Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw
its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in
the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics
internalised by our civilisation). Its actual function, of course, is
to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively
untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.
(This isn't a
conspiratorial view, by the way. Conspiracies undoubtedly happen - the
ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together
and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as
anyone else - but conspiracy is not the basis of the system. Conspiracies
are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are
theoretically punishable. They are, in a very real sense, an
aberration. An endemic aberration certainly - and more endemic the more
confident the ruling classes get - but an aberration nonetheless. It's
important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine
that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.
That isn't how systems of control endure. Systems of control endure by
being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and
those who benefit from them. Corruption is real. It is a by-product of
a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.
Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the
system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and
integrity. Everyone - the corrupt and the non-corrupt - partly derives
their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what
constitutes illegitimacy.)
Part
of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of
control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be
aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be
based on moral categories... and one way in which it manages this is by,
to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those
things. You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system. It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be. You can
trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and
strictures. This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of
popular pressure to reform the system. But then the absorbtion and
adaptation of popular demands,
the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of
democratic
ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive. Ultimately,
all
worthwhile conceptions of 'justice' come from the democratic impulse
from
below. This isn't to say that they come from the innate goodness of
people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or
anything
like that. Rather, the oppressed - always the more universal class
because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted - develop the
democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied
it.
Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. Inequality creates the
aspiration towards equality. Justice isn't a thing that exists in the
world a priori, it is a human idea. That makes it no less real,
but it does mean that it bear the marks of its social origin.
ideas are icepickproof
Monday, 23 June 2014
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Voluminous Description
Finally finished Kershaw's biography of Hitler. I've been
working on it - both volumes, unabridged - for years, picking it up for a
bit, putting it down for a bit, etc. (This is how I usually tackle mammoth
reading projects.)
Can't help feeling underwhelmed. I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.
Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history. The narrative history of one protagonist. This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority. Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind. He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity. His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company. This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times. Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project. Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people. He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.
Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history. He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist. The asides can be genuinely fascinating. Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example. The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem. In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it. Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews. Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).
But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis. He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era. He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution. He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism. Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered. Etc.
Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis. You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.
Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution). Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book. Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals. Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle. If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.
Also, he's not much of a prose stylist. He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.
I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...
But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.
Can't help feeling underwhelmed. I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.
Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history. The narrative history of one protagonist. This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority. Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind. He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity. His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company. This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times. Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project. Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people. He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.
Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history. He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist. The asides can be genuinely fascinating. Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example. The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem. In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it. Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews. Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).
But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis. He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era. He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution. He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism. Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered. Etc.
Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis. You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.
Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution). Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book. Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals. Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle. If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.
Also, he's not much of a prose stylist. He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.
I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...
But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.
Friday, 23 May 2014
UKIP SURGE AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
The main headlines today.
THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.
In other news...
UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.
The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.
"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."
Finally...
BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.
Andrew Marr is 412 years old.
THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.
In other news...
UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.
The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.
"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."
Finally...
BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.
Andrew Marr is 412 years old.
Saturday, 17 May 2014
X
On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties. Six if you include the Conservatives. Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party. So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers. Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Pit
I want to take a moment to tell you all about some music I love. I am a devotee of movie soundtracks. I am particularly fond of two movie scores by Eliot Goldenthal.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
Friday, 2 May 2014
Sarcasm and Chips
Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is
a work of sarcasm. Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm
nonetheless.
It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion. This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings. He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici... and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable.
It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves. In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince. The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia's most implacable enemies.
Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying. They just didn't talk about it. In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets. If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible. Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets.
The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book's implicit recognition of this. Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips. Money. To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested. The market is the basis of Medici power. They make society a market in which people are the tokens.
Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don't think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of 'realpolitik' people often take from the book. On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo's Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel - a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.
It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion. This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings. He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici... and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable.
It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves. In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince. The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia's most implacable enemies.
Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying. They just didn't talk about it. In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets. If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible. Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets.
The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book's implicit recognition of this. Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips. Money. To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested. The market is the basis of Medici power. They make society a market in which people are the tokens.
Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don't think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of 'realpolitik' people often take from the book. On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo's Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel - a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
Plain Ketchup
I've been playing catch-up on SF/Fantasy films/TV that passed me by. (Here be spoilers.)
Enders' Game
Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point? If not, look no further. Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all... in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood. Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield's sullen, gormless face. Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom. One empathises.
Pacific Rim
The level of disregard shown for plot logic - even their own heavily-established plot points - is so brazen as to be almost admirable. Beautifully made. But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong. The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(Yes, I know it's ancient. There were reasons for me seeing it now. In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.) I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this. So he never needed George R. R. Martin's influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.
The Wolverine
(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.) I should've mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim. So I'll mention it here instead. There's a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing. It's the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do. Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him... someone who, in this case, isn't a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia... so... umm...
The Machine
Seriously? An 'is the A.I. alive' storyline? A naked fembot? Again? In 2014? By the way... the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension. So, creepy much?
Believe
Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types. Just go and watch Firestarter instead. The story is essentially the same, and even if you don't like it, at least it'll be over quicker.
Gravity
A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing. Virtuoso silence. Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.
By the way, Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl. Hey, SF writers... could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit? This is getting worrying.
Enders' Game
Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point? If not, look no further. Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all... in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood. Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield's sullen, gormless face. Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom. One empathises.
Pacific Rim
The level of disregard shown for plot logic - even their own heavily-established plot points - is so brazen as to be almost admirable. Beautifully made. But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong. The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(Yes, I know it's ancient. There were reasons for me seeing it now. In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.) I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this. So he never needed George R. R. Martin's influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.
The Wolverine
(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.) I should've mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim. So I'll mention it here instead. There's a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing. It's the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do. Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him... someone who, in this case, isn't a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia... so... umm...
The Machine
Seriously? An 'is the A.I. alive' storyline? A naked fembot? Again? In 2014? By the way... the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension. So, creepy much?
Believe
Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types. Just go and watch Firestarter instead. The story is essentially the same, and even if you don't like it, at least it'll be over quicker.
Gravity
A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing. Virtuoso silence. Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.
By the way, Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl. Hey, SF writers... could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit? This is getting worrying.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)