatans like Osho or Deepak Chopra; then there's the cheap copies of Dan Brown and Coelho, thousands and thousands of these non-books, rotting next to old copies of GQ and Moshin Hamid (or, more accurately, his books-if that makes any difference). Everything's, ultimately, a spin-off (retro, repackaged, rebooted).

When did it start though? The 1960's and the stream of mumbo-jumbo emanating from the freer, looser, hip, hypnotic rambling-stream-of-consciousness-I-can't-be-bothered-with-structure or even with ending this sentence, like, properly, man? The mystical east and Zen life strategies, sold to you as the gen-u-ine article by some second-hand Texan salesman? A thousand years of wisdom condensed for you in the gleaming smile of a Californian trickster or in a pocket book of cartoons. Or does it go back further..the stuttering century, the ranters, the marginal man emerging from the underground, stumbling in the light streaming down onto him, those drop-outs and losers who would speak in tongues to the men in pointy hats as respectable people looked away aghast?

"In which anyone is up for anything and everyone's desires are compatible with everybody else's."

Is that a description of pornutopia or the free market? 

~

And Alice Spawls has another piece which refers to a place that I am very familiar with, having walked there and thereabouts at least a million times:

Hammershoi, whose wonderful paintings-this is not one of them- you were lucky enough to see (two days in a row, the second time borrowing the swami's ticket) at the Royal Academy. The only other artist for whom I've done that is Rothko (at the Tate), though I paid both times on that occasion. 

Gold, Man.

Goldman Sachs gets a 5 billion dollar 'fine' (or is it a settlement?). In reality the figure will probably end up being less than the headline figure. But it's worth thinking about all the "fines" that the big players have had to cough up (or, more realistically, that they've been happy to settle for).

Now, of course, you can keep on talking about how great markets are (I've got some wheat, you've got some cheese; let's trade! What's there not to like?! We're both better off, aren't we?).

But for heaven's sake let's stick to such examples and not talk or think about the vast power of corporations, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry and the media. Phishing for fools, as Akerlof would say. 


When you get away from the textbooks you see that actual real world markets are full of imperfections (of information), incomplete contracts, transaction costs, uncertainty, social norms, asymmetric power relations, and various motivations beyond simple self-interest.

David Harvey might be closer to the mark when he writes,

[t]here is a vast array of what we would now consider extra-legal activities, such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence and co-ercion, along with a range of suspicious and shady practices in the market (monoplisation, manipulation, market cornering, price fixing, Ponzi schemes etc.)

Here's a simple question I ask my students:

If you're in a one-off game (or a situation in which you're only transacting with someone on a one-time basis) then what should you optimally do? Should you, for instance, cheat the other person (e.g. default)? If students have been well trained they'll think of the incentive compatibility constraint. In simple terms: let me look at the benefit of cheating and let me look at the costs of doing so. If I can get away with cheating (low probability of detection, small fines) and if the benefits are large then why not! There are no future consequences, remember (even if this was a finitely repeated game you might get the same result through "backward induction").

So, you cheat. You're not constrained by morality but simply following your self-interest. And that's supposed to be a good thing, isn't it? Your actions are imposing a cost on the other person (who could be someone in the future,a s in the environmental problem) but why should you care about that? Especially if it's legal (Or, to take a more general case, if the following of your self-interest hurts other people but you do not intend them harm).

It gets worse! Not only is the maximization of my self-interested preferences what I 'ought to' do; it is the rational thing to do (since rationality is usually conflated with self-interest). 

If I can corner the market, exploit informational asymmetries, swindle you, gain from your trust in me, exploit workers to cream off all of the surplus value they create for myself, then why not? Well, other people have rights, don't they? But who allocates those rights? The market? Once you start to ask that question you're in the territory of G.A. Cohen. Does the market itself determine the distribution of property rights?

Where are the counteracting forces? Not just against industry-wide concentration of power but within the firm as well? If, on efficiency grounds, it doesn't matter if capital hires labour or labour hires capital why do we typically see bosses/managers with tremendous amounts of power and labour with very little? (You won't see questions of power discussed in Econ 101!). 

Are the only balancing forces the state and unions? Regulation, labour standards, anti-monopoly legislation, "fines"? Or are the unions, or what's left of them, just trying to get a better share of the pie without questioning-as an older left tradition might have and, actually, did-the processes involved in the production of the 'pie'. And to what end? One cannot divorce production from consumption.

An interesting quote from Marglin's fascinating paper. Old, but not dated.

'First of all they [trade unions] would have to break their pattern of not thinking about work, the nature of work, their relationship to work, and what they can do about work..But do they ever say: Hey, the whole concept of production of an automobile on a line stinks; the whole thing is wrong; what we ought to be doing is figuring out new ways of looking at the problem of work? No, these are questions from which every union withdraws.'   

The Seer

Wendell Berry is, like Merton, one of those writers, 'thinkers', who writes and speaks with a profound simplicity, getting to the heart of things because in the final analysis there is no analysis (which means to 'break down') and only sound thought, an approach that requires a clear heart and not a sharp mind. 

'Oversimplified moral certainties-always requiring hostility, always potentially violent-isolate us from mercy..'

That is not a case against moral certainties per se but most definitely one against the hubris that results from a lack of humility. 

It hasn't escaped your attention that the world is full of missionaries: everyone thinks they've got the answer and that the world's problems would be solved once and for all if you simply toe their line. Other people's truth will always set you free.

Wendell Berry is spot on in connecting freedom to attachments to the local (a paradox to modern ears since how can a limited perspective afford more autonomy? Yet, it is precisely this stance that another brilliant thinker took over thirty years ago: Ivan Illich).

In opposition to that is the 'private government' of the corporations. This is one thing you simply won't study in economics (possibly in IO but not mainstream, core courses). How is it that the firm is a centralized, hierarchical organization when capitalism is supposed to promote autonomy? In short, why isn't there economic democracy and why are so many people wage slaves, living under the spectre of uselessness? 

Precarious and flexible labour: temporary contracts, job insecurity, inequalities in (bargaining) power, exploitation, a lack of creativity and autonomy, and the meaningless of work. All of that would have been part and parcel of a critique by the old left. 

Based on an 18th century of exchange it is assumed that there is formal equality between contracting parties. The Brewer, the Baker of Adam Smith all a million miles away from the satanic mills he couldn't have foreseen and the huge corporations with unbelievable economic and political power. In a word: big business. And that's, precisely, what is not taught at the university. Instead, we have the black box of 'the firm' or stylized examples of competitive wheat producers. Note: in the Edgeworth analysis of exchange there is no money, no debt relations, no uncertainty and no transaction costs. Again, an outdated, 19th century idea that still finds its way into mainstream economics textbooks.

~

The Dream

Now, each year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of renters are put out on the streets.
--Katha Pollitt, The Guardian. 

In the U.S. 27% live alone (up from 5% in the 1920s). Stockholm: 58%. Of course, living alone doesn't necessarily mean you're lonely, just as being old doesn't, but they might be contributing factors. As is the decline in social capital-the lack of permanent residence in a place and/or a lack of job security. Transience and flexible labour. 

[And what about the quality of housing? China's "floating population".]

London (2025): estimated that 60% will be renters. L.A., N.Y. and San Francisco: around mid 50's.
--C.M. Gillies, The Guardian.

The dream of private property (Thatcher). Two things: what kind of dream was that and how was it connected to the ideology of the market? And, secondly, it ain't gonna happen.

Back in the land of the pure. Been teaching since 1993 and am, as salaries go, very privileged compared to most of my fellow citizens (who are only citizens in name). But still could never imagine buying a piece of land or constructing a house unless I prostitute myself a bit. Even then: unlikely. 

Inescapable frameworks?

What we want is spirituality without religion, religion without faith, faith without God. We do know what we want, only what we do not want. Do we have any idea of what we need?

[ religion ]

Girard is quite right to claim that the Enlightenment succeeded in convincing everyone that evil comes from (religious) institutions and what constitutes freedom is an escape from repression, domination (negative liberty). To think that any collectivity could play a positive role in one's self-determination is to really tread the road to serfdom. 

Since human beings are now considered to be good in themselves (without the aid of grace) evil-if it is allowed to exist-must be located elsewhere. And to be free is to be 'free from' (other people, society, the family, organized religion, the state).

All heady stuff, you might think, except it does make you wonder whether that view has contributed to the dissolution of the self (or, more accurately, of the person..to talk about 'the self' is already to give too much to modern sensibilities).

It was the best of times, the worst of times. That seems to be one of Girard's messages. and since that is a confusing statement it isn't likely to gain much support in an age that wants simple, black and white answers: "you're either with us or against us."

Can't help but think-and this is without reading him and therefore totally unfair-that the last lines of his interview got to the heart of your scepticism towards him. His "passion for ideas", for "solving problems", "like a scientist". he sounds too much like a theoretician, an academic, a French academic! When you read Merton, in contrast, you get the feeling of a lived spirituality, an inward relation to faith that shines through in the simplicity and elegance of his language and clarity of thought. A spirituality and understanding that has been worked at. 

Girard, somewhere else, claims that Islam doesn't seriously engage other faiths in dialogue because of its emphasis on the falsification of the older texts. I'm not sure what his training in Arabic or the history of Islamic thought is but it's quite a remarkable statement coming from someone whose perspective maintains that there is only one way to salvation (pre-Vatican II and pre-Ratzinger's stunning recent comments).

It is remarkable because even a cursory glance of the texts would point to this rather strange term that crops up again and again: the People of the Book. And he couldn't be unaware of the deep reverence Muslims have traditionally held for the prophets from the Jewish and Christian faith who are thought to be part of the same islamic tradition (small 'i'). At one point Muslims are told to "compete" with people from other faiths 'in good works' and are also informed that some are righteous ( a momentous word, I think, in the Qur'anic lexicon).

And then there's what to me is a canonical verse:

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life.
Q. 5.48

In the traditional formulation: the haqiqah (inner truth) is one; the sharia (laws) are many.

This phrase (or word), "way of life", is something to be explored. Asad has it down as "an open road", abstract, not specified. In that sense at the very heart of an inescapable framework that forms a community is the openness of the spirit. If one brings you home, the other keeps you a stranger, wandering. 










   

A London child

Well, I'm not really a Londoner (though it is the city I love mostest). Neither Greek nor Jew and all that. Too many stray thoughts by far, too many false starts. Where to begin? Wales, Kashmir, Taxila? And now? And now I live too much out in the sun, and my sensibilities are increasingly formed by this excessive light, though I maintain a craving for dark grey skies, the stillness and anonymity of a remembered grey. 

'Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.'
--another Saul.

The importance of not fitting the narrative: be ye not conformed. 

Q: How would you like your Paki, Sir?
A: Not too rare, thank you.

Of course, it's a lot easier when you're put in a box: are you a lunatic (fundo) or one of us, a barbarian or a lackey? What cannot be tolerated, at any cost, is the strange hybrid that loves aspects of western culture but sees through its materialism and detests its war machine (the reality, though you'd never know by watching t.v., is that there's quite a few of us out there. Iran, for instance, is full of young people who hate the mullah as much as they do 'the west' (politically speaking, of course)).

Ec-centric, off key. 

But this too is a game for some. The breakdown of narrative is precisely what is engendered by (one might even say required of) capitalism. There can be no narrative, just moments of instantaneous pleasure. Identity, as the academics love to tell us, is a construct (well, what else could it be when talk of essences or human nature is not permitted).

There's no place like home, there's no place.

The ridiculous claim to be a citizen of the world. Or, equivalently: world cinema, world music. One must accept this vacuousness on pains of being drawn to the other camp, the culture industry's manufactured nostalgia or the right-wing reactionary tale of the loss of purity. The false universality of market choice is the only 'world' that is allowed to stand, which is to say: one must take up a perspective that is equivalent to a 'view from nowhere' (or, to put it in its older, pre-scientific formulation: 'the view from the point of the universe').  

To see something today, to truly see it, is not to participate in its being like a shaman but, instead, to take a step back and think of it from a distance, as it were, so that one catch the phenomenon objectively..and already one eye is focused on what use can be made of it (Jonas was surely right here: we live under the shadow of technology). 

We live in the world like voyeurs. What would be meant, today, by the notion of 'right looking', the 'loving glance', the restrained gaze? We've lost the words for different ways of looking (Illich). 

To look out innocently again, the child's unchanged song of innocence remembered with great clarity..an older street in London that still exists, somewhere in the shadows, and even if unfound always there, indestructible, from time out of mind. 

In an age that sets great store in the expansion of knowledge it is surprising that it is never asked: what is really worth knowing or: how deeply do you know anything. Can an expansion in one domain lead to a forgetting in another? There is, no doubt, a lot of empirical and theoretical knowledge that is quite useful, but there is another kind of practical and empirical knowledge that has to do with how one can live a good life. And there is a different 'theoretical' perspective that is not pure method but aims to understand the 'higher' things. Theory, in that sense, is as much determined by its object as it is by its procedures. Such an understanding of theory goes against the grain of modern thought whereby everything (there is no 'higher' or 'lower') can be theorized (Jonas, again). 

In that older form of understanding one could be quite 'unread' and lacking in technical know-how, almost to the point of naivete, but still wise. Contrast that to the people who know an awful lot about their own very narrow field of specialization. That is not to deny the very real societal advantages of this division of labour, but only to pose the question of what actually counts as intelligence. Formidable advancements in the scale of information and knowledge still do not amount to greater understanding. In fact, the scattering of it across various disciplines and the increasingly theoretical nature of it means it has often lost its ability to represent anything meaningful to us. 

'The hand tells the bowstring:
   Obey me.
The bowstring answers the hand:
   Draw Valiantly
The bowstring tells the arrow:
   O arrow, fly.
The arrow answers the bowstring:
   Be my light
The target answers the arrow:
   Love me.

--Aleksander Wat.

Lost words, worlds

He would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree or the species of frog..

the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind..

the speech, the graves, the wedding songs

while the years of silence gathered..

[ ..]

...


......

whispered the name of a bird
in his mother tongue
while memories of snow and market days...
]
..
[
his father's hands...

nothing he said was remembered.
[the last word, found in nobody's heart]

--John Burnside (more or less. Less, actually].

~~

1534

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

Our whole modern tone of mind is not conducive to questioning the thought that human beings are anything but clever animals, subject to the same natural processes of decline and adaptation as every other living thing on earth. We have lost the words to describe ourselves in any other way. 

Men and women are not made in the image of God and have no special status, no stay against the briefness of time, no imaginative faculties that can transport them to other worlds, no glint of transcendence, no distinct centre, no creative spark, just the same fixed horizons that fade with his own death, as everything else in the universe fades out of memory.

[Is this somehow related to the point made in the previous post: politics reduced to the body, to its display (spectacle) and management? To be small, out of the limelight, is to be condemned to obscurity. One must stand and up and be counted (by the state) and sell oneself or one's wares on the market. Transparency! How the white man hated the Red Man's secretive nature... ]

All that can be admitted today is that Man's unique quality-if he has any at all-is his inclination and capacity to destroy all around him.

If the former view, that of men and women being the apex of creation, bordered on the arrogant then what are we to make of the modern view? Is it one of humility or an expression and symptom of nihilism?

What is one to make of the view that man is the measure of all things? Does the lack of a transcendental dimension inevitably result in that view being transformed into a picture in which Man is nothing but a thing, a number? But before that, the intermediary stage of thinking that nature, animals, all that was living was devoid of intelligence and simply a "resource" to be used for the comfort of human beings.

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

~

Moments of beauty

Is there anything sweeter than seeing England lose? (India, perhaps?). A sheer moment of beauty. 

~

M&S have introduced a "Burkini". Created quite a stir amongst the usual circles of fascists and racists. Western civilisation under threat blah blah blah. Our values, blah, blah, blah. We didn't fight two world wars to see freedom eroded like this. Another regressive step that will see women go back to the medieval ages.

One of the most interesting comments I saw was along these lines: cut it out with your hypocrisy and whining. Where were you when so many women's bodies were mutilated by the bombs that are a direct or indirect result of western 'interventions'.

And, of course, they were nowhere because culture, private or personal matters -"the body"-are what count as political nowadays. Or, to put it more accurately, they are the paramount political concerns.

"I am not an Islamophobe. Women have the right to wear headscarves, but I do not see why we are going towards this religion, these practices and mores, that are absolutely incompatible with our western freedoms."

"Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship."

--Pierre Berge.

H&M: "There are no rules in fashion."

"Of course, there are women who make the choice..there were also..american negroes who were in favour of slavery."
--Rossignol, French minister for women's rights.

~~

Nothing grates on people's nerves more than the word 'modesty' or the idea that there might be some standards of appropriate dress/behaviour. Who the fuck do you think you are telling me? And, of course, there is often good reason to resent standards because they've been imposed (usually by men) in order to control and subdue others. 

But the very idea that men and women could choose moderation, austerity or reticence, goes against the grain of the culture of late capitalism where perpetual growth is the driving force and limits, of whatever kind, impede the expansion of the markets. And nothing can be allowed to remain private or secretive. Everyone is in thrall to the latest revelations, to the goss that lays it all bare.

To say we live in a consumer society is to say we live in a labouring one (labour in the sense of producing enough for the body's renewal, producing something that is consumed and then disappears). Life, bios, becomes a supremely political notion (or rather the efficient management of it does). Not life as a 'way of life' but sheer animal existence (the unnatural growth of the natural, Arendt would say).

The biopolitical, the bringing of the forces of what was previously hidden (the economy) into the public realm ends up destroying both the private and the public. 

But no-one even flinches when they think what this has led to. Foucault, on the other hand, was quite explicit. The totalitarian aspect of the management of life is exemplified by the camps: work shall set you free.

   


  

The Red & the Green

For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian is a civilised and religious man..is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest sense of the word. 

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H.L.