Tweet This Post

In January 2010 Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the ruling French party, proposed the draft of a law which bans the full-body veil from French streets and all other public places. This announcement came after the anguished six-month debate on the burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. All main political parties expressed their rejection of burka: the main opposition party, the Parti Socialiste, said it is “totally opposed to the burka,” which amounted to a “prison for women”. The disagreements are of purely tactical nature: although President Nicolas Sarkozy opposes the outright ban on burka as counter-productive, he called for a “debate on national identity” in October 2009, claiming that burka is “against French culture.” The law fines up to 750 Euros on anyone appearing in public “with their face entirely masked”; exemptions would permit the wearing of masks on “traditional, festive occasions,” such as carnivals. Stiffer punishments would be laid down for men who “forced” their wives or daughters to wear full-body veils. The underlying idea is that the burka or niqab are contrary to French traditions of freedom and laws on women’s rights, or to quote Copé: “We can measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats and respects women.” The new legislation is thus intended to protect the dignity and security of women. Furthermore, as Sarkozy said, veils are “not welcome” because, in a secular country like France, they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims… one cannot but note how the allegedly universalist attack on burka on behalf of human rights and dignity ends up as a defense of the particular French way of life.

via The Symptom 11 » The Neighbor in Burka Slavoj Zizek.

For my take on the issue click here

Tweet This Post

Duke Ellington in front of the Apollo Theatre, New York, 1963. Photograph by Richard Avedon.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/17/100517crat_atlarge_pierpont#ixzz0nouFKFUY

 by Claudia Roth Pierpont May 17, 2010

Duke Ellington and race in America : The New Yorker.

Tweet This Post

Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson

Verso, 625 pp, £29.99, October 2009, ISBN 978 1 85984 877 7

Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. With that in mind, it’s tempting to propose a period, coincident with Jameson’s career as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction.

Over the last quarter-century, Jameson has been at once the timeliest and most untimely of American critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that sought to catch the historical specificity of the present age.

This was a matter, first, of cataloguing postmodernism’s superficial textures: the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, first delivered as a lecture in 1982 and expanded two years later into an essay for New Left Review: a 40-page sketch that caught the features of the fidgety sitter more accurately than many longer studies before and since.

via LRB · Benjamin Kunkel · Into the Big Tent.

Tweet This Post

Some things seem so odd, so completely insolite, that in coming across them one can only assume that they are completely without historical precedent, that they exist outside of all tradition. Consider this, for example:

Fast Tube by Casper">
Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=OJ2mftZpfGE]

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil’, or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People’s Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

via Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

Tweet This Post

The non paternalist elite hobnobbing at the ICA

It’s worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, “elitist”, whereas treating them as if they are stupid is “democratic”. It should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.

Parkes touches here on the right way to think about paternalism – not (just) as something prescriptive, but in terms of the gift and the surprise. The best gifts are those we wouldn’t have choosen for ourselves – not because we would have overlooked or rejected them, but because we simply wouldn’t have thought of them. Neoliberal “choice” traps you in yourself, allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different “you”, a you that does not yet exist. (All of which resonates with J J Charlesworth’s illuminating piece on the management of the ICA in Mute, with its attack on the assumption that “what the audience wants is merely what the institution should do.”)

Neoliberalism may have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk economics of programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have played their part in propagating, but the kind of “entrepreneurs” that dominate our culture – whether they be Bill Gates, Simon Cowell or Duncan Bannatyne – have not invented new products or forms, they have just invented new ways of making money. Good for them, no doubt, but hardly something that the rest of us should be grateful for. (The genius of Cowell was to have plugged a very old cultural form into new machineries of interpassivity.) And for all the bluster about entrepreneurialism, it is remarkable how risk-averse late capitalism’s culture is – there has never been a culture more homogenous and standardized, more repetitive and fear-driven.

Read more via k-punk.

Tweet This Post

Fast Tube by Casper">Society of the Spectacle

‘In a society that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood’ – Guy Debord

Tweet This Post

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play -Nietzsche

Freud was right when he said getting work and love right are essential for a good life, but he should have added a third: play. What is play? I think it’s something like a pure means, without any ends.  When we play we do something that has no real utility, no end, no extrinsic reward. It’s done for its own sake. As such, it is the exercise of our freedom.

When a child plays with something everyday -like a box, a cup, a coaster – she turns it away from its fixed meaning as a tool, a bit of equipment, and recreates it as a thing subject to the play of her imagination. Its potential to be a thousand things is there; the child makes it in imagination a multitude of them in an hour.

When we play, as adults, we release ourselves from the means-end  logic of the day. Play here reveals its affinity with art. Both, I think, have a utopian aspect: negating the sad realm of necessity, linking the infant we were to the joyful adult we are. Or might be.  I’d go so far as to say that making this possibility real for everyone should be the  ultimate aim  of politics. Stendhal called beauty the promise of happiness; play is the thing itself.

Play is the unneurotic unhurried childlike absorption in the present, a sign of maturity. To to be childlike is to be in the opposite state to childishness. It’s childishness that our mass entertainment industry stimulates in us, an endless distraction, without real focus on anything, the finger of the depressive hedonist flipping from channel to channel. Childish: the promise of satisfaction, forever witheld, just out of reach of the tetchy kidult. The full absorption in what one is doing is utterly different to this.

So we need play, we need it as we need freedom and love. Are they even possible without it?

Tweet This Post

All his life, which was blessed with publicity, Edward Said was often photographed. He had a knack for organizing the image, in which he typically appeared as a richly upholstered six-footer, his bold stripes and patterns from a Savile Row tailor, topped by a wavy stand of hair like black whipped cream. The best-known image is very different. In it, the distinguished professor is throwing a stone at an Israeli guardhouse. He rears back to hurl a jagged rock. Behind him, a young man has just thrown his own stone, and the two figures superimposed recall those early multiple-exposure prints of horses running or dancers dancing, images made to show the power of film. This photo evokes the urchins of the Intifada no less than Hector smiting the Myrmidons, because a fortunate accident or the photographer’s wit has posed Said in the heroic diagonal–dear to ancient Greek sculptors. But picture is hardly art for art’s sake. Agence Frances scored an immediate hit, with the photo instantly published around the world, instigating calls for Said’s dismissal from Columbia, with the corresponding passionate rush to his defense, including a long public letter from the University provost. No other photo captures so economically Said’s ability to make you look and think again: a prominent, self-declared Western humanist violently attacks his own civilization at its weakest point.

More at via Politics and Culture.

Tweet This Post

From top: The Meeting, The Pursuit, The Confession (a.k.a. Love Letters), The Lover Crowned. More on these pictures: here

Tweet This Post

An Interview with Marshall Berman

Tony Monchinski

… there is a paradox in fundamentalism. Every religion in the twentieth century is polarized: on the one hand it’s more humanistic and inclusive, on the other hand it’s more tribal, rigid and exclusive. Part of the exclusion is that not only does it exclude people from other religions but it also excludes most of the people from the religion itself. For example, to a Christian fundamentalist, most Christians turn out not to be true Christians; for a Muslim fundamentalist, most Muslims turn out not to be true Muslims.

All fundamentalisms have a depressingly similar structure. It’s easier for them [varying religious fundamentalists] to talk to one another and they have more in common with one another than they do with other Jews, other Hindus, other Christians, etc. But Fundamentalism is a very modern idea. It takes traditions that are thousands of years old and rejects almost all of them, conceptualizing a few of them and putting them into a system. It then judges all life according to that system.

Fundamentalism uses very modern forms of cognitive operations: it’s not the only modern way to see things, but it is certainly one of the ways to see things. Fundamentalism is also open to modern technology. It’s extremely avant-garde, so that in many religions the most sophisticated computer technologists are fundamentalists. In a sense Fundamentalists are more willing to buy into certain forms of modern technology more uncritically than secular humanists like myself. Willing to buy into anything if it will put forth their idea of the faith. (….)

T.M.: Your All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a ringing defense of modernity. For many segments of the left, Post Modernism is a specious concept. What, if anything, should we (the left) take from Post Modernism?

M.B.: I guess the most attractive quality in it is skepticism towards everything. That’s something we should always carry around with us. We should always be self-scrutinizing and self-critical.

But I don’t think many of the Post-Modernists themselves have actually done that. Part of the thing that is so infuriating to me about the Post Mods is the total lack of self-criticism, so that they can see how all previous thought was complicit in this and that — which is often certainly true — except for them. The idea that is impossible to tell the truth about anything except this. The naiveté with which they did this was attractive to many people, except me. I think Nietzsche is a very good teacher in that way, in that he shows we must say to ourselves, what if the opposite is true, instead of what I think?…(more)

Freedom and Fetishism

Marshall Berman

“The world,” says Wittgenstein, “is all that is the case.” Labour power, capital, commodities, surplus-value: these Tatsachen encase the world of the bourgeoisie. But there is something odd about this world: its “atomic facts” serve as its basic values as well. All possible descriptions have prescriptions built in; words themselves define the “proper” attitude to be adopted toward all the things they describe — and thus save men the trouble of morally making up their minds. But if, as we said above, freedom is logically bound up with choice; and if the capitalist outlook on the world tends to evade choice; and if, as Marx wrote in 1842, “Morality rests on the autonomy, religion on the heteronomy of the spirit” — then it is clear that it is as a religion, and not as a morality, that capitalist fanaticism must be understood.

This is precisely the sort of explanation Marx is attempting in his discussion of the “fetishism of commodities”:

… we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands … (Capital, 83).

The function of fetishism, and of religion in general, is to relieve the believer of responsibility for his actions. It is not he who is acting, it is the God (or daemon) who is acting in and through him; he cannot criticise, modify or change the world; he, like the world itself, is merely the vehicle of an alien Will. Similarly, the capitalist denies that it is in his power even to try to alter the ruinous processes of the market: it operates according to “eternal laws” to which he and all men are helplessly subjected. The fiction of Natural Law — which plays on all the ambiguities of both “nature” and “law,” and through which descriptive and normative discourse are fused — is immensely powerful in keeping men riveted to their roles. …(more)

All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity

Marshall Berman

google books

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

Tweet This Post

Slavoj Zizek has just given a lecture on apocalypticism -click here for the audio.(CH)

K-Punk on similar themes:

The standard tactic of capitalist realism in relation to eco-apocalypse is to work with the stupid ingenuity of the Symbolic. Here we might think of Lacan’s famous example of Holbein’s Ambassadors. Capitalist realism keeps attention on the ephemeral plenitude of wealth and social status, containing the nullity of ecological catastrophe as an anamorphic blot at the edge of vision. It has the advantage that such an operation is already routinely at the level of individual psychology in respect of death, whose repression no doubt one of the ‘falsities’ that, according to Nietzsche, is necessary for life.

So one tactic is to stop imagining eco-catastrophe and Realise it – which is not to say bring it about, but to act as if it has already happened. This is the intriguing suggestion from Jean-Pierre Dupuy which Zizek takes up, most recently in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. The only way to prevent the catastrophe, Zizek and Dupuy suggest, is to project ourselves into the post-apocalyptic situation and think what we would have done to have avoided it. In other words, we must act as if what is in fact the case – the inevitability of catastrophe – is the case. The simulation, the as-if, is necessary in part because the Real, here as elsewhere, cannot be confronted directly, and can only emerge in the form of a fiction. The shift to the question of ‘what would we have done’ has the benefit of circumventing the capitalist realist/ postmodernist foreclosure of the old modernist-Leninist question, ‘What is to be done.’ An anti-capitalism need not be imagined any more than the end of the world has to be: it is Realized in the encounter with the fictional-virtual-Real of inevitable apocalypse.

Here we can turn to a rather less august example of fictional apocalypse than either Children Of Men or Atwood’s novels – the much derided Terminator: Salvation.

more via k-punk.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=E_K3DvRtnPQ]

See also here for video of Pippin discussing Henry James and moral life with Richard Rorty and others.

Tweet This Post

Waking the dead

Terry Eagleton

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority – the story of human history to date, in fact – can never be recompensed for their wretched plight.

What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

More at:

New Statesman – Waking the dead.

Tweet This Post