From an exhibition of his work at the Stephen Daiter Gallery

Marx

Although many use this expression, no one seems to have bothered actually to have read The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx was not merely coining bons mots, he actually meant something when he wrote this. The two events Marx was talking about were first, the French Revolution, which he took to extend from 1789 to 1814, and second, the French Revolution of 1848-1852, of which The Eighteenth Brumaire is a history.

Marx follows this famous line about tragedy and farce with one almost equally famous: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” This also used to be quoted often, but now isn’t, I suspect because it makes some people uneasy to suggest that men make their own history. After all, if they get the idea that they can do something, they might decide to make something other than what the rulers have in mind. Marx is not treating history as a scientific phenomenon worthy of observation. Science is a discipline that postulates the impossibility of acting with a purpose. It expunges purposes from the pantheon of causes. Marx, a firm believer in human action, that is action with a purpose, is trying to explain its difficulties. People often take the farce line to mean that the first time, the tragic one, is serious, and the second, farcical one, is a kind of joke. But Marx is making the point that whenever people want to act they usually can only act in a pattern taken from the past. People act in a way that they know. Thus the first French Revolution took on the trappings of Rome to bring about the Bourgeois Revolution. Once the revolutionaries overthrew the ancien régime, the Roman garb came off and they settled down to moneymaking in a world free of the complicated obligations and ties of the ancien régime. The Revolution of 1848 imitated the Revolution of 1789 precisely because it was not a “real” revolution. For whereas the Revolution of 1789 threw off its Roman costume once it had accomplished itself in the abolition of the ancien régime, the Revolution of 1848 continued to imitate the earlier revolution because it had so little to accomplish: it was a farcical revolution. In the end it all vanished behind Louis Napoleon’s conjurer’s handkerchief.

Robespierre

Read more via Swans Commentary: The First Time As Tragedy, by Michael Doliner – mdolin48.

The film is at the ICA

Taking philosophy out of the books and the classrooms and putting it on the streets..

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=1zwmum5_ofU]

Cornel West

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=Vf1d2qSeVVE]

Fast Tube by Casper">TS Eliot reading \’Prufrock\’

TS Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.      .      .      .      .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.      .      .      .      .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.      .      .      .      .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Slavoj Zizek

I. Through the Glasses Darkly (revisited, enlarged and re-edited)

John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood Left, is a true lesson in critique of ideology. It is the story of John Nada – Spanish for “nothing”! -, a homeless laborer who finds work on a Los Angeles construction site, but has no place to stay. One of the workers, Frank Armitage, takes him to spend the night at a local shantytown. While being shown around that night, he notices some odd behavior at a small church across the street. Investigating it the next day, he accidentally stumbles on several more boxes hidden in a secret compartment in a wall, full of sunglasses. When he later puts on a pair of the glasses for the first time, he notices that a publicity billboard now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard urges the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally he soon discovers that many people are actually aliens who, when they realize he can see them for what they are, the police suddenly arrive. Nada escapes and returns to the construction site to talk over what he has discovered with Armitage, who is initially uninterested in his story. The two fight as Nada attempts to convince and then force him to put on the sunglasses. When he does, Armitage joins Nada and they get in contact with the group from the church, organizing resistance. At the group’s meeting they learn that the alien’s primary method of control is a signal being sent out on television, which is why the general public cannot see the aliens for what they are. In the final battle, after destroying the broadcasting antenna, Nada is mortally wounded; as his last dying act, he gives the aliens the finger. With the signal now missing, people are startled to find the aliens in their midst.

more here

Enlightening retrospective exhibition on now at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London. I  like the way he plays with codes of representation -among many other things. Recommended.

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd

Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the party’s boosterish slogans of enterprise, freedom and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good for the moral fibre of the nation, and took the view that the softness of modern consumerist lifestyles had raised a society of degenerates. It was but a small step from inside lavatories and quilted toilet paper to long-haired decadence, dysfunctional families and drug addiction.

However, as Thatcher learned in the months before she became leader of the party, it was a mistake to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had just lost a general election and Joseph had emerged as the likeliest alternative leader. However, in a speech which deliberately departed from economic issues to denounce the permissive society, Joseph undermined his political credentials. He warned that Britain’s ‘human stock’ was ‘threatened’ because a high and rising proportion of children were being born to adolescent mothers ‘in social classes four and five’, some of whom were ‘of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment’. Joseph believed that these mothers were ‘producing’ the ‘delinquents’ of the future, ‘denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters’. To prescribe birth control for these girls was perhaps ‘immoral’, but surely, Joseph calculated, it was the lesser of two evils. Although Joseph’s message resonated with the Conservative base and beyond, his invocation of eugenics undermined his reputation with the broadsheet press. The influential journalist Alan Watkins described him as ‘a saloon-bar Malthus’.

Read more at:

LRB · Colin Kidd · The Irresistible Itch.

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

The new Tory party: desert for everybody

It’s taken me a few days to get around to it, but here’s my take on David Cameron’s equality speech (The Big Society: Hugo Young Lecture, 10 Nov 2009).

Cameron name checks Wilkinson and Pickett and says that they “have shown that among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator”.

He then sets himself this rhetorical objective: how can you square an admission that less equal societies do worse than more equal societies with a long-standing Tory view on personal wealth: that is, the wealth of an individual is a reflection of the choices they have made. Since choice is good, material gains that aren’t explicitly judged unlawful must also be good. Here is an example of this kind of thinking in a 1977 speech by Margaret Thatcher:

The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. … Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

And of course this view was taken up almost wholesale by New Labour, so it’s a view that still has currency in a very large part of Britain’s polity. The problem for advocates of choice simpliciter is that choice is compatible with inequality. And it’s hard to be an advocate of inequality: at least, it’s hard to do it in a way that’s going to make you popular. Cameron’s way out suggests sleight of hand: he switches from talking about inequality measured across the whole of society to talking about inequality between those in the middle and the least well off:

We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it. That doesn’t mean we should be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini co-efficient, the traditional financial measure of inequality or on closing the gap between the top and the bottom. Instead, we should focus on the causes of poverty as well as the symptoms because that is the best way to reduce it in the long term. And we should focus on closing the gap between the bottom and the middle, not because that is the easy thing to do, but because focusing on those who do not have the chance of a good life is the most important thing to do.

And if our attention can be shifted towards the category of the least well off and away from the category of the wealthy, then perhaps we might just stop worrying about the wealthy. If this is Cameron’s purpose, he’s only following in the footsteps of New Labour’s Peter Mandelson, the man who told us he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about personal wealth.

But let’s say we take Cameron seriously: let’s say we agree that alleviating extreme poverty is the goal that matters and restrict our political aim to that. How can we reach that goal while (implicitly) either maintaining taxes at current levels or even reducing them? After all, in the same speech, Cameron tells us the increase in government spending since 1997 can’t be sustained. More than that, he argues: ‘large government’ has come to cause inequality:

But, quite apart from the fact that it turns out much of this has been paid for on account, creating debts that will have to be paid back by future generations; a more complete assessment of the evidence shows something different – that as the state continued to expand under Labour, our society became more, not less unfair.

Cameron’s answer, it seems, is to reduce state spending and curtail the role of government and instead go work on the way people think: children should get “better education” and adults should get better attitudes: “responsible behaviour” should be incentivised. Now this may make you think of New Labour, but forget them: to my mind, at least, the stall Cameron is setting out looks as ugly as anything yet brought forth by American conservatives. This is workfare advocacy. And the failure of this approach, of course, is just what people like Wilkinson and Pickett have been working hard to demonstrate.

But even if your stall is unattractive, you can set it out in an honest way. You might simply say: we believe that benefit claimants should do more to justify our support. Cameron goes beyond this. For one, his suggestion that the increase in state spending since 1997 (when New Labour took office) has caused inequality is really reaching. A history of UK wealth distribution shows that most of the post-war rise in inequality took place from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: all Tory years. This is well known. Even worse, Cameron conflates ’size of government’ with ‘amount of state spending’. These are clearly not the same thing: you can have a small government that spends a lot, or you can have millions of bureaucrats who are needlessly penny-pinching. The complaint that many have made about New Labour is that they have promoted the second. It’s a reasonable complaint, yet it says nothing about the proper role of government: what its aims should be; what makes it legitimate.

Is there anything more going on in Cameron’s speech? Is there a broader ethical point? Is there anything new? I can’t see it. And an old idea which is not getting any Conservative Party air time, but which needs to, is this: an individual’s lawful choices may have bad consequences for others. If our lives go badly, we might have a share in the blame, but we don’t carry all of the blame. Where lives are blighted, adjudicated redress – where those who adjudicate are under democratic oversight – is justified. Taxes can be fair.

Charlie Whitaker at:

The new Tory party: desert for everybody | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion.

Melancholia
c. 1910
autochrome
Charles Corbet

From: ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

It’s really quite simple, but in case anyone is a politician I’ll try to be very clear.

If you don’t have enough of some things, letting people choose which ones they want will still leave some people who don’t get any of those things.

OR

If you have enough things, but some are more desirable than others (or believed to be more desirable -perhaps because a lot of people desire them), and you let people choose what they want, then some people will still not get the more desirable things.

And

if you do this (encourage people to believe they can have something if they choose it, when there is scarcity)

(a) you will tend to favour those best able to compete (the sharp elbows principle)

(b) you may promote an attitude and practice which favours individuals over the common good (or just over other individuals). This may of course be what you wanted to happen – but do pause to think this through in case it isn’t what you really want to occur.

(c) You may drive down the actual quality of the ‘less desirable’ things, thus making them seem even less desirable for the unlucky in the competition for desirable things

(d) You will have some people who feel, quite, slightly or very disappointed.

There are other effects, but I’m sure the politicians are having trouble staying focused..so just one more:

(e) If you do all this, then you lecture people on citizenship, the community, duty or The Big Society  you will give the impression that you are a twat.

Here’s an old review of Children of Men, which I urge you to see on DVD if you missed it at the Cinema

coffee bars and internment camps

I’ve finally seen Children of Men, on DVD, after missing it at the cinema. Watching it last week I asked myself, why is its rendering of apocalyspe so contemporary?

British cinema, for the last thirty years as chronically sterile as the issueless popluation in Children of Men, has not produced a version of the apocalypse that is even remotely as well realised as this. You would have to turn to television – to the last Quatermass serial or to Threads, almost certainly the most harrowing television programme ever broadcast on British TV – for a vision of British society in collapse that is as compelling. Yet the comparison between Children of Men and these two predecessors points to what is unique about the film; the final Quatermass serial and Threads still belonged to Nuttall’s bomb culture, but the anxieties with which Children of Men deals have nothing to do with nuclear war.

Children of Men reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential. It’s long since been evident that only someone outside the self-serving, self-pitying low gene pool of British cinema is capable of realising this potential, and Children of Men‘s director, Alfonso Cuarón, and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are both Mexican. Together they have produced a portrait of Grim Britannia that is like a film equivalent of the Burial LP (and the film’s excellent soundtrack features Burial’s mentor and label-mate, Kode9).

Lubezki’s cinematography is breathtaking. His photography seems to leech all organic and naturalistic vitality from the images, leaving them a washed-out grey-blue. The effect is something like a visual equivalent of the ‘muting’ about which Woebot speaks so eloquently in his latest broadcast. As David Edelstein put it in an insightful review in New York Magazine: ‘ The movie calls to mind an early description in Cormac McCarthy’s overwrought but gripping post-apocalypse novel The Road of gray days “like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”’ The lighting is masterly: it as if the whole film takes place in a permanent winter afternoon when even the sun is dying. White smoke, its source unspecified, curls ubiquitously.

Cuarón’s trick is to combine this despondent lyricism with a formal realism, achieved through the expert use of hand-held camera and long takes. Blood spatters onto the camera lens and goes unwiped. The gunfire is as oppressively tactile as it was in Saving Private Ryan. The meticulously choreographed long takes – technical feats of some magnitude – have justly been highly praised, and they are all the more remarkable because they go beyond the familiar role of simulating documentary realism to serve a political and artistic vision.

This brings us back, then, to my initial question, and I think that there are three reasons that Children of Men is so contemporary.

Firstly, the film is dominated by the sense that the damage has been done. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

Secondly, Children of Men is a dystopia that is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, V for Vendetta, which, incidentally, compares badly with Children of Men on every point).

Read more at:

k-punk: coffee bars and internment camps.

Zizek’s review on youtube is here.

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=B7G4WIa-HAk]

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=hJikG-p_nho]

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?

      The decline of four empires. They haven’t included Germany, and of course the USA went in for imperial expansion, but as a visual representation of the decline of four maritime empires this is pretty good..