Horner's Corner

We never knew his legendary head

nor saw the eyes set there like apples ripening.

But the bright torso, as a lamp turned low

still shines, still sees. For how else could the hard

contour of his breast so blind you? How could

a smile start in the turning thighs and settle

on the parts which made his progeny?

This marble otherwise would stand defaced

beneath the shoulders and their lucid fall;

and would not take the light

like panther-skin; and would not radiate

and would not break from all its surfaces

as does a star. There is no part of him

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Translated by Stephen Cohen

Archaïscher Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Rilke

Fast Tube by Casper">Chomsky on the unipolar moment and the culture of imperialism

Our System

Jaroslaw Miklasiewicz

Paintings of Jesters, Irony, Village Idiots

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

Plenty of  people seem to have forgotten, or never to have grasped, what actually happens when you sell off public assets to the private sector. So as a public service I offer you these three key things to keep in mind the next time you hear some wiseacre banging on about the ‘efficient private sector and the  inefficient state’:

(1) Cost to the taxpayer It has been calculated that, in the course of the Thatcher-era privatisations the deliberately low price at which long-standing public assets were marketed to the private sector resulted in a net transfer of £14 billion from the taxpaying public to stockholders and other investors.

To this loss should be added a further £3 billion in fees to the banks that transacted the privatisations. Thus the state in effect paid the private sector some £17 billion to facilitate the sale of assets for which there would otherwise have been no takers. Not an efficient use of public money.

(2) Moral hazard. Private investors are willing to purchase apparently inefficient public goods because the state shields them from risk.  Take the London Underground: Metronet et al. were assured that  they would be protected against serious loss—thereby undermining the case for privatisation: that the profit motive encourages efficiency. The “hazard”  is that the privileged private sector will be inefficient —while creaming off such profits as are to be made and charging losses to the state. Take a look at our rail and underground and you’ll see that this is just what has happened.

(3)  Problem of regulation: Postal services, railway networks, retirement homes, prisons, and other provisions targeted for privatisation remain the responsibility of the public authorities. Even after they are sold, they cannot be left entirely to the  the market. Someone has to regulate them. The private sector has proved time and again that it doesn’t self regulate properly; the danger is that at the moment the state is letting too much of the private sector do just that. And when it the state tries to regulate at all, it too often subcontracts to other private organisations to do this for it (for instance, with accounting).

The state won’t be going anywhere soon. But do we just want to to limit its activities to military and policing duties? That would leave a state whose main job was essentially repression, with all the other relations of life left to the market, or to unprotected individuals in an insecure world, where to be other than well off is a big problem, while to be ill, old or unfortunate and poor is a catastrophe.

Further reading: What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy (NYRB), by T Judt, from whom I’ve drawn heavily for this posting.  I don’t share all his politics but he does make a telling case. You can find it elsewhere in Horner’s Corner

On the face of it, the struggle over the Christmas number one this year sums up capitalist realism’s stranglehold over culture. From one perspective, what we have here is a simulation of disputation, one Sony BMG act versus another, where capital wins every way up – abetted by a grassroots Facebook campaign that has fed the marketing machine while ostensibly raging against it (retailers and Sony BMG must be delighted that members of the public have off their own back come up with a way of re marketing ye olde commodified rebel rock). Yet it’s worth also attending to the utopian dimension at work in both the campaign for the Rage Against The Machine to be number one and (submerged) in the X Factor phenomenon itself.

The problem is that no response to the X Factor phenonemon is adequate: whether it be the standard bourgeois “I don’t watch it, I don’t have a TV, although I occasionally watch serious documentaries on the IPlayer”, the PoMo “I watch it to exult in how awful it is”, or some version of apparently ingenuous engagement – any response seems useless. The X Factor has seemed as impregnable as capitalism. In one of the best pieces he has written for some time, Paul Morley captured very well the quandary that the X Factor presents. “What’s the point of watching the show,” Morley asked, “and feeling that I must be losing my mind, because I seem to be seeing and hearing bad, unsavoury, deeply uncomfortable things, while everyone else is enjoying a cheery, light-hearted party, fun for all the family, a Saturday night television show that is merely an ingeniously produced newfangled way of keeping alive certain old-fashioned light entertainment values?” Complaint seems both churlish and impotent; or else irrelevant – why be concerned about the X Factor at all? Aren’t there more important things than this high-gloss trivia?

more via k-punk.

The view of equality that was reflected in the first phase of Cold War liberalism could be summed up in a sort of koan: equality is one of the necessary goals towards which any good society strives. At the same time, the failure to attain equality is a necessary structuring principle that makes the good society possible.

Among the canons of Cold War Liberalism, no text was clearer about this double bind than Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In no other area of political philosophy was the difference between Cold War liberalism and its classical predecessors so significant. The experience of the devastating wars of the twentieth century, and the Great Depression, had destroyed the old gentleman’s liberalism for which Hayek pined. In its place was a liberalism that ceded, and promoted, an interventionist state. But, in continuity with the old anti-egalitarian thematic, the CW Liberals saw the danger of perfect equality from two perspectives. From the economic perspective, while conceding the performance of the mixed economies of the developed world, that performance would be endangered if positional incentives were wholly removed from the picture. Thus, the people on the bottom would be peculiarly hurt by a totally equal society, for those were the people who benefited most from the technological innovations of the private sphere. The second danger was political. To maintain equality required some body, some institution, some party. But the enforcers of equality would not only destroy liberty, but would themselves simply recreate inequality in terms of other goods. The administrator whose pay, in a capitalist society, put him well above the wealth of a worker on the assembly line, was matched by the party administrator whose perks and power, in a communist society, permitted him access to a lifestyle far above that of the workers for whom he supposedly spoke.

More via news from the zona: republican virtue and equality.

Ed Ruscha’s work allows me to combine two activities I love: reading and looking at art. The pleasure feels a bit illicit, as if neither thing would willingly give up the supremacy of my undivided attention. More simply put, I feel like I’m getting away with something — maybe doing my homework and watching TV at the same time. It feels good. I want to keep doing it.

Coming away from The Whitney’s recent retrospective, Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, which spans over forty years in the artist’s career, I’m once again dazzled by the remarkable depth of Ruscha’s gift for understatement. Verbally and visually he does so much with so little — and gets away with it! Known for his books of serial photographs, his still lifes of cleaning products, his drawings of motels and gas stations, Ruscha is most famous, crudely put, as that guy who draws words. These works, by far, make up the majority of the exhibit, and it is particularly of them I wish to speak.

More via Jacket 25 – Elaine Equi – The Poetry of Ed Ruscha.

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=acPE9qdPwYI]

From THE NEW BABYLON (1929)-Soviet film about the Paris Commune of 1871

A Yuletide Wish.