Horner's Corner

A Place Weeping

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (Cis-Jordan), I had a dream.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

via Threepenny: Berger, A Place Weeping.

There was an unhealthy period when ‘ideology’ seemed to be the word that could not be uttered. This was, I guess, partly due to the  temporary waning of Marxist influence in the 80s and 90s – and the accompanying vogue for all things deconstructive and postmodern. Foucault, of course was instrumental in bringing the very useful Nietzschean concept of ‘genealogy’ to bear in texts that reconceived power:  constituting  bodies of knowledge, running its capillaries through institutions, relationships and ideas. Then there was Baudrillard and his  epigones. There seemed no room for ‘truth’: so what use could ideology be?

And then came the new millenium, the twin towers….and the new economic crunch. And ideology is back. There’s no one reason why this happened – but its for sure that Slavoj Zizek, from The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) on – was increasingly influential in the relaunch. Ideology can now be invoked in polite revolutionary circles and cells again (and on couches – for Zizek’s version comes with a tangy Lacanian twist) Ideology is seen again as what it always was: an indispensible concept for the left: So viva Zizek!

Not that intellectual history is made by great men – that would be bourgeois ideology.

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There is a bold, reviving leader’s speech that might yet salvage Labour. It just can’t be delivered by Gordon Brown

“Things Can Only Get Better” was Labour’s strangely double-edged theme song in 1997. Now things couldn’t get worse, at 15% and below Ukip. How can Wales have gone Tory? Good grief, only 8% voted Labour in the entire south-east. ­Crunching the numbers for the next general election, YouGov says Labour has to get 20% more to win. It looks virtually impossible. That’s what realists in the parliamentary ­Labour party said tonight – but the rest banged the desks as if loyalty would save their skins. They bottled it.

Gordon Brown is not Labour’s only problem, but he is the greatest ­obstacle to recovery. Delusory denial grips those still defending him, as they warn defen­es­tration would lead to meltdown. But that’s already here – crack up, ­collapse, catastrophe, the nightmare is real. When he ducked the election, he said he needed time to lay out his vision. Eighteen months later, none has emerged. Will they believe he can do it now?

more via Dazed, gripped by delusion, the party tonight bottled it | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian.

 

My take on seven days of Labour crisis

More via BBC – Newsnight: Paul Mason.