'WOW – this is the business of capitalist money-making at its best.

Beyoncé’s audience is the world, and that world of business and money-making has no color.

Concurrently, the scantily clothed dancing image of athlete Serena Williams also evokes sportswear. (Speaking of commodification, in the real-life frame Beyoncé’s new line of sportswear, Ivy Park, is in the process of being marketed).

What makes this commodification different in Lemonade is intent; its purpose is to seduce, celebrate and delight..

the goddess-like character of Beyoncé is sexualized along with her acts of emotional violence – like Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, she destroys with no shame.

Among the many mixed messages embedded in Lemonade is this celebration of rage...

To truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight,..'

--Bell Hooks.

~

If that's what passes for journalism nowadays then Gawd help us!

Abundance and Extinction

The walled city, the grand intuition laid to rest, the abundance squandered as the great summer holds us captive. Would that my words were richer (for you). The extinction of forms we once knew, memory like a forgotten hat on the train, the sense of it all now only smoke in our hands, a stain on our fingers, the smell of tobacco loosely lingering on your old coat. The empty plot next to the library in the old country is probably now all glass and steel. 

The breath out of time, keeps pace at the last turn. The squalor of a mind without 'givenness', priors. The night-words at 3 a.m. still clinging to the dream-world, fresh from the first beginnings of the heart's radiance, like little H repeating a word five times until you turn your head to notice what's always been there...

And the blue mourned the loss of the red.

Draw up the list of what belongs to who, and who to what. "Marriage only lasts ten days," KP said. "I sit under a tree by the river and watch my life go by." The river has dried up, like our words and feelings. Sixty, seventy years ago-or so the swami says-there were crocodiles there and now the lush grass has grown so thickly over the bed that buffaloes freely roam over the lost parts of river. Within a single lifetime what is known with the surety of our senses becomes a memory. When we were children did we only imagine we saw a river? Only when there's a starless sky can you hear it murmur again. 

The plant world faces extinction, the myriad names slipping by, down far into the obscure pages of a dusty and soon-to-be obsolete book. There was more than enough for everyone, there always was. 

The term draws to a close. You prepare for the last rituals with nothing much to show for it. And yet none of that bothers you at this time. What would you write, and for who? 

More importantly: wild garlic in the morning, barley with gur in the evening, an unsurpassed summer drink. Apples (imported..I know, I know)and fresh cherries but even better: a watermelon and lemon blitz. This is the time when there's an incredible variety of seasonal fruits: plums and peaces, too. Jamun for two weeks, dry on your tongue. Then by 15th June (there is a precise day) mangoes. If you've only had the awful south American version you've missed out on one of life's great pleasures, for can anything beat the king, Sher Shah Suri's chaunsa? 

Second thoughts: disappearing acts

Too hasty in yesterday's post. So, some second, unconventional thoughts.

Putting to one side the whole history of the orientalist perspective on the niqab and the visibility of women's bodies is there something peculiarly modern about today's 'concerns', is there anything new to be said? (Of course, the very fact that so many men feel they have the power and right to discuss this, some special degree of insight, is itself revealing).

In other words: in what sense is it Muslims 1, Europe 0?

Is the veil simply and exclusively a form of patriarchy? Do women who "choose" the veil really just suffer from a form of false consciousness, adapting their "preferences" to the constricted circumstances in which they find themselves in (in which they've been placed)? Is the visibility of the face central to western sensibilities, as so many people think?

Of course, at one level a degree of confusion, aversion and perhaps even revulsion is to be expected. There are legitimate concerns about oppression, the lack of free expression (less concern, you think, when bombs are mangling those very same bodies). But there is also plain human nature at work here: anything that represents a stark difference to the prevailing cultural norms will be looked upon with a fair amount of hesitation and suspicion. The question is, I suppose, in a world of three-line stories and breaking news is there any chance for reflection, second thoughts?

Are these women, then, the disappeared?

Perhaps-and I say this only speculatively-one of the reasons why the veil is so frightful is that it clearly goes against the ethos of late capitalism whereby everything should be readily available. Bodies, information and images should be instantly and effortlessly accessible. Anything or anyone that does not give itself to the market to be commodified and eventually priced is missing out on an opportunity. In the neo-liberal era you have to market yourself, put yourself on display (is this one of the main reasons for soaring levels of anxiety?).

What would it mean, today, for the image not to be consumed? Isn't that the real disappearing act..the disappearance of the substantial self? Do we carry around with ourselves another kind of image, one that is a secret or only known obliquely? There are no co-ordinates for the internal self to latch on (existence precedes essence) and history is bunk. All we have is the 'view from nowhere' and a disjointed set of occurrences in which we never fully participate (which is precisely what happens to be useful for an economic system that demands "flexible labour"). 

No ties to a specific place, no binding obligations (only temporary contracts). The old, solid self of the bourgeois era has come to an end. Not particularly stylish and too worldly, self-interested to be of any enduring value, but when all is said and done still a bulwark against the dissipating forces of late capitalism and science. 

It is not just that so much of our thinking militates against a unified and coherent conception of the self (think: academia cannot fathom the possibility of human nature..everything is a "social construct" and in economics there is only the bizarre picture of a robot mechanically choosing to maximize its preferences, preferences that are taken as 'given' and which are not subject to any second-order evaluation); it is that our way of living precludes the formation of a deeper self (or any contact with it). All that is solid melts into air.

There is a world of difference between choosing to disappear and being forced to.  

If market forces destroy the public world (reducing it to a play of spectacular or disconnected 'events' and performances) then it also-and this was Arendt's point-diminishes the private realm as well.    

   

What has happened?

What has happened to you, the Europe of humanism, the champion of human rights, democracy and freedom? What has happened to you, Europe, the home of poets, philosophers, artists, musicians, and men and women of letters? 

---Pope Francis.

I'm a big fan of this Pope and there are some good things in this speech (the need for a social economy) but parts of it really did seem hollow. Many of the comments answered the Pope's question with one simple word: immigration (this is a theme the Australian woman will no doubt warm to).

Well, yes, who can deny that the influx of large numbers of people from different backgrounds hasn't had an impact.

Er..ahem. Europe 1, Muslims 0.

But seriously. Can one still talk about Europe after the concentration camps? A modern history that consists of colonialism, followed by two brutal "world" wars, support for autocrats and dictators everywhere under the name of "national interest" and an economic system that has resulted in an imminent environmental crisis and you still want to talk about poets and men and women of letters? Really?

What if we put immigration to one side and ask the more difficult question: could it be that the economic system is subverting democracy and freedom? Is it possible that the endless pursuit of useless commodities, an emphasis on instant gratification and a shallow materialism results in the decline of culture?

Will Hutton, writing about the anxiety epidemic, gets closer to the mark:

"But there must also be an effort to get at the roots of what is happening-and that lies in more social interaction, and stronger social and public institutions that don't make individual choice the alpha and omega of everything." 

Only problem is, Will, that under the market system it is the alpha and omega. And you can't turn back two centuries of thought or the practices built on that thought. The liberal heritage is central to European/Western identity. Liberty: yes! Fraternity? Come again?

It goes without saying that there's no point looking to the "mystical" East because it is backward, stagnant and decadent. What humanism there was is rapidly dissipating under the forces of a crass consumer capitalism and/or ethnic and religious hatreds. Where does one look, then? Superficiality or the pretentiousness of the pious?

A dear uncle, someone who was as at home reading textual interpretations of the Qur'an as he was reading Mario Puzo, once said to me, many years ago: there are no more collective solutions. Find what you can. 

I think that's about right. It's too late in the day to ask "what has happened". A question that serves no purpose to my mind and can only be asked someone who is desperate to keep a creaking institution from falling apart (understandable, really, but in the circumstances might one not venture a more radical approach?). A question asked by someone whose nostalgia is misplaced (to continue on the Joseph Cornell theme from yesterday).

What has happened is that no-one quite knows and no-one is willing to ask that question- for all the wrong reasons.  

Hold on Dreamer

I See You (Live) by Frøkedal on tape.tv.

The Dark Mirror

Me? I pursue an image, no more.

--Nerval.

Prisoner of love

[..

.

.


..

-ko]

For a thousandth of a thousandth of a second I was free.

~~~

I see it now, the fleeting world.

~~~~

There are some strange people in the world! Misfits, losers, tramps, ghosts in the sunlight, those who lived in the new world heartbroken but whose souls were formed by a forgotten life in a small town in eastern Europe, the ancient rhythms of sowing and reaping, sowing and reaping in the hinterland still felt in the pulse. Or maybe their words might follow the contours of speech, some unique shift in sounds, from an old fishing village song cycle found in no book. The last words their fathers spoke indelible..and then the blue sea. Even when they were sitting in a side-street cafe in New York, surrounded by flashing lights, the howling sirens from two blocks down, they could order a slice of soft, sponge cake (the image is Simic's) with gestures and words that marked them out.

"You're not from around here, are you?" asked the waitress. He couldn't smile properly and thought of the long trek back, past all those strange and discarded objects to the dark cellar of his home where he could work, unseen. "I must remember," he mumbled to himself, walking at a strange angle to the universe, with an unusual, jolting and uneven pace.

"I wish I hadn't been so reserved." The human heart, it is so infinitely curious. 

These people, out of time, in the wrong place, seem like kindred spirits. Walser and Pessoa, behind the grey, respectable suits, that lost look of resignation in their eyes, their remarkable acceptance of defeat (shikast) and the final awareness of the reality that time had passed them by, that they'd quietly grown old not knowing how to live. Why do they seek cramped spaces: a basement room, an office, a makeshift refuge? Why didn't they marry? 

Somewhere in the city were the objects and the people that were now isolated but that belonged to one another. What strange times we live in! The image of us, not now, but then, face to face. That was my metaphysics, my religion. Nothing but a variation of lost and found, nothing but a reversal of time. Me? I pursue an image, no more. 

Leaving (Planet) Urth Cafe

I assemble particularities, with no reason or rhyme. The story of the Californian hijabis asked to leave a cafe caught my attention. The shape of things to come if strumpet comes to power? It appears-at least from a distance-that everything there has to be settled by recourse to the law or the gun, as befits a gnostic age. A game of celebrities and stars and random trash. You only add to it, perhaps, by taking note of it.

A red cord, tightly wound but hanging loose on a clothes line, nearly bleached by the light; a crow in the shade, looking upwards, open-mouthed, as if gasping or waiting for something to fall from the tree that very moment; a small and delicate brown leaf, like a sparrow, pressed up against the base of the third step of a flight of stairs. Outside the masjid, a tractor being driven slightly crazily in ever-wider circles, almost as if it had a mind of its own, trying to get beyond its own circumference, flinging up thick puffs of brown dust into the air as it passes the bewildered students. 

What kind of observations are these?

In the old days economists were somewhat practical people, having some connection to the real world. Since the late seventies they've increasingly become armchair theorists, not so much as speculating on the world from a distance but, rather, setting up theories in the private laboratories of their mind. Not a science in any recognizable sense of the word; more like mathematics, since they've been more concerned about formal elegance, internal consistency, regularity, deduction etc. and not overly worried about how their theories "correspond" to reality. Economics as logic, as a set of consistent internal relations. At most, not an "explanation" of a reality but a description of it. 

In fact, why bother with human agents at all! Any system or machine could produce such consistent "behaviour". Under such a mechanical notion of rationality what scope is there for experience, introspection or judgement? Even goals such as maximizing utility are seen as redundant. What purpose does "utility" serve since it's just a vacuous concept. At best it's just a formal representation of underlying preferences. But why even stick with preferences, why not just look at behaviour (the pseudo-scientific pretence that we have reintroduced empiricism or observation back into the equation). And why maximization? One could, after all, consistently minimize. 

Now, would it be so surprising that human beings, swooning before the machine, would eventually hold the machine up as their idol? 

~

Taking Notes:

  

  

southern light

I don't think it's the heat so much as the light. By 5.30 in the morning it's already bright and the sky, the rooms, the tree tops..the world itself is full of a dazzling light that takes up and fills every square inch.

Of course, this subjective displeasure is of no import. The thing to focus on is how climate change is disrupting old processes of settlement and narrowing our time horizons so that we only think about living in the present. In Vietnam, Cambodia and (possibly?) Thailand there is a severe water shortage. India, too, it seems. 

As people's thoughts narrow down to the simple question of making it through the day one can imagine the pressure that is going to put on political structures. And what of our attitudes to other people, the strangers who come to our door with empty hands and parched lips? (As in a survivor film you somehow believe that you will be spared, singled out by the gods or by sheer brute luck for survival).

The director General of the WTO was here this week. Usual bullshit: more trade, more growth. Asked him whether he thought that the emphasis on trade/globalisation from the 1990s onward had scuppered any chances of reaching a sustainable level of emissions. Sly to the core, he claimed "that the economists tell him" that long-distance trade is actually more efficient (emissions per unit of distance traveled) compared to, say, the local transport of a substitute good within a country.

Of course, what he forgets to add is that the volume of trade and the absolute emissions produced by trade (and not the per unit figure) is what we're interested in. Over the last thirty years there has been a 95% increase in global extraction of materials. To reduce this figure to per capita terms is interesting but misses the point. The overall increase in population, the shift to urban centres, the growth of a middle class, the development of infrastructure and the eating up of forests and agricultural land (actually, the mechanization of agriculture as well), the favourable change in attitudes to consumption/commodification (partly brought on by debt) and increased trade..all of that suggests a serious increase in emissions.

In fact, we may be locked in to developments and infrastructure, patterns of living that make future reductions in emissions increasingly unlikely. One stark figure from Naomi Klein: for a reasonable chance of meeting the 2C limit it is estimated that only 1/5th of all the carbon on the books can be extracted, the rest has to be kept in the ground. In practical terms developed countries would have to reduce their emissions by 8% p.a. for a number of years. Without a severe recession that seems unlikely. But even if Co2 emissions do come down they can't simply be replaced by methane. 

These lines by Russell always strike me as being supremely relevant. In an additional point: where are the great thinkers today? Thinkers who could address the problem in a clear way? Instead, you hazard the guess that they've been replaced by technicians, "experts" and those with tremendously narrow specializations.  

'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 is slow: autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embedded something of it in the festival of Easter..'

A Biff Tannen Presidency,

I stand corrected, may the Lord have Mercy on me! And ain't Jesse gonna come down from the great skies and smite them there heathens and strike out the untruth from their hearts, and i ain'ts sayin if it wrong..ain't sayin if it's right. Mysterious ways, y'all. Him that go round braggin and brayin like a mule, he don't call out Your name, he aint gonna testify to nuffin. He just gonna bring confuzion to the righteous, dear God cants you see good people of indiana he be the Beast and Whore of Babylon. 

I ain't legally blind, no Sir! she aint the prettiest little thing i seen on the road but a man gotta do what man gotta do. We gotta sayin back in ol Texas, the old country, if it broke, don't fix it.Amen. Praise be. 

Yeah, my ol man he did go right down and smite that JFK. Lee Harvey weren nothin I tell ya but a pink dummy run for the real thing. Hoffa been a-buried long and good time now in old man backyard and we ain't none the worse for it, if truth be told. Us decent folks kinda gotten used to finding our own ways.

And let me tell you, we looked after Elvis in his old days, tendin and carin for him, providin him with the finest ladies in town, coz that's what we are, them bees our values, take it or leave it. That man be God's witness on earth.

I grews up surrounded by strong women and injuns. But I knows to myself, Ted, Ted i says, you got to get yourself a prime education and leave this stinkin no-good, rat-infested town of losers and fornicators. It's like that film, you know the one, dirty natural killers, coz in that town theres women doing terrible things to one another and incest and black people and so the god-fearing people can't take it no more and shoot all those bad folks and their babies until we're all safe again. that's why i gotta get up and leave or elst i just be another one of dem dirty natural killers, y'know. Amen and God Bless America.     

Civilisation

{Photo courtesy of anton}

I was quite taken by John Zerzan's anti-civilisation book and will try and write about it later. Once one gets beyond the casual and quite ridiculous claims that anyone opposed to technology is a Luddite you get an inkling of just how radical green anarchism is. Not just a questioning of economic growth and commodification, but a more profound and searing examination of the prior 'move' to greater and greater levels of abstraction.

On the other hand, you can't escape the fact that for you fiction, Bach (and, more generally, art (representation)) are supreme achievements. To think of a space like the one shown above is to be reminded of the virtues of peace, order, the equanimity of the mind, settled habits, attentiveness and predictability. 

To see through a glass darkly, obliquely; beauty as the soul of distance, second spaces..all that is given form by civilisation and is dependent on refraction, reflection, gaps in our lives that are not necessarily 'closed' by art: we may intuit unity (Iris M) but art is also, and predominantly, a 'broken circle'.

And then you think to yourself, if there is order then there is also the opposite:

   
This, too, is part of modern civilisation. It gets worse, of course, when you think that the peace and order in some people's lives is purchased at the expense of other people's. It is, no doubt, quite delightful to ponder the varieties of light on the South Downs (as AnnWroe does in her latest book). It is edifying to think of the history of light, to imagine one has-somehow-emerged from centuries of darkness into an enlightened, progressive era. Tea and cream cakes, while you contemplate some watercolour paintings or think of the great advances in spirituality that have been fostered by the book: writing, learning, the diligent, cloistered mind.

But behind it all, the unnameable and uneasy feeling that won't go away persists, seeping into your imagination, slowing down your thoughts and words, giving rise to an awareness of the falseness of your voice. Not only is civilisation a fragile thing; not only has it led to its own horrors and disasters: it's wars against the barbarians, the uncivilised, the semi-rational, the denigration of earth and nature as well as the suppression of our instinctual and sensuous life; no, more: does the very possibility of civilisation itself rest on the exploitation of all that cannot be counted, that is peripheral, marginal to radiant splendour of the centre? Does civilisation itself produce these other, non-worlds, the dark side of Eden?   

Higher Ground

To an outsider the Correspondents' Dinner in which the President cracks a few jokes seems utterly mystifying. Of course, that is how power works: by mystifying (Kadare's Successor is good on this). To show the human face of power, to, you know dude, not take politics too seriously ("it's all a game, lighten up for Christ's sake!").

At which point you're simply told to sit back and enjoy the show, fawn over the charm and wit of the performer, marvel at how superior democracy is to your own crummy system of failed, miserable and humourless politicians, how the west's system is so transparent and open that it can stage a ritual piss-take of those in power. What, exactly, is the point of the Daily Show when everyone's a comedian? 

The Master of this kind of buffoonery was, of course, Walker. You were always left wondering if he was a genuine old time fool, the kind of prankster or joker in the pack who'd be taken on a hunting expedition to keep the others entertained or if it was, after all, only a ruse, the great act of a clown in a small-town play, holding up a mirror to society's idiocy, or maybe it was a pure Machiavellian strategy for confounding his opponents? The jokey, all-too familiar slightly dumb-assed shenanigans of a gullible teenager brat who never really grew up or the wise fool who rules by becoming everyone? And then the troubling questions would follow: did it make any difference which it was after all, and how did someone like that ever get to the top in the first place?  

And still the anachronistic 19th century view persists: satire and irony are ways of challenging and diffusing power (Je suis..). Except, of course, that power these days relies precisely on disarming people by convincing them they're free (as long as they have a choice of 21 yoghurts in the superstore), and that that freedom consists, precisely and exclusively, in questioning everything, taking nothing seriously, going with the flow, imagining another shade of grey, the ability to bring about a political revolution through your i-phone.

There is no higher ground, there are no second spaces..this is as good as it gets. Deal with it!

~

Well, the world has always been going to hell in a hand cart so why not simply withdraw from life altogether and focus on something like, I don't know, why the biographical details of an author in a book's back flap are so futile and sterile. Or better still, keep up the pretense of a heroic stoical detachment with the help of a few choice words from some poet or the other.

It goes without saying that the latter has always been something that appealed to you, which explains the superficiality of this blog. It's all in line with the fakery of the higher ground of "the life of the mind" and really just a subtle way of exercising control: whilst the plebs are kept entertained by bread and circuses the self-styled intellectuals are kept preoccupied by trivial and marginal problems, their minds so narrowly focused and abstract that to see any issue in the context of a larger historical, political or economic frameworks is next to neigh impossible. It is not surprising that the very word 'capitalism' has been expunged from the language of economics and why, as Tony Atkinson once noted, here's been the strange disappearance of Welfare Economics (as well as the history of Economic Thought) from economics departments. 

~

Meanwhile, back in the jungle...

Ground zero is right here, right now. 

'There's one area where Trump's experience could be invaluable..closing down Guantanamo. Trump knows a thing about or two about running waterfront properties into the ground.' 

{Photos courtesy of Tom}

Are friends electric?

I prefer to use the term theory..[as] something that can be put ina computer and run..the construction of a mechanical artificial world populated by interacting robots that economics typically studies."

--Lucas.

The common view that economics focuses too much on a narrow, egotistic individual with no consideration for other people or nature misses the point. There is no individual. Walras had said as much over 100 years ago!

A century of style

Red is the new pink.

A hundred years ago some men in a room smoked cigars and decided the fate of Syria. The Great Powers would civilize these barbarians yet and unleash a century of great style and panache. The classical pose. 

A fleeting image to tug at our sensibilities..then turn the page.

'Many [images] fall flat, the gestures and poses too affected; their tropes grown weary through overuse (ungainly, vamped-up, languid, exotic, arty, theatrical, 'real'): saturated novelty lacking character. There are only really three expressions now: neutral (seductive), seductive (seductive) and faux-animated. The over contrivance means a lack of drama, and loosed from their serial place in the magazine, they seem like finales without their preceding movements, revealing nothing, going nowhere.'

--Alice Spawls.

~

'Like Mill, we may be passionate about individual freedom of expression, and so about the freedom of the press to represent individuals' opinions and views. But freedom of expression is for individuals, not for institutions. We have good reasons for allowing individuals to express opinions even if they are invented, false, silly, irrelevant or plain crazy, but hardly for allowing powerful institutions to do so. Yet we are now perilously close to a world in which media conglomerates act as if they too had unrestricted rights of free expression, and therefore a licence to subject positions for which they don't care to caricature and derision, misrepresentation or silence. If they had those unconditional rights they would have rights to undermine individuals' abilities to judge for themselves and to place their trust well, indeed rights to undermine democracy.'

Onora O'Neill

~

In the attention economy the media must be able to hold our attention-for a second- and then release us back into the system of getting and spending. Nothing could be worse than being fixated on an image. Instead, we must be 'fixated' on the flow of images, news stories, gossip and trivia. Breaking news, the news that doesn't stay news, is what it's all about. Anything that generates comments, publicity..that has "impact", "visibility" (even academics are now encouraged to sell themselves in this way). Anything is as good or bad as anything else ("pushpin is as good as poetry"..there are no judgements when it comes to taste). 'Good' and 'Bad' is, so, 19th century! 

The show must go on, said the American salesman. 

And all the while let us not think of the incredible concentrations of power and wealth in the financial sector and the mass media. 

Is it me, or are Beyonce and Kim Kardashian everywhere? Is blogging just another (successful) attempt at fragmenting consciousness?    

'But thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool

And Time, that takes survey of all the world, 

Must have a stop.' 

The sheer impossibility of imagining another's life. A photograph, a glimmering sentence in a novel, a turn of phrase in a poem, nothing too close. A pause, an interval, is what we perhaps were really after all this time. But the ordinariness of suffering, the idiocy, the petty and great hatreds that are a recurrent feature of human history, the way in which the whole bundle is in some sense what constitutes 'the world'; that, even after all these years, continues to startle. The way in which things go on without us, how everyone misunderstands the other, how no-one ever actually stops to see and take in a tree, another human being, a star. It does make you occasionally wonder if this is all little more than a brief and strange farce. People, they do come and go. 

The Allama's complaint: God, either take away our consciousness or give us greater power.

It is as if there is a witness to our lives, a mirror in which we would see ourselves whole, complete, beyond the shadow-life, the warp and woof of time's shadow-work. That sense of our first step, the recovery of our true voice- without the false words, the beclouded glance. Instead, we live as strangers, to ourselves and to one another. And you ask me where I'm from. Originally? 

~