Thrawn

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'A time comes when the inner life is mostly about memory.'

Do you know when that is, that moment when time is reconfigured, draws focus?

'..recovering a single happy moment from the past, like some random snapshot found between the pages of a book, a single moment of light and specific colour to slide into before the gold of this world goes into shadow.'

And now book and word, image and deed, crumble before your eyes, without shape or inner form. The bewildering galmour of the world in these fragments, in the hands struggling to hold on to what they always knew. When winter comes around again, will you remember? What cast of mind and whither your heart?

the big question

Here's a young writer who I think has got her head screwed on:

'What does a soft drink have to do with literature?..As interest in visual mediums of expression grows at a rampant pace, literature festivals, as one of the few safe havens for writers and the written word, need to remain true to their ethos.'

Hamna Zubair.

She's really too polite but hopefully with time she will learn to trust her instincts (which have obviously been stifled by editorial oversight) and become a lot more scathing of the circuses that are up and running in the land of the pure, what with their prostitutes and their fawning over Indian "celebrities". 

~

Talking of circuses, this has to be the single best line that Trumpet has come up with in the whole campaign:

'The two men even squabbled about Bush's mother. The former Florida governor said proudly, "My mother was the strongest person I know."

Trump's response" "Maybe she should be running." 

Classic.

~

Fragments of a life

I dreamt my own death and the light was calm, serene, easy and simple and gentle. I'd always imagined it just so, the perfect light of late summer, just before Fall and the evening chill.

"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".

He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.

Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.

By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.

~~

'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'

--Macintyre. 

Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was. 

Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.  

Post-capitalism

'It's embarrassing to say this to a generation where individual tuition has become a privilege; where non-examinable knowledge is perceived as a waste of time; where every thesis and dissertation must begin with a mind-numbing rehash of existing knowledge, written to a formula as rigid as that demanded by the Qing-era Chinese civil service. But here goes: the past was better.'

--Paul Mason.

~

I never realised just how radical Macintyre is. Of course, the radicalism originates from a religious perspective since religion, in its best sense, will always stand opposed to worldliness. Which is not to say that a proper perspective should not take in the world; just that one should not be taken or taken in by the world. 

'It is also a time for resisting..as temperately as possible the dominant social, economic, and political order of advanced modernity.'

This, to some ears, will no doubt sound too harsh, and smack of a spirit that is too generalizing, too broad-brushed in its judgement. Well one might ask: is there nothing in the times we live in that is worthy of our attention, that redeems, at least in part, some its flaws?

I think part of 'the Muslim problem'-though its never characterized as such-is that insofar as the religious spirit survives it is never fully at home in a world that has been formed by the Enlightenment. There will always be, I suppose, this nagging sense that for all the progress, for all the advancement that has been achieved (and that is not in question, of course), and for all the wonders of science, something of importance has been irretrievably lost. A way of looking at the world, a way of being in it.

Particular modern notions of rationality, self-interest, individuality and liberty jar with that older outlook or world view. Religion, in that sense, is on the side of poetry and art.

Dynamism, which in youth is a sign of vigour, is often quite the opposite at a later stage of life. Ceaseless flux and restlessness are not necessarily an open-ness to the world-at least not when they're manufactured by an economic system that must keep the juggernaut moving. Bloch was right here: continuous change isn't necessarily the same thing as freedom. The dissipation of forms, the shedding of identity can just as well be signs of decay as they can of growth.  

'The self is nothing, not a substance, but a set of perpetually open possibilities.'

In one succinct line Macintyre has summarized the centrality of existentialism to modern culture (existence precedes essence, the leap of the will) as well as hinted at the dissolution of a substantive notion of the person at the hands of scientific and economic ways of thinking. 

What remains is the abstract, ghost-like creature who, like the American woodsman, has no sense of place, no time or patience. Everything must be sampled, tasted, skimmed through. Attachments, far from being a source of enrichment are either a distraction or an encroachment on the true, inner self (Gnosticism). What is freedom but to be 'free from'?

And in a parallel fashion the freedom of the market mirrors the actions of a man with no qualities. The possibilities are endless, at least in a 'quantitative' sense; in another sense they're just a refashioning of age old tracks that humans have, since time out of mind, traversed.

But the allure of living more than one life, the plurality of the self, is undermined by the thought that what we end up with is not a double life but half a life. 

'The Greatest Party on Earth'

Type in Rio Carnival in google and you'll see how difficult it was to choose this picture. No-wonder the Tableeghis (missionaries) are not allowed to go to Brazil or Argentina unless they're married. 

"[The disappearance of the carnival] testifies to the fact that disorder has irrupted into the entire course of existence and to its having become generalized to such a point that, in reality, we could said to live in a 'sinister, perpetual carnival'."
--Rene Guenon. 

[The point about order and disorder is taken up in more detail by Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return]

We're so used to thinking-because of our historical experiences- that the main form of domination is exercised in a totalitarian, oppressive and controlling way. Think of the state, religious authority, the family, tradition and one immediately thinks of stable institutions trying to kill off spontaneity, smothering the individual in a desperate attempt to establish or maintain order, continuity, conformity, passivity. 

But what if all that's changed under liquid modernity or late capitalism? What if it's not property but property rights (alienability) that is the thing to concentrate on? (Arendt saw this way back in 1957).

What if power is now exercised in more subtle ways? Sowing confusion and producing spectacles, persuasion and manipulation, rather than brute force, may be more effective ways of exercising control. Unbounded desires, a superficial notion of individuality, the negation of any image of Man, or any possibility that we have a specific telos results in the view-confirmed by science and re-inforced by the silence of religion-that we are nothing but selfish genes, clever animals with infinite desires, hurtling along without any notable direction in a world of contingency and purposelessness. 

A mere speck of life thrown into an unforgiving vast and grey universe. That we are thrown here suggests it is all just a roll of the dice, a game of chance or a blind turn of mechanical forces (Hans Jonas's point).

Techniques of letting go. Civilisation and culture are repression. The wild man, the nomad, the person who has no orientation (Ostad Elahi), no name and no country (the American woodsman)..that is the ideal. This 'constantly moving happiness machine' is there for the taking by the corporations and the dream merchants.

Go with the flow, just do it. Liberation...mindfulness for CEOs, Buddhism in five easy steps, Islam for Dummies, how to discover your true self (in Oakland) for $ 3.99 or your money back, GUARANTEED. Repeat after me: I am an individual, I am an..Je suis.. 

Encyclopedia of the Dead

Do you think, D, that life was somehow a dream..or maybe it was just our lives? It's as if we just floated through life or maybe it was the other way around: everything in the world passed before our eyes in a fleeting moment. I can't get a hold on things. I don't even reach out any more, not sure of the point. Everything can be contained in one room, or maybe even in a suitcase. 

D: There's some anthropological theory, isn't there, about how we could understand a person's life by just looking at a complete record of their transactions?

But isn't that in part the problem? That it's always been ideas, as if they were just another one of those transactions? What about what we gave and took from life?

D: Life?! Dear child, what are you talking about. We died a long time ago, don't you know?

The Ghosts of Motley Hall? Gosh, we're in a charming mood this morning!

D: Dunno about you, kid, but I am. Do you know any tunes?

I know the first four notes of 'Once in Royal David's City' and can play them on that cracked piano. 

D: Then play them in the centre, those keys still work.

~

Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

~

You really wanted to like Danilo Kis but three stories in you're still undecided. Certainly some lovely passages but what holds you back is the feeling that there's a fierce intelligence at work there, that an idea can take over and swamp the story telling. No, maybe it's not that. Perhaps there's the uncomfortable thought that lurking just below the surface of the stories is politics (not quite a political agenda but..). That all sounds a bit harsh, I know, but...

~

That night I dreamt I was back in an old part of the town, in the old country. You stopped at what you thought was the public library, but it really resembled a city train station with kiosks, stone walls and lots of people in grey hats and long coats walking past it. there you are, in the shade, the sweltering heat, windows flung open..and you always walk up the wrong flight of stairs. In the offices above the station/library was the loud-mouthed girl from your class, from the school on the hill, all grown up and it was truly amazing to see her. "Where have you been?"

I couldn't tell, after all these years. We return as strangers to our own homes.



~
Was there only ever one room after all? The red one of bewilderment, the white one in which all directions were possible? The dark one, with no lights, except from the passing cars. Your face pressed against the cold window, the tune from Dizzy's 'All these things you are' behind your back, as you wait for the return.

~
[Do you ever see your own face in a dream? Is it the true one? You dreamt of someone's fantastic legs the other day. Really must stop watching Paige].

Faith in an uncertain world

It may be that with nuclear proliferation we have entered a far more radically uncertain world than has ever been witnessed before; the distinct possibility of environmental catastrophe only adds to that sense of foreboding. If one were to look at Syria and the rise of religious extremism in many parts of the "Muslim world" then there are even more grounds for pessimism.

But is that the whole story? Really? Is it still possible to have faith in an uncertain world?

This comes on the back of reading what to me sound like some rather bizarre comments:

1. If you look at Syria it kinda makes you nostalgic for the cold war.
2. Look at the wars, the way black people are being gunned down in America. World War I wasn't this bad.
3. We live in an unprecedented era of disease, war, violence, drought..etc., etc.

Of course, there are some young people who love wallowing in misery and there are a good number of old ones who mistake their personal situation for the actual state of the world.

Blessed is the man who hears the crash of thunder and doesn't think of home.
--Basho.

~

On a cautiously optimistic note, then:

Comparisons. What is the base line? Compared with the extreme violence and barbarity of the 20th century are what we're seeing a real degradation? Is it even possible to imagine a lowering of the standards set by that most vicious of centuries?

So, not is only the negative less negative than in previous times; there have also been significant positive changes.

1. Nutrition levels (Angus Deaton. More on that later). 
2. The number of people who have moved out of poverty over the last 30 to 40 years.
3. Gender equality has increased (despite all the horrific instances of crime and evil). In simple terms of artists, female professionals, female education..
4. Attitudes to race have mellowed (at least in the UK). Also, in America there's no slavery and no segregation (the incarceration of so many black Americans is an obvious rejoinder tot his point). 
5. In many places people are becoming less obsessed by religion. That can only be a good thing. Without state funding a lot of the extremism might still exist but as a pale shadow of what it is now. Even now, because it is a force that is morally, spiritually, and intellectually bankrupt, it is hard to imagine it surviving for much longer.
6. There are tentative steps to democracy in some countries (helped by the demise of the Communists).

"The perplexing fact about lives given over to the satisfaction of ordinary material needs is that they seem capable of generating their own self-validation..The terror of life, for Augustinians, was that it is so inexplicably endurable."

--Ignatieff.

If that is true then the measure of our fallen state is that we are simply not aware of what we lack. We do not comprehend the chasm that has opened up before us and merrily hurtle toward it because movement, no matter to what end or in which direction, is expressive of our will.

We gorge ourselves on pleasures, relinquishing the possibility of joy or composure or repose. Does the word 'excess' still exist in our vocabulary?

There is a tendency to see our situation as unique. We either think that we stand at the culmination of a long drawn-out historical process of an epic struggle against superstition and theological mystification; or we see ourselves as frivolously or seriously living out humankind's last act. 

By some kind of great miracle human intelligence has finally freed itself from thinking about 'other worlds' and can concentrate on the more practical consideration of improving people's lives-even if only incrementally- here on earth, right now. On the other hand, after centuries of war and barbarity that very same intelligence lies in tatters, as does our confidence in any long-term project. There is no poetry after Auschwitz. Itself, that has become a slogan, an empty gesture! 

And so we conclude that it was that very same intelligence that tricked and trapped us when it was life, life all along that what we wanted. Sovereign becoming, and don't tarry to try and make sense of it. Go with the flow, don't tie the fragments together because nothing an be reassembled at this late stage in the day/game. Is it anything but a game or a stage and, if so, what part to play but that of the clown?

"Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space."

--Russell.

It is precisely that way of seeing, thinking, reflecting and remembering that seems unavailable to us today. What resources can we call upon then?

How b got his groove back..

Growing up in what was to all effect an all-white community you always had the sneaking suspicion that white people weren't that cool (part of that was, no doubt, down to the racism you experienced). But part of it was, you'd like to think, that your cousins and the dougal had a stack of LPs that no-one had really heard of and whose sound was, how to say this, soulful, unpretentious, more real than all the other stuff on the radio and television (Otis, B.B., Marvin, Toots, Aretha, Sam & Dave, Marley). 

R.I.P. Maurice White.

2° C

Will Copenhagen be met? Is an increase in average global temperatures of two degrees by 2100 likely, possible, or just pie-in-the-sky? And what are the implications of this figure and of exceeding it.

Kevin Anderson has a fascinating and startling chapter on these questions.

First things first. There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding climate change. That doesn't just mean we have probability distributions over different scenarios. It also means, in the technical sense, that we may simply not know how technologies and production will evolve, how much greenhouse gas will be produced or what its impact on temperatures will be. And the ecological system, beyond a certain increase in temperatures, may react in ways that we cannot currently predict. Will there be "feedback effects", non-linear changes?

But here's the dope.

2° C over pre-industrial levels is actually unlikely and its likely impact has changed from being "dangerous" but "very dangerous".

Average global temperature increases over the last century have been about 2.7° C each year. Average, mind you. Given that land surface and the sea warm up at different rates that means increases in land temperatures is more (perhaps one degree more). Also, NY and the arctic might be hit by much higher increases than other places because this is only an average figure.

If we were to increase at 2.7 that would mean the business-as-usual scenario would give us around 25 years for carbon to increase to 800 ppm ! At 800 we're talking about maybe a 17% chance (Weitzman) of temperature increases of + 6° C. Which, in anyone's books, is disaster.

Of course, there isn't going to business as usual so you need to look at mitigation (though, having said that, carbon dioxide has grown at more than 3.2 % even after the economic slowdown and global material extraction has, over the period of 1980-2009 nearly doubled (an increase of 94%).

Is there time for serious mitigation and which countries are going to have to take the plunge?

Given that Co-2 can stay in the atmosphere for over a 100 years the later we delay things the more difficult stabilisation is going to become. Anderson clearly explains this: in order to reach 2° C there's only a certain amount of Co-2 that can be emitted by 2050. If we made all the cuts in the last years before 2050 (for argument's sake) that would not be the same as if we cut back gradually up to 2050 since Co-2 would have accumulated and it's the stock of it that counts.

For Stern and others for us to have a reasonable chance of not going over 2° C we have to reach peak Co-2 by 2015. Er..

And there's this widespread assumption built into the models that new technologies in the future will help resolve the problem. And if they aren't there, then what happens to the models? 

2° C

There must be some optimal temperature range in which the human body feels just at ease. Lahore, right now and possibly for the next two weeks has hit that zone. The air is warm and mellow, the light is gentle, clear and bright but not without its own sadness.

You sit outside in the sun on a bench and read some Macintyre. Questions, all the questions are as of dust. Answers, too, of no import. You are cast back to the 12 th century momentarily. You look at the brown earth on this wonderful day and nothing tugs at your heart, nothing teases your mind. This patch of earth, the grand sweep of time, time returning with different people in it, the birds, the trees-all nameless-the ancient sun and I, myself, part of this picture..

In the early evening the light catches a large tree, concentrates there, so that it glows brown and red with some mysterious inner fire meeting the intermingling of the breeze and the old day's light. Every leaf is caught in motion. The tree is there, and maybe there for years and years after I am gone but right now it is flowing, flowing.. 

~
It is also the season for fresh turmeric (which looks like ginger) and fresh, raw garlic (which looks like spring onions). One of the great advantages of living in an 'undeveloped' country is that there is less processed food and people generally eat fruit and veg. that is local and in season (though that is, unfortunately, changing with improved cold storage facilities). It also means that finance is less developed and, given the shenanigans and corruption associated with it (LIBOR, FX, etc.), that too is a blessing. 

Since there is a lot of mediocrity I manage to survive. And the universities haven't-as of yet-been worked over by capitalism and the audit culture so there is a lot of lazing around (which suits me just fine). There is no sense of urgency, and so I continue to float at my own speed (rather than drift aimlessly, as I probably would had I been elsewhere).

And yet, and yet, I'm too Jewish by far to think this (or anything) is it. 

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

--Shah Latif.

On the other hand, life and religion are full of colour.

There is much to admire in the Pope's Encyclical. Here are some of his words/thoughts:

Damage stems from the idea that there are no ultimate truths to guide our lives and the notion that we have limitless freedom.

An integral ecology would lead us to understand that social justice is not separable from ecological justice; care for other people cannot be separated from our responsibility to non-human beings and, more generally, the environment.

Without openness and awe in front of nature there is only consumption and mastery: the desire to eradicate what we lack in life with the aid of material things and the mistaken belief that nature is something to be used, tamed..an "input" into the generation of income or human welfare.

"Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there..."
[There must always be a space, a time, where human beings stand aside from themselves]

The world is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be contemplated.

Technology has made the earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey. [One dimensional].

"Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection..Each of the various creatures..reflects in its own way a ray of God's infinite wisdom and goodness." 

God's goodness "could not be represented fittingly by any one creature." (Aquinas).

[This notion of abundance, of an overflowing goodness, is likely to strike modern ears as wildly inaccurate. But it is only when you consider that it is humans who have turned abundance into scarcity, the beautiful into ugliness, that this rings true. In addition, this is an incredibly humble stance: to recognize one's own smallness, limits, without despair, without impatiently trying to achieve something that we are not capable of and, ultimately, something that we don't really wish to be. And since no-one being contains all truth and merit, it follows that we should respect other beings, other ways of being. Pluralism, in its best sense, is intricately related to humility]. 

[From a Muslim perspective: Lord of all the worlds. Equally, the orthodox position that Islam is just the last in a long line of revelations, each with their own distinct approaches. There is no one "saving truth"].

"Respecting the possibilities offered by things."

"Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology.."

To be conscious "that we live and act on the basis of a reality which has previously been given to us, which precedes our existence and our abilities."

No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful.

When the day is done

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain.

The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,

The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,

My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,

I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,

My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,

I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I am but made.

The glass is full, and now the glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

---

With thanks to Bob and Tom for pointing me here.

~

I'm homesick for a place I don't know, or that I've never left. I have nothing left to say and don't know how to say it. A dark planet was discovered, hidden after all this time, and in the human heart...

A story by Breece sounds hollow, contrived. There is nothing to follow: no letters, staged reading performances, contracts, deals, signings, secrets revealed by lost lovers out to make a buck. This is it, the final form, the last-day face that said it all. No 'progression', no reference to other books, no storyline, just this slim volume between your fingers, a life condensed to a few thousand words, contained within this thin jacket, the imprint of a hand on a windowpane, your breath in the early morning winter, January, now.

No afterglow, no fame, just a moment of rediscovery and then sink back to where you've always been. If you have not reached winter, then where?

Fat Tails

According to Weitzman there is about a one in ten chance (10%) that climate change will result in temperature increases of 6 C in the business-as-usual scenario. That, to put it quite simply, spells catastrophe.

Reading the haunting book on Chernobyl you don't have any great confidence in nuclear energy as a solution.

Perhaps the key to thinking about climate change is not in terms of "consumption smoothing" (inter-temporal optimization) but in terms of insurance against catastrophic changes.

But maybe that, too, is the wrong way of thinking. After all, why should I buy insurance for someone else (future generations)?; also, if there is a pay-out that cannot replace the damaged environment nor can other people directly benefit from the pay-out (as in life insurance). So, what we're really talking about is risk management and our responsibility for avoiding a catastrophic situation.

The first approach (optimization) is fraught with all sorts of technical and ethical difficulties (not least: what discount rate should be used). I'll write a post on that later but W. Beckerman has, for me, the clearest exposition of the technicalities involved in the Ramsey equation.

~
There's this amazing scene in one of my favourite films, the original Planet of the Apes (one is constantly reminded of this given the way in which ISIS and other fanatics have risen to prominence). And it's this: when the old religious order finds out that there is evidence of another kind of world, one that preceded theirs and that was in some sense more intelligent (but more violent). The apes replace that civilisation with something cruder but less violent because less technologically advanced.

And what is that evidence? A talking doll found in the rubble. 

~
Given the possibility of threshold effects and feedback loops it's not absolutely clear what kind of "system" we'd enter if temperatures increase by 6 C. Will we be in a system of non-linear and irreversible changes? Certainly earth hasn't seen these levels of concentration of carbon dioxide (400 ppm) for 800,000 years. The period of settled agriculture is perhaps only 10,000 years long and has obviously depended on favourable climate changes.

So, the question is really about survival. Not just who survives but what survives? Will a recognizable human form, the Image of Man, continue to exist?

The American Dream

 To be white now has no meaning divorced from “the machinery of criminal power.”
--Ta-Nehisi Coates.

To dream the dream that the dreamers dreamt. Dream on. We have our own dreams. As soon as I could walk I knew how to dream.

~

Blind spots. People don't like to talk about them much. The way men can't understand women; the way so-called religious people are contemptuous of non-religious people; the way in which racism-which exists everywhere-has been institutionalized by white people over the last two centuries.

Think: South Africa, Australia, America and the idea and practice of segregation, camps, ghettos. In some sense Israel is a continuation of this rather nasty dimension of European history. Think: colonialism and how it was deeply intertwined with notions of racial superiority. And, of course, Nazism. 

Foucault's apt formulation: Nazism = State Racism. (The bio-political pushed to its extreme).

As one might well ask if men have really got over their misogyny I think one can also ask: have Europe and America got over their intense race consciousness? 

The Red Man, the Black Man, ..ain't really man enough.

~

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky...

Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leapt to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs...

a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun.

Fifty Shades of Laughter

Not quite sure who Grayson Perry is..sounds like some kind of performer. Side note: give anyone a platform and they become an actor seeking out the laughter and 'companionship' of the audience. You can see academics at TED doing their best to throw in a joke here and there, cultivate some two-penny act, become a showman, an entertainer, a "communicator" (can anyone beat Reagan here?)..forget "relevance" and academic acclaim; nothing beats being a media whore-except, of course, for being a servant of the state as a public policy wonk, a self-styled expert who will sell his soul for some greenbacks and the dream of a comfortable life out in the sticks.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts in his Reith lectures:

"By the early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we're in a state where anything can be."

There is something mildly irritating by the casual use of, you know, the language, like. It's all sort of, you know, vague, confessional-ly, kinda of like how a teenager speaks, you know, right, like we was in Essex or something.

But put that to one side and get to the meat..

"The avant-garde is now a period style."

And the art establishment sort of looks down and goes, oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

[And take your clothes while your at it, luv]

We were now in a period where anything could go.

[Against that, cultivate some mode of thinking that is stuffy, arcane, esoteric and impossible for the plebs to understand-even if it is utter nonsense]

We've accepted a lot of things that were weird now are normal..."We're all bohemians now". [Or, as the like to say in late capitalism: "Everyone's a nomad!"]

[Rebel. I told you to rebel. Je suis Charlie..]

And if you think about it [no, don't] all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things sort of crop up on Saturday night on family viewing.

[Of course, we sort of don't want to think of subversiveness as independence of thought, or as a way of dealing with the fact that the political and media machines have worked us over].

But what they don't realise-by being all inventive and creative, they're actually playing into capitalism's hands. 

The art world is the perfect model of neo-liberalism..

So radical art of the 60s has become a kind of messy play lifestyle accessory for the Fifty Shades of Grey generation.(LAUGHTER). 

Outrage has become domesticated.

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency..the currency of a bohemian-ness, lefty, arty-fartiness..especially in the urban ecology.

A part of his [Graham Fagen] installation if you like was a pile of sweets and they [a group of students] all just started eating the sweets! (LAUGHTER). You know that's their argument.

I mean Piero Manzoni in 61 famously canned his own faeces and sold them for the weight, equivalent weight of gold. 

[Hey, you can't blame all of the decline of western civilisation on immigrants!]

And we should all say yes everything we do is really brilliant.

Theme park plus Sudoko. You know, people want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it's about. (LAUGHTER).

You know it might be art rather than just an interesting website when it has the grip of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending.