Some of us will always have a soft spot for the essays of John Berger, that ol ersatz-peasant Marxist-Mystic. Came across a fairly recent example of his work today, by chance, on the tyranny of the New World Order:
........The next step is to reject all the tyranny's discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang's code-word, stolen from humanity [..] The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realise that the media play a crucial role, not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.
Any tyranny's manipulation of the media is an index of its fears. The present one lives in fear of the world's desperation. A fear so deep that the adjective desperate, except when it means dangerous, is never used.
Without money each daily human need becomes a pain.
Those who have filched power - and they are not all in office, so they reckon on a continuity of that power beyond presidential elections - pretend to be saving the world and offering its population the chance to become their clients. The world consumer is sacred. What they don't add is that consumers only matter because they generate profit, which is the only thing that is really sacred. This sleight of hand leads us to the crux.
The claim to be saving the world masks the plotter's assumption that a large part of the world, including most of the continent of Africa and a considerable part of South America, is irredeemable. In fact, every corner which cannot be part of their centre is irredeemable. And such a conclusion follows inevitably from the dogma that the only salvation is money, and the only global future is the one their priorities insist upon, prior ities which, with false names given to them, are in reality nothing more nor less than their benefits.
The weathered face, the narrowed eyes, the trained and visionary intensity, the weight of silence behind and between each word. One only wishes one could more often give his stinging sentiments unconditional assent.
Friday, July 30, 2004
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Tibetan Prayer Wheel
Occasionally, Freud can sound surprisingly (well, vaguely) like Marx:
.If a culture has not yet got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share
But of course, they do share these commodities, only at the level of the image. As we know, modern technologies of reproduction mean that the semblance of things can be skimmed off them and sold as a commodity. Not wealth itself, not success, not jouissance, creative fulfilment etc but the electronic facsimiles thereof is what we are sold. There is indeed a world where people are happy, rich, where they experience intense sexual pleasure and careless freedom. It is not ours, but this does not matter, its windows are curtainless and we have that historically unique and sovereign freedom: the freedom to watch.
And gradually, our responses as watchers are folded back into the spectacle watched. An early example of this was canned laughter: someone else laughs on our behalf. Who is this someone? It is the technology itself, the machine. And isn’t ‘Big Brother’ amongst other things a kind of ‘canned boredom’ – we watch others being bored, as it were, on our behalf. Zizek notes that the original model for this was the phenomenon of designated mourners hired to cry at funerals in certain cultures. The purpose of this (to us) strange ritual was to externalise one’s grief, delegate it onto a kind of exterior apparatus (ie another human being). Someone else does for us. Research showed that although people watching comedy shows with canned laughter laughed less, the physiological effects were as if they had indeed laughed. Ditto with the hired mourners. The logic is partly that of the Tibetan prayer wheel: we insert a piece of paper with a prayer into a mechanical wheel, we turn the wheel and the prayer is relayed to the appropriate authority – the prayer wheel preys for us (this is another of Zizek’s examples). The logic of the Tibetan prayer wheel is increasingly that of post-modern culture as a whole - we delegate to the electronic apparatus what we previously did ourselves.
Freud continues:
It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, neither has nor deserves the chance of a lasting existence.
.If a culture has not yet got beyond the point where the satisfaction of some participants requires the oppression of others, maybe the majority (and this is the case with all contemporary cultures), then, understandably, the oppressed will develop a deep hostility towards a culture their labour makes possible but in whose commodities they have too small a share
But of course, they do share these commodities, only at the level of the image. As we know, modern technologies of reproduction mean that the semblance of things can be skimmed off them and sold as a commodity. Not wealth itself, not success, not jouissance, creative fulfilment etc but the electronic facsimiles thereof is what we are sold. There is indeed a world where people are happy, rich, where they experience intense sexual pleasure and careless freedom. It is not ours, but this does not matter, its windows are curtainless and we have that historically unique and sovereign freedom: the freedom to watch.
And gradually, our responses as watchers are folded back into the spectacle watched. An early example of this was canned laughter: someone else laughs on our behalf. Who is this someone? It is the technology itself, the machine. And isn’t ‘Big Brother’ amongst other things a kind of ‘canned boredom’ – we watch others being bored, as it were, on our behalf. Zizek notes that the original model for this was the phenomenon of designated mourners hired to cry at funerals in certain cultures. The purpose of this (to us) strange ritual was to externalise one’s grief, delegate it onto a kind of exterior apparatus (ie another human being). Someone else does for us. Research showed that although people watching comedy shows with canned laughter laughed less, the physiological effects were as if they had indeed laughed. Ditto with the hired mourners. The logic is partly that of the Tibetan prayer wheel: we insert a piece of paper with a prayer into a mechanical wheel, we turn the wheel and the prayer is relayed to the appropriate authority – the prayer wheel preys for us (this is another of Zizek’s examples). The logic of the Tibetan prayer wheel is increasingly that of post-modern culture as a whole - we delegate to the electronic apparatus what we previously did ourselves.
Freud continues:
It goes without saying that a culture that fails to satisfy so many of its participants, driving them to rebellion, neither has nor deserves the chance of a lasting existence.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Symbolic Ordure ii
More thoughts on Lenin’s letter to Gorky (see below).
Ideology operates on a level prior to Belief, it is embodied in behaviour. Wired into the way we are forced to live there are silent imperatives, unspoken propositions about the world. Working in a factory, surfing the internet, window shopping on a Saturday are already animated by the implicit nerves of the ideological. Zizek makes the point with reference to ‘commodity fetishism’. It is not a matter of incorrect conscious beliefs about commodiities, but consists in the fact that
in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, [people] are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.
The ideological illusion inheres in the practice. In some sense, therefore, the system ‘justifies itself’, immanently in its material praxis and without recourse to intellectual content.
And so to the intellectuals. If we accept the preceding argument, then the explicit ‘ideas’ produced by the intellectuals are a kind of surplus. The system, already self-justifying – receives a kind of gratuitous (secondary) rationalization though the intellectuals. But it is utterly surplus to requirements, ie, it is excrement. When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.
Ideology operates on a level prior to Belief, it is embodied in behaviour. Wired into the way we are forced to live there are silent imperatives, unspoken propositions about the world. Working in a factory, surfing the internet, window shopping on a Saturday are already animated by the implicit nerves of the ideological. Zizek makes the point with reference to ‘commodity fetishism’. It is not a matter of incorrect conscious beliefs about commodiities, but consists in the fact that
in their social activity itself, in what they are doing, [people] are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the immediate embodiment of wealth as such.
The ideological illusion inheres in the practice. In some sense, therefore, the system ‘justifies itself’, immanently in its material praxis and without recourse to intellectual content.
And so to the intellectuals. If we accept the preceding argument, then the explicit ‘ideas’ produced by the intellectuals are a kind of surplus. The system, already self-justifying – receives a kind of gratuitous (secondary) rationalization though the intellectuals. But it is utterly surplus to requirements, ie, it is excrement. When, for example, some investment banker writes a verbose blog rationalizing the profit system he is, in a very precise sense, talking shit.
A Psychoanalysis of Capitalism? (Or: the Boss Stole My Jouissance)
....... The employee never enjoys that surplus product: he or she 'loses' it. The work process produces him or her as an 'alienated' subject ($), simultaneously producing a loss (a). the capitlaist, as Other, enjoys that excess product, and thus teh subject finds him or herself in the unenviable situation of working for the Other's enjoyment, sacrificing him or herself for the Other's jouissance - precisely what the neurotic most abhors!
(Bruce Fink)
(Bruce Fink)
Monday, July 26, 2004
Various Reasons Why Experience is not the Litmus Test of Truth
Knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presumptions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.
Only what they do not first need to understand they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.
Repudiation of the current cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's finger tips, so to speak, but at the same time time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Symbolic Ordure
"The intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact they're not its brains, they're its shit."
(Lenin, Letter to Gorky, Sptember 15th, 1919.)
For some reason I was reminded of this quote after reading Oliver Kamm's attack on the mighty SWP.
Just to be clear, I do regard Lenin's comment as having intellectual - and not merely scatalogical - content. The point, presumably, is that intellectuals entertain the illusion that they are in the engine room of society (and that ideas precede and determine social organisation). The truth is that they are (more often) a kind of inessential by-product, spontaneously secreted, as it were, by the social machinery, but misrecognising themselves as the very fuel by which it runs.
(Lenin, Letter to Gorky, Sptember 15th, 1919.)
For some reason I was reminded of this quote after reading Oliver Kamm's attack on the mighty SWP.
Just to be clear, I do regard Lenin's comment as having intellectual - and not merely scatalogical - content. The point, presumably, is that intellectuals entertain the illusion that they are in the engine room of society (and that ideas precede and determine social organisation). The truth is that they are (more often) a kind of inessential by-product, spontaneously secreted, as it were, by the social machinery, but misrecognising themselves as the very fuel by which it runs.
The Long Sunday
I initially considered naming this blog 'The Long Sunday', as in this line from the hilarious Franz Kafka:
"You are reserved for a great Monday. Fine, but Sunday will never end." (Diary, 2 November 1921).
[Probably should have, all things considered]
Another of his uproarious one liners: "Some deny misery by pointing to the sun; others deny the sun by pointing to misery."
"You are reserved for a great Monday. Fine, but Sunday will never end." (Diary, 2 November 1921).
[Probably should have, all things considered]
Another of his uproarious one liners: "Some deny misery by pointing to the sun; others deny the sun by pointing to misery."
Friday, July 23, 2004
Cabala the Ghetto Demon
Speaking of the Cabala brought to mind the Ted Hughes poem ‘Folktale’, which deals with his relation to Assia Wevill:
She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.
[…]
So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found.
. The way I read it, what he desires in Wevill is (to use a Lacanian formulation) that which was ‘in her more than herself’, her agalma, her secret treasure. She is the object of his desire, yes, but the cause of his desire is this secret thing, which, of course she does not in fact possess; conversely, he embodies for her a certain kind of English reserve and decorum. And each ‘ransacks’ the other for this secret, like the child opening the kinderegg. But what, specifically, is ‘Cabala the ghetto demon’?
One first needs to know a little about the ‘alluring but fragile’ Wevill, originally a war-time Jewish refugee
the bizarre fate of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath. An aspiring poet and strikingly beautiful Russian-German-Jewish woman, Wevill continued a tempestuous relationship with Hughes after Plath’s suicide, bearing his child, a girl called Shura, in 1967. Two years later, depressed by Hughes’ inability to make a commitment to her, Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in her own kitchen, in a grotesque re-enactment of her rival’s death
Hughes is brutally candid about the reasons for his desire – the dark allure of Jewish suffering, the sex-appeal of Otherness, even the horror of the fate of the Jews from which Wevill figures as a miraculous escapee, and the shadow of which lends to her unusual beauty a deliciously intolerable pathos. Needless to say, as Hughes recognizes, she does not actually possess these things. She serves as their support, their sign. And in trying to access these fantasy objects, the actual empirical person is destroyed.
She wanted the silent heraldry
Of the purple beach by the noble wall.
He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon
With its polythene bag full of ashes.
[…]
So they ransacked each other for everything
That could not be found.
. The way I read it, what he desires in Wevill is (to use a Lacanian formulation) that which was ‘in her more than herself’, her agalma, her secret treasure. She is the object of his desire, yes, but the cause of his desire is this secret thing, which, of course she does not in fact possess; conversely, he embodies for her a certain kind of English reserve and decorum. And each ‘ransacks’ the other for this secret, like the child opening the kinderegg. But what, specifically, is ‘Cabala the ghetto demon’?
One first needs to know a little about the ‘alluring but fragile’ Wevill, originally a war-time Jewish refugee
the bizarre fate of Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he had left Plath. An aspiring poet and strikingly beautiful Russian-German-Jewish woman, Wevill continued a tempestuous relationship with Hughes after Plath’s suicide, bearing his child, a girl called Shura, in 1967. Two years later, depressed by Hughes’ inability to make a commitment to her, Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in her own kitchen, in a grotesque re-enactment of her rival’s death
Hughes is brutally candid about the reasons for his desire – the dark allure of Jewish suffering, the sex-appeal of Otherness, even the horror of the fate of the Jews from which Wevill figures as a miraculous escapee, and the shadow of which lends to her unusual beauty a deliciously intolerable pathos. Needless to say, as Hughes recognizes, she does not actually possess these things. She serves as their support, their sign. And in trying to access these fantasy objects, the actual empirical person is destroyed.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Witness me.
Scragg sends me a text message: I am on beach lookin out 2 c [sea]. serene. It is not enough for her to experience this, she wants also to be envisaged by another. To be pictured lends her being a new density. The 'mobile' is her wee portable witness. (And of course, she now has a picture phone, another key tool for those who rather too literally take Berkeley's 'to be is to be perceived'.)
A note from the University
On teaching:
'Please be sure to make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.' Apparently some students have complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class.
The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded. Employee sues employer for being made redundant, after employer fails to point out that attendance is compulsory. Vastly overweight man sues McDonald's for not providing him with written documentation that lard-burgers are not entirely compatible with optimum athleticism. A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.
'Please be sure to make clear to your students that attendance is compulsory.' Apparently some students have complained, on receiving a low grade, that they had not been told that it was necessary to actually come to class.
The whole edifice of common sense can no longer be taken for granted. The more litigious American society becomes the more this edifice will be eroded. Employee sues employer for being made redundant, after employer fails to point out that attendance is compulsory. Vastly overweight man sues McDonald's for not providing him with written documentation that lard-burgers are not entirely compatible with optimum athleticism. A vast legal superstructure, wordily detailing the bleeding obvious will gradually come to occupy the set of silent rules that had previously regulated - but also enabled - human interaction.
Monday, July 19, 2004
Fuel
Who could live without the dark potency of coffee? Not me
Barthes somewhere speaks of it as a kind of flint: it generates cognitive sparks, quickens the pulse and focuses the mind rather than diffusing it. After drinking a small skull-white cup of this drink, a text which had been blank is suddenly glossed with thought.
Barthes somewhere speaks of it as a kind of flint: it generates cognitive sparks, quickens the pulse and focuses the mind rather than diffusing it. After drinking a small skull-white cup of this drink, a text which had been blank is suddenly glossed with thought.
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