The New is always premature (2 quotes)

It was Beethoven's quartets themselves [..] that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging the audience for Beethoven's quartets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in the quality of artists at least in the quality of minds, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is of persons capable of appreciating it.. it is essential that the work should create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work would not be posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half a century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist, if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, should launch it, where there is sufficient depth, boldly into the distant future.

&

As all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotypical attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speakers appear to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. .. people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual.)

Ghetto for the Intellectually Malnourished

Some of you may have encountered a number of blogspots purportedly dealing with BBC bias. Among them the unimaginatively titled 'biased-bbc.blogspot. Like many such right wing cells, it dramatizes itself as some noble minority fighting a left-liberal establishment.

Now, you might think a recent report on the subject of BBC bias would arouse its interest and engagment. Instead, we get the following post:

'BBC biased towards Israel, says a recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group. That's that then. We pack up shop.'

Despite the clumsy irony, this statement speaks volumes. Why would a blog that is genuinely concerned with bias 'pack up shop' in response to a report on BBC bias? Well, see, its not their particular brand of bias is it? More bizarrely, the sure implication is that if teh BBC was biased toward Israel, the blog would be perfectly happy.

Of course, they have no genuine interest in BBC bias. What they do have an interest in is promoting a very obvious right-wing agenda under the disingenuous guise of a concern for ‘objectivity’. Anything outside a pro-conservative/ pro-republican line is vilified as a pathological deviation. What is also striking is the seeming unfamiliarity of any of their writers with elementary logic or the basic tools of media analysis. The whole enterprise is without rigour, humour or self-insight. Fortunately, it is also entirely without efficacy

Unlawful combatants

from zizek:

'The logic of homo sacer is clearly discernible in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a 'war' operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into the very notion of a 'war on terror' — a strange war in which the enemy is criminalised if he defends himself and returns fire with fire. Which brings me back to the 'unlawful combatant', who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal. The al-Qaida terrorists are not enemy soldiers, nor are they simple criminals — the US rejected out of hand any notion that the WTC attacks should be treated as apolitical criminal acts. In short, what is emerging in the guise of the Terrorist on whom war is declared is the unlawful combatant, the political Enemy excluded from the political arena.

This is another aspect of the new global order: we no longer have wars in the old sense of a conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (to do with the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons etc). Two types of conflict remain: struggles between groups of homo sacer — 'ethnic-religious conflicts' which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for a 'humanitarian pacifist' intervention on the part of the Western powers — and direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, but merely 'unlawful combatants' resisting the forces of universal order. In this second case, one cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising an exchange of prisoners and so on, because one side in the conflict — the US-dominated global force — has already assumed the role of the Red Cross, in that it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order, crushing rebellion and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the 'local population'.'

Pontifications

I was accused of 'pontificating' from my armchair (about Nicaragua) the other day, by one who had 'actually been there'. And so he had - armed only with the thin key of anecdotal detail he was determined to unlock the supra-empirical truth.

Anyway, i was reminded of Gustave Flaubert's 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'. One could add an entry:

'Armchairs. Pontificate from them. Or rather, accuse others of so doing.'

The Inexhaustible Wisdom of Marcel Proust.

On the subject of Received Opinion (see below), some of you might remember the cafe proprieter described in A la Recherche:


"He was in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference.. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the remarks of a customer or the columns of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere."

Spectacle of Torture

The Iraq torture photos as cultural symptom.

Helpful

"It might be helpful to us to rid ourselves of the habit of hearing only what we already understand"

Received Opinion

What passes for thinking borrows its authority from the invisible network of 'recived opinion' that precedes and underwrites it. When, for example, one makes a statement about the 'fight against terrorism,' one presupposes and reposes upon that invisible network. Thus you claim authority for yourself by standing on the shoulders of 'what everyone knows'. And in so far as your authority is borrowed from that which you repose on (Opinion) you are its proxy. If however you say, like Chomsky, 'the USA must stop engaging in terrorism', you are brave enough not to rely on the invisible network of Opinion. Courageous because received opinion will of course vent its furies upon you. It is furious that 'what everybody knows' has been bypassed. Needless to say, the critique of this invisible network is the starting point of thought. Reading the mainstream newspapers is like encountering an organised campaign to prevent one reaching this starting point.