More curated tumblr jottings, which some people seemed to like. Rewritten and expanded.
There is, in fandom, an impulse to denounce which is very congruent with a
similar impulse that exists in some iterations of right-on
politics. It comes from a similar place: helplessness. We’re always
told that power corrupts, and it certainly does. But powerlessness
corrupts too. People in fandom get accustomed to worshipping that which
is handed down to them. They can then discover the opposite but equal
pleasure of execrating that which is handed down to them. What both
have in common is the idea of passively accepting what you’re given.
And yes, hating on something is a form of passivity quite distinct from the activity of criticism. Passive acceptance of texts is, contrary to myth (a myth largely put around by fans, amazingly
enough) far more common within fandom/s than in the general television
viewing public.
Jane Q Citizen puts Doctor Who (or whatever) on her telly, doesn’t
like it, and so switches over to hunt for something she does like… or
she likes it (having no long-cherished internal needs that she has
trained herself to expect to be met by it), so she watches it, and then
she forgets about it. John Z. Fan puts Doctor Who on his telly, doesn’t
like it, but cannot switch it off because he is a fan (and yes, this
can apply to me too in some ways). So, passive and powerless to influence the show that
he loves but finds disappointing, he rages. He isn’t writing it or
producing it himself, and he doesn’t even have (because he’s chosen to
abnegate it) the basic and paltry consumer freedom that capitalism
grants us and lauds so much: the freedom to hunt for another product
that will satisfy us where one product has failed.
Meanwhile, in many sections of right-on politics, splittery and
sectarianism and denunciation rule the day because the right-on either
have no real mechanism by which they can actually change any of the
stuff they don’t like (clicktivism being such a dead end, and most
branches of direct action and protest being dead ends too when taken by
themselves) or they despair of the one thing that really can change
things - mass, working class action - because we’re in a long-term
trench of neoliberal downturn.
The powerlessness corrupts.
Meanwhile (again), there is another strange tessellation. The gap
between fandom and actual critical savvy is uncannily similar to the gap
between right-onitude per se and actual critical political education.
The fan mindset can (notice I say can) leave one hungry for the tools
of proper critical analysis but does not itself supply them. Similarly,
right-onitude (however well intentioned and sincere) can leave one hungry for the desire to think
politically but does not itself supply the actual critical understanding one needs in order to do so sensibly or usefully.
Between the desire and the reality falls the shadow.
(And I’m not being patronising because I have in the past fallen into
most of these traps myself, and still occasionally do today.)
Meanwhile (yet again), the fan's attitude to a commodity they don't like, but to which they are attached by fan loyalty (those long-cherished internal needs we were talking about earlier), is eerily like the attitude of passive reformism to politics itself. 'The political' is that which exists within a band as narrow as the identity of a show. You could even look at 'the News' as the show that is being followed. As the fan saying goes "if you don't like the show at the moment, wait a bit and it'll change". At most, the angry fan might engage in 'activism' like starting tumblrs with names like 'pleasefiremoffat' etc. Because firing the current guy and getting a new guy instead will solve all the problems. But when it comes to the right-on critique of Moffat (which has some points to make, don't get me wrong) too often what is missed is that Moffat is just a new development in a long-standing systemic issue.
The fan loyalty, even when it is a twisted and angry loyalty to iterations of a franchise that you don't like, is itself probably a sign of commodity fetishism triumphing over actual critical engagement. You are religiously following the logo (to paraphrase my friend Josh Marsfelder) because you are treating the commodity like an entity to which you owe allegiance, rather then critically following texts because - for whatever reason - you want to.
(I like to think that I do it differently, but then I like to think lots of things.)
Ultimately, of course, discontent with the narrative commodity you enjoy (or to which you have ingrained loyalty, or which you have fetishized) is far less an issue than discontent with society. You can put up with a show being rubbish or reactionary (as long as you don't fail to speak up when it publically makes a political misstep, with that judgement being based on good faith critical engagement and some knowledge of how texts work). But we're severely mistaken if we think we can put up with society being so royally fucked up for much longer. The danger is that otherwise potentially useful right-on people might think that the critique of a particular set of texts (often based on a shoddy and crusading form of particularist politics) is a substitute for the critique of capitalist society as a unified juggernaut of exploitation and oppression - just as some people think that if Moffat would only STFU then modern TV would be pretty much peaches.
The mistake is waiting to be made in the powerless mire that so many people feel - not without some justification - that they are stuck in.
ideas are icepickproof
Thursday, 20 November 2014
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Random Thing #4: Woss Going on 'Ere Then?
I have become convinced that the fundamental appeal of the detective story lies in fantasies of autonomy.
Think about it. What does every detective story have in common? The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam.
Sherlock Holmes hangs around in his rooms until he decides to take a case, whereupon he follows the scent wherever it leads. He makes money from his cases and doesn't do any other kind of work. Poirot similarly - when he isn't on holiday, that is. Like Miss Marple, Poirot is retired and financially self-sufficient. Other classic detectives combine one or more of these traits. Spade and Marlowe run their own detective agencies. Some detectives are aristocratic and wealthy, some live off their earnings, but they are all, essentially, either unemployed or self-employed. Even the police detective characters - Morse, for instance - manages his own time. He leaves his batchelor home and goes to work, but once on the job he and Lewis perambulate around Oxford as they please, stopping off in pub after pub, etc etc etc. Most detectives, like Morse, are single. Some are apparently asexual, some widowed, some divorced, some eternal bachelors, whatever. But they tend to live alone or with a same-sex buddy like Watson. The queer dynamic is often there, but usually non-diegetic. There are detectives with families or busy personal lives - Wexford, Bergerac, etc - but even they leave their domestic or romantic entanglements behind while on a case, and rove around freely instead. Often, in these days when cop shows have to include loads of dour and gritty stuff about how being a police officer harrows your soul and consumes your relationships, the detectives with family lives are resolutely miserable, those family lives being a catastrophic mess of some kind. They then leave the mess behind when they zoom off to investigate. In this case the pleasure of ditching the domestic may be furtive and guilt ridden (the trope of the cop's wife glowering when he gets a phone call that will take him away from her) but it's still there. Called back to work, he doesn't have to go and sit in an office. Whatever the fictional copper's notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car. The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied.
The original fictional detectives were a focus of anxiety about transgression of privacy boundaries. They tended to be eccentric masters of disguise, or common-as-muck policemen who broke into the middle class home to snoop (like Mr Whicher). The detective story settled into such a popular staple of modern fiction when the detective was transformed from a figure of disconcerting and nosy instinct (i.e. Dickens' Inspector Bucket or Collins' Sergeant Cuff) into the bourgois man of leisure (Holmes). He stops being an uneasy mixture of proletarian and spy, and becomes instead a middle-class investigator-as-hobbyist-or-small-businessman.
Here's the secret fantasy. It works in a way reminiscent of the American fantasy about solving guilt-problems held over from conquest which lies at the heart of the American ghost story. American ghost stories are all, fundamentally, about disputed real estate. British ghost stories are, of course, far more about the haunting of the modern by the feudal. Both are about capitalism vs some flavour of pre-capitalism. The detective story is, transatlantically, about some fantasy of freedom from the capitalist organisation of time or, relatedly, from the schedules imposed by the bourgeois family.
Think about it. What does every detective story have in common? The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam.
Sherlock Holmes hangs around in his rooms until he decides to take a case, whereupon he follows the scent wherever it leads. He makes money from his cases and doesn't do any other kind of work. Poirot similarly - when he isn't on holiday, that is. Like Miss Marple, Poirot is retired and financially self-sufficient. Other classic detectives combine one or more of these traits. Spade and Marlowe run their own detective agencies. Some detectives are aristocratic and wealthy, some live off their earnings, but they are all, essentially, either unemployed or self-employed. Even the police detective characters - Morse, for instance - manages his own time. He leaves his batchelor home and goes to work, but once on the job he and Lewis perambulate around Oxford as they please, stopping off in pub after pub, etc etc etc. Most detectives, like Morse, are single. Some are apparently asexual, some widowed, some divorced, some eternal bachelors, whatever. But they tend to live alone or with a same-sex buddy like Watson. The queer dynamic is often there, but usually non-diegetic. There are detectives with families or busy personal lives - Wexford, Bergerac, etc - but even they leave their domestic or romantic entanglements behind while on a case, and rove around freely instead. Often, in these days when cop shows have to include loads of dour and gritty stuff about how being a police officer harrows your soul and consumes your relationships, the detectives with family lives are resolutely miserable, those family lives being a catastrophic mess of some kind. They then leave the mess behind when they zoom off to investigate. In this case the pleasure of ditching the domestic may be furtive and guilt ridden (the trope of the cop's wife glowering when he gets a phone call that will take him away from her) but it's still there. Called back to work, he doesn't have to go and sit in an office. Whatever the fictional copper's notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car. The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied.
The original fictional detectives were a focus of anxiety about transgression of privacy boundaries. They tended to be eccentric masters of disguise, or common-as-muck policemen who broke into the middle class home to snoop (like Mr Whicher). The detective story settled into such a popular staple of modern fiction when the detective was transformed from a figure of disconcerting and nosy instinct (i.e. Dickens' Inspector Bucket or Collins' Sergeant Cuff) into the bourgois man of leisure (Holmes). He stops being an uneasy mixture of proletarian and spy, and becomes instead a middle-class investigator-as-hobbyist-or-small-businessman.
Here's the secret fantasy. It works in a way reminiscent of the American fantasy about solving guilt-problems held over from conquest which lies at the heart of the American ghost story. American ghost stories are all, fundamentally, about disputed real estate. British ghost stories are, of course, far more about the haunting of the modern by the feudal. Both are about capitalism vs some flavour of pre-capitalism. The detective story is, transatlantically, about some fantasy of freedom from the capitalist organisation of time or, relatedly, from the schedules imposed by the bourgeois family.
Saturday, 8 November 2014
Reverse Racism ('Into the Dalek' 2)
The Doctor learns that he is bigoted because he refused to accept the idea that a Dalek could be good. Indeed, he hates Daleks so much that the one time he is prepared to even countenance the idea of a good Dalek is when he meets a Dalek which says all Daleks are evil and should die. So he hates genocidal racists so much that the only member of that race he can think of as good is the one who says that it would be a good idea to exterminate an entire race. But, of course, that isn't good. That's bad. That makes you as bad as a Dalek. Indeed, that's Dalek-thinking.
Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.
But there's another interesting irony here, which probably wasn't intended.
As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism. Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics. The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans. All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc. The problems with this are obvious. It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience... not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism. But that's all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.
Back to the unintended little irony in 'Into the Dalek'... which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves. No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism. I'm not really talking about race here. I'm talking about politics.
Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis. Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.
So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that 'Into the Dalek' more or less explicitly questions). We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad. But you see... they are. By definition. The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man). But you can't have nice Nazis. You can't even approach that. It's like talking about dry water - if it's dry, it ain't water.
We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination. It isn't something that can happen to anyone or everyone. There's no such thing as 'reverse racism', or 'misandry' (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels). There certainly isn't any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists. That's why they shouldn't be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them. You can't have democratic fascists. Obviously, therefore, you can't extend them the boons of democracy. I'm not in favour of banning fascist parties or imprisoning fascists - because it would be counter-productive - but it isn't an unreasonable idea in itself.
(Similarly, I don't think its an unreasonable idea in itself for capitalist democracy to lock me away too, since I've repeatedly voiced my desire to see it destroyed... though it makes considerably less sense than locking fascists away, since my dissatisfaction with capitalist democracy is based on a rejection of its own rhetoric about democracy, and a demand for more democracy, whereas the fascist objection to capitalist democracy is based on a desire for less democracy.)
My saying that it is right to discriminate against fascists certainly doesn't make me as bad as a fascist. That's wishy-washy, purblind piffle. That idea rests on a false equivalency, like many liberal cul-de-sacs. The eternal phantasm of the level playing field, the balanced middle-ground; the idea of the centre as the rational point between irrational extremes, and fairness as the equidistant zone between claims. All that childish, politcally-illiterate shit.
You don't become a fascist when you discriminate against fascists; you become an anti-fascist... just as you don't become a sexist when you challenge patriarchy, or a reverse racist when you challenge white privilege.
Of course, it might be objected that you can label everyone who ascribes to a political philosophy 'bad' without accepting that it would be a good thing if they were all killed... and you'd have a point. But it's still interesting that, even today, we are more comfortable playing around (albeit questioningly) with the reading of the Daleks which is based on race essentialism than on the reading which is based on political philosophy... even when they openly represent a political philosophy that 'we' supposedly all despise.
Ironic, fairly interesting, and doubtless intentional.
But there's another interesting irony here, which probably wasn't intended.
As has been frequently pointed out, SF often falls into the trap of a race essentialism. Alien races in SF all have the same characteristics. The same sort of thing is true in Fantasy, and in other forms of storytelling featuring sapient non-humans. All Vulcans are logical, all Sontarans are militaristic, all House Elves are servile, all Orc are psychopaths, etc. The problems with this are obvious. It rests upon a reductionist view of race, society and sentience... not to mention a set of assumptions directly related to biological racism. But that's all obvious, and well covered elsewhere.
Back to the unintended little irony in 'Into the Dalek'... which, to be fair, is more an irony about the Daleks themselves. No, not the irony of creatures which metaphorically express the evil of racism themselves being based on race essentialism. I'm not really talking about race here. I'm talking about politics.
Because, as is also well understood, the Daleks are metaphors for the Nazis. Actually they hardly even bother being metaphors.
So we wind up in a peculiar situation politcally when we question the idea that there is something wrong with assuming that all Daleks are evil (an assumption that 'Into the Dalek' more or less explicitly questions). We wind up essentialy questioning the idea that all Nazis, all fascists, are bad. But you see... they are. By definition. The DWM review of Timewyrm: Exodus said that Hermann Goering was the closest thing to a nice Nazi (a pretty startling remark if you know anything about the man). But you can't have nice Nazis. You can't even approach that. It's like talking about dry water - if it's dry, it ain't water.
We have bumped up against a standard misunderstanding about discrimination. It isn't something that can happen to anyone or everyone. There's no such thing as 'reverse racism', or 'misandry' (at least as the term is meant by the crybabies who object to feminism on the basis of their bruised manfeels). There certainly isn't any such thing as unfair discrimination against fascists. That's why they shouldn't be allowed on Question Time, no matter how many people vote for them. You can't have democratic fascists. Obviously, therefore, you can't extend them the boons of democracy. I'm not in favour of banning fascist parties or imprisoning fascists - because it would be counter-productive - but it isn't an unreasonable idea in itself.
(Similarly, I don't think its an unreasonable idea in itself for capitalist democracy to lock me away too, since I've repeatedly voiced my desire to see it destroyed... though it makes considerably less sense than locking fascists away, since my dissatisfaction with capitalist democracy is based on a rejection of its own rhetoric about democracy, and a demand for more democracy, whereas the fascist objection to capitalist democracy is based on a desire for less democracy.)
My saying that it is right to discriminate against fascists certainly doesn't make me as bad as a fascist. That's wishy-washy, purblind piffle. That idea rests on a false equivalency, like many liberal cul-de-sacs. The eternal phantasm of the level playing field, the balanced middle-ground; the idea of the centre as the rational point between irrational extremes, and fairness as the equidistant zone between claims. All that childish, politcally-illiterate shit.
You don't become a fascist when you discriminate against fascists; you become an anti-fascist... just as you don't become a sexist when you challenge patriarchy, or a reverse racist when you challenge white privilege.
Of course, it might be objected that you can label everyone who ascribes to a political philosophy 'bad' without accepting that it would be a good thing if they were all killed... and you'd have a point. But it's still interesting that, even today, we are more comfortable playing around (albeit questioningly) with the reading of the Daleks which is based on race essentialism than on the reading which is based on political philosophy... even when they openly represent a political philosophy that 'we' supposedly all despise.
Monday, 27 October 2014
A Wilderness of Tigers
The opposition between town and country is a perennial obsession of modern Western narrative art. The idea of the division becoming diffuse and permeable, of the one bleeding through into the other, appears to be deeply threatening. For Titus Andronicus, in a play in which precisely this bleeding effect occurs, Rome's degradation leads it to become a "wilderness of tigers".
This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.
What people don't realise is that maps lie to us. They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.
We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country. No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue. We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns. No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.
What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find. The country isn't a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself. Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you. The more you sink down into it. The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated. The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister.
The city, meanwhile, has no borders. It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller. And all cities are connected. If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome. The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities. Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.
This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.
What people don't realise is that maps lie to us. They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.
We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country. No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue. We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns. No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.
What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find. The country isn't a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself. Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you. The more you sink down into it. The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated. The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister.
The city, meanwhile, has no borders. It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller. And all cities are connected. If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome. The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities. Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.
The Abandoned Line
All disused London Underground stations are connected via ghost trains
that traverse conceptual topography. It's called the Abandoned Line.
London’s Abandoned Line is in a state of perpetual Cold War with Metro 2, the secret parallel underground system in Moscow which was used to transport Party officials around the place. One of the many ideological differences between Metro 2 and the Abandoned Line is the very question of Metro 2’s existence. The Abandoned Line insists that Metro 2 exists. Metro 2 itself stubbornly denies this.
London’s Abandoned Line is in a state of perpetual Cold War with Metro 2, the secret parallel underground system in Moscow which was used to transport Party officials around the place. One of the many ideological differences between Metro 2 and the Abandoned Line is the very question of Metro 2’s existence. The Abandoned Line insists that Metro 2 exists. Metro 2 itself stubbornly denies this.
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
Build High
Some tumblr jottings, curated with pictures.
Modernism. The International Style. Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc.
A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes. Machines for living in. Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism. Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism.
Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world. You had to be perfect to live in a glass box. And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song. Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity.
Whatever the admirable radicalism - and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism - it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility. The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.
In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.
It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks. Look at those 60s constructions - built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture - and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.
So, in 'Paradise Towers', the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism. Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age. Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain. Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.
And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order. The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side. The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines. They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism.
They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack.
Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter. They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.
Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy. As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.
*
Modernism. The International Style. Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc.
A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes. Machines for living in. Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism. Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism.
Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world. You had to be perfect to live in a glass box. And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song. Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity.
 |
| Prora, the elephantine Strength Through Joy holiday camp. Nazi Butlins. |
Whatever the admirable radicalism - and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism - it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility. The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.
In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.
It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks. Look at those 60s constructions - built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture - and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.
So, in 'Paradise Towers', the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism. Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age. Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain. Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.
And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order. The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side. The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines. They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism.
They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack.
Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter. They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.
Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy. As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.
*
In 'Paradise Towers', as in the 80s DWM comic strip ‘Profits of Doom’, the old capitalism/tentacles connection still lurks, largely abandoned and almost forgotten.
Friday, 26 September 2014
Once More With Feeling?
It is incredibly depressing to realise that I have been asking the rulers of the state I live in to refrain from bombing Iraq for my entire fucking life.
There's an extent to which the 'it won't work' critique is entirely valid as an objection to waging yet more war upon the Middle East. Because the surface aim of the politicians is almost certainly to impose 'stability' on 'the region'. They like stability. No threats to embarass them, no revolts to topple their friendly dictators, no threat to Israel, no danger to neoliberal exploitation of local resources and markets, etc. And, as has been shown, it doesn't work. They try and try to bomb the Middle East into passive compliance, and all they succeed in doing is generating more troubles for their empire.
This is, of course, what empires have always done. Create the problems of tomorrow by viciously conquering the problems of today.
But there's another sense in which the 'it won't work' argument is fatally flawed, because there's a sense in which it does work. It may never achieve 'stability' but it does keep the machinery of empire chugging, and the fuel of empire flowing. Because the fuel of empire is as much war itself as the resources extracted via war. The neverending war keeps the military-industrial complex in work, the contracts coming, the factories producing, etc. It keeps the corporate media busy and happy, reporting yet more incomprehensible strife from 'over there' and 'our' attempts to make things better. It keeps the endless circular debate about intervention circling (the system can tolerate a tortuous and muddled debate, what it doesn't want is clarity). It keeps the public money flowing into the vast state run apparatus of military spending, and into all the R&D that is done under the aegis of this and then handed over (free) to private enterprise. It keeps the empire's power and prestige in the ascendant, with the machinery of death inspiring the fear - and projecting the apparent invincibility - that every empire needs.
No, the war never 'works' in the sense of achieving a stable imperium, but it does 'work' - at least in the short term - in achieving a powerful empire. One of the paradoxes of empire is that its power relies upon it never being stable. So even when the bombing doesn't work, it actually does.
Meanwhile, of course, people die. And die and die and die.
There's an extent to which the 'it won't work' critique is entirely valid as an objection to waging yet more war upon the Middle East. Because the surface aim of the politicians is almost certainly to impose 'stability' on 'the region'. They like stability. No threats to embarass them, no revolts to topple their friendly dictators, no threat to Israel, no danger to neoliberal exploitation of local resources and markets, etc. And, as has been shown, it doesn't work. They try and try to bomb the Middle East into passive compliance, and all they succeed in doing is generating more troubles for their empire.
This is, of course, what empires have always done. Create the problems of tomorrow by viciously conquering the problems of today.
But there's another sense in which the 'it won't work' argument is fatally flawed, because there's a sense in which it does work. It may never achieve 'stability' but it does keep the machinery of empire chugging, and the fuel of empire flowing. Because the fuel of empire is as much war itself as the resources extracted via war. The neverending war keeps the military-industrial complex in work, the contracts coming, the factories producing, etc. It keeps the corporate media busy and happy, reporting yet more incomprehensible strife from 'over there' and 'our' attempts to make things better. It keeps the endless circular debate about intervention circling (the system can tolerate a tortuous and muddled debate, what it doesn't want is clarity). It keeps the public money flowing into the vast state run apparatus of military spending, and into all the R&D that is done under the aegis of this and then handed over (free) to private enterprise. It keeps the empire's power and prestige in the ascendant, with the machinery of death inspiring the fear - and projecting the apparent invincibility - that every empire needs.
No, the war never 'works' in the sense of achieving a stable imperium, but it does 'work' - at least in the short term - in achieving a powerful empire. One of the paradoxes of empire is that its power relies upon it never being stable. So even when the bombing doesn't work, it actually does.
Meanwhile, of course, people die. And die and die and die.
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