Thursday, July 27, 2006

The sole feature of fascism which is not counterfeit is its will to power, subjugation, and plunder. Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism.

Trotsky

Monday, July 24, 2006

Audio of Zizek's Lacan Masterclass at Birkbeck (via K-Punk).

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Friday, July 21, 2006

(Glimpse of) A Newly Discovered Shelley Poem

See here (Thanks Isak.)

Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things which now confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –

Schopenhauer on Reading

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid. For to occupy every spare moment in reading, and to do nothing but read, is even more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual labor, which at least allows those engaged in it to follow their own thoughts. A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it. Just as you can ruin the stomach and impair the whole body by taking too much nourishment, so you can overfill and choke the mind by feeding it too much. The more you read, the fewer are the traces left by what you have read: the mind becomes like a tablet crossed over and over with writing. There is no time for ruminating, and in no other way can you assimilate what you have read. If you read on and on without setting your own thoughts to work, what you have read can not strike root, and is generally lost. It is, in fact, just the same with mental as with bodily food: hardly the fifth part of what one takes is assimilated. The rest passes off in evaporation, respiration and the like.

'conspiracy theory'

Heard the other day someone say “I prefer cock-up to conspiracy theory every time”. Really? Every time, automatically, without critical thought or reflection? How strangely dogmatic. Sure, there are crazy conspiracy theories, just as there are crazy cock-up theories. But too often, ‘conspiracy theory’ means little more than this: anything that speaks of goals, tactics, strategies other than the ones officially declared; in other words, 'conspiracy theory' as anything that differs too markedly from the official account, anything which – in an age of unprecedented spin and careful government PR – refuses to take such PR on its own terms. And it’s interesting that the ‘conspiracy theory’ whistle is frequently blown before any ‘theory’ has even been advanced, when all that’s happened is that the official narrative has been challenged or asked a few basic questions. (Most recently, an predictably, those disputing – or exposing - the official statements of the IDF as to reasons and motivations in Gaza and Lebanon).

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Perennial Themes of Right-Wing Anti-Left Rhetoric

The motifs of right-wing discourse vis-à-vis the left have changed little over the years. The authors of such discourse fly under different flags, and the content naturally changes, but much repeats itself with dreary inevitability. I note only a few of these themes in passing:

* The pretence that there is left wing dominance in the fields of opinion and education. Thus, the use of terms like ‘the left (or liberal) establishment’, ‘the left-liberal consensus’ etc. Correspondingly, the dramatisation of yourself as a beleaguered iconocalst minority fighting an entrenched tyranny of consent. The most trite Daily Telegraph common sense masquerades as a samizdat.

* Much praise for ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ in the abstract, but no analysis of the concrete economic conditions in which these function or do not function. The invocation of these keywords almost always as something under threat, rather than as something we might radicalise, expand etc

* Attempting to discredit the vocabulary of the left. The use of this vocabulary only ironically or contemptuously. For example, capitalism is never spoken of directly, but phrases like “They [the left] blame all this on the evils of capitalism” or “I suppose you think this is all about nasty American imperialism”. The insinuation that this vocabulary is only a set of empty phrases and slogans.


* The production, by the actual right-wing bourgeoisie, of an ideological double, the ‘middle class’, imagined as isolated from the real world, dangerously naïve, treacherously permissive and implicitly unpatriotic (they are working against what the country stands for etc). In producing this spectre, you simultaneously lay claim to a fake populism.

* The requirement of an 'enemy without' and a corresponding 'enemy within'. The enemy without are necessary to rediscover ‘our values’ as something in danger. The enemy within are those (typically, of course, the left in its various spectral guises) who through their ideological blinkeredness and/or naïve tolerance are the conscious or unwitting representatives of the external enemy (previously communism).


* The support for Trade Union and/ or workers’ struggles only when they are abroad and in defiance of some designated enemy (eg Solidarnosc in Poland).

* The attribution to the left of a fixed and fanatical mindset. The enemy is in thrall to ideology, uses abstractions to measure reality, sees things in terms of a pre-conceived template etc. Similarly, the left is always ‘fashionable’, is merely ‘trendy’ and so on. In both cases, the left is seen as a psychological condition rather than a set of ideas to be engaged with.

It can be seen that each of these motifs is both a portrait of an enemy (who threatens) and an implicit self-dramatisation. Thus: The attack on the spectral middle-class is also the declaration of a no-nonsense populism; opining about left-wing dominance in the media entails a corresponding stance of valiant dissent; the charges of fanatical rigidity and trendyness lay claim to a normal commonsense viewpoint; accusations of left-wing ‘jargon’ and ‘sloganeering’ are also about legitimising one’s own ‘natural’ and transparent language.

In every age the self-appointed secretariat try to pass off these ideological machine-parts as the free products of their own brains.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Facts and Figures since beginning of Gaza invasion

See here.

"Dr. Barghouthi ended the presentation by addressing the issue of unbalanced media coverage of the Gaza crisis, and the terminology and narratives adopted by news agencies. He cited the example of the use of the terms “hostage” and “kidnapped”‚ in relation to Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, while Palestinian parliamentarians being held under Israeli detention without charge are referred to as “prisoners”.
He also stressed that sustained Israeli attacks on Gaza in the months leading up to the invasion illustrate that the current crisis was not sparked off by Shalit’s capture. Between 29 March and 27 June, Israel conducted 112 air strikes on, and fired 4,751 artillery shells into the Gaza Strip. A total of 65 Gazans were killed between 3 May and 27 June, including at least 34 civilians, 12 of whom were children and 5 of whom were women."

Monday, July 03, 2006

Chomsky & Language

From a 'critique' of Chomsky's linguistics here:

"By ‘language’, Chomsky doesn’t mean what you or I might mean by that term. He doesn’t mean French or Swahili and he certainly doesn’t mean people conversing or exchanging ideas."

Well, I'm not familiar with Chomsky's linguistics in anything but a second-hand and general way, but by 'language' I don't mean French or Swahili or people conversing or exchanging ideas, and neither, I suspect, do you. When we say, for eg, 'language is what differentiates us from animals' or 'X has a facility with language' or 'no thinking without language' or 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language', we use the word in the more abstract and non-specifc sense, a sense perhaps not that far removed from Chomsky's. And it's interesting, to me, that - even if we're monolingual and not at all theoretical - we can make this distinction, that we recognise, beyond our mother tongue and beyond particular conversations and speech acts, this deeper universal.