[Fisher’s
polemics are startling and effective, as
the editor of K-Punk Darren Ambrose notes in his introduction: “He
(Mark Fisher) consistently displays the courage to take up a strong theoretical
and practical position. His work rows against the tide of anti-intellectualism
in the present which has tried so hard to flatten things out to a level of
cretinous instrumentality and utilitarian stupidity. . . he had a consistent
belief in the operative effectiveness of fugitive discourses which have been
legitimated by neither the official channels of the establishment (via academia
or mainstream media outlets) or traditional forms of publishing.. ‘All that is
lacking is the will, the belief that what can happen in something that does not
have authorization /legitimation can be as important- more important – than
what comes out through official channels.’”]
Houllebecq
Finishing: Atomised. No wonder Zizek likes this
one. Is there a better savaging of desolate hippie hedonism and its pathetic
legacy in New Age Zen bullshit?
J. G. Ballard:
In the BBC Four profile – nothing new here, the old man gamely and tirelessly
going over his favorite riffs, once again- Ballard repeated one of his familiar,
but still powerfully sobering observations. People often comment on how extreme
his early life was, Ballard said. Yet, far from being extreme, that early life-
beset by hunger, fear, war and the
constant threat of death- is the default condition for most human beings on the
planet, now and in every previous century. It is the comfortable life of the
Western Suburbanite which is in every way the planetary exception.
Male Desire ( from Villiers de I’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve, 1877):
“The creature whom you love, and who for you is the sole REALITY is by no means the one who is embodied in this
transient human figure, but a creature of your desire. […] This illusion is the
one thing you struggle against all odds to VITALIZE in the presence of your
beloved, despite the frightful, deadly, withering nullity of Alicia. What you
love is this phantom alone; it’s for
the phantom that you want to die. That and that alone is what you recognized as
unconditionally REAL. In short, it is this objectified projection of your mind
that you call on, that you perceive, that you CREATE in your living woman, and which is nothing but your mind
reduplicated in her.
The Middle Class
Blair has made
middle-class security the horizon of all aspiration. In this over-conscious,
over-lit twenty-four-hour office of the soul , business, preposterously, is
served up to us as the closest to thing to anything animated by the libido.
Ballard knows that a break-out from this affective prison must involve the
explicit de-cathexis of the “nice house, nice family’ picture that bourgeois culture
is still capable of projecting as ideal.
In the
histories of punk, much is made of the middle classes, but the crucial
catalytic role of that particular kind of middle-class refusal remains
under-thought. The middle-class defection from reproductive futurism into
scarification and tribalization did nothing more than state the obvious- middle-class
careers and the privileges they bring are empty, tedious and enervating – but,
now more than ever, it is this obviousness that cannot be stated.
The interesting thing is that they’re
protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know that they
are the enemy.
Pornography
What Ballard, Lacan
and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic. For all three,
human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the
hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. As Renata
Aleci argues in (Per)Versions of Love and
Hate, it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for
humans to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed
by the news that, when an orangutan was presented with pornography, it ceased
to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating.
The orangutan had been inducted into human sexuality by the ‘inhuman partner’,
the fantasmatic supplement upon which all human sexuality depends. The question
is not, then, whether pornography,
but which pornography?
Two hundred years after Sade, a century after Bataille and Masoch, it appears
that anything which acknowledges that eroticism is inseparable from violence
and humiliation is more unacceptable than ever. The issue is not how “healthy”
sexuality can be purged of violence, but how the violence inherent to sexuality
can be sublimated. Meisel’s photographs – which, we should remember, appear in
magazines the vast majority of whose readership is not “adolescent males “ but
women – are ‘fantasy kits” which offer just such sublimations, providing
scenarios, role-play cues and potential fantasmatic identifications. . . Ours
is an age of cynicism and piety which primly and pruriently resists the
equivalences between eroticism, violence and celebrity . . .It is clear that
the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already
intensely eroticized stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American
pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed. Part of the reason Abu Ghraib
images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines
religious moralism with hyper-sexualized commerce, and which is united only by
a taste for mega-violence, is that it exposed the equation between military
intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends and
must suppress. . .a carefully maintained distinction between a violent, obscene
underside and a bland, official front is the normal practice of power and
privilege.
God and His Gardeners
Note that Kant’s
argument applies equally well to the neo-paganism of God’s Gardeners (in The Year of the Flood) as it does to the
‘righteous non-believers”, for Kant absolutely refuses the equation of nature
with beneficence that the Gardeners preach. On the contrary, Kant argues, God
is necessary to make good a nature
characterized by amoral purposelessness. The true atheist must be able to look
at this ‘vast tomb’, this ‘abyss of purposeless chaos’, full in the face –
whereas I suspect that most(of us) non-believers manage only to look away from
it. But Kant’s moral argument is less easily dismissed than it would appear,
because it is far harder to dismiss the belief in a providential structure of
the universe than we first imagine – precisely because this kind of belief
lurks far beneath anything that we would admit to accepting. (Watch an edition
of Deal or No Deal, though, and it’s clear that many openly evince such a
belief.) Perhaps it would indeed take a Crake’s genetic tinkering to eradicate
it.
The problem with The Year of the Flood
is that politics and religion become synonymous – and while there’s every
reason to be positive about politicalized religion, there are deep problems
with politics which cannot shed the redemptive and messianic mantles of
religious eschatology. It’s striking how much God’s Gardeners resemble the
Greens as abominated by Sorman, in a passage quoted in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce:
‘No ordinary rioters, the Greens are the priests of a new religion that
puts nature above humankind. The ecology movement is not a nice peace-and-love
lobby but a revolutionary force. Like many a modern-day religion, its
designated evils are ostensibly decried on the basis of scientific knowledge:
global warming, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, super-weeds. In fact,
all these threats are figments of the Green imagination. Greens borrow their
vocabulary from science without availing themselves of its rationality. There
method is not new, Marx and Engels also pretended to root their world vision in
the science of their time, Darwinism.’
Atwood makes a case for such religion. (Clarifactory note: just to be 100%
clear- I in no way endorse Sorman’s view of the Greens, I just thought it was
amusing that Atwood constructed an eco-cult which so closely fitted Sorman’s
stereotype.) In an exchange with Richard Dawkins on Newsnight a couple of weeks ago, Atwood maintained that arguing
against the religion from the perspective of evolution makes little sense, because
the persistence of religion itself suggests that it confers evolutionary
benefit on humans. Given this, Atwood suggested, religion should be used as a
tool for ‘progressive’ struggles; and Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners, is interesting only when he sounds
like a Machiavelli or Strauss, who uses religion to manipulate popular
sentiment – the rest of the time his eco-piousness is made bearable only by
virtue of Atwood’s gentle satirical teasing (witness, for instance, the
convolutions into which Gardener-doctrine is forced in its attempts to
reconcile vegetarianism with both the carnivore-bias of the Bible and the
“amoral chaos’ of a nature red in tooth and claw). Initially, what appeals
about the idea of God’s Gardeners is the promise that Atwood would describe as
a new kind of political organization. Yet the Gardener’s doctrine and structure
turns out to be a disappointing rag-bag of stale and drab No Logo-like anti-consumerist asceticism, primitive lore, natural
remedies and self-defense that is as alluring as last week’s patchouli oil. The Year of the Flood feels
like a a symptom of the libidinal and symbolic impasses of so much
anti-capitalism. Atwood imagines the end of capitalism, but only after the end
of the world.
Toy Story
On his blog
ion memory and technology, Bat, Bean,
Beam, the theorist Giovanni Tiso recently noted he echoes of Pinocchio in the Toy Story films. For the Marxist Richard Seymour,
“Toy Story 3 is a story of how freedom is
achieved through commodification, and how ‘the consent of the governed” roughly
equals the willing embrace of bondage […] Everyone, and everything has is place
in the Toy Story scheme of things.
That scheme is a hierarchy of commodities with toys near the bottom,
subordinate and devoted to their owners.’
Yet, at an ontological level, the Toy
Story films constitute something of a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ The toys that
are depicted in the films do not only exist at an ‘ontologically inferior’
level of the film’s fiction; they are real in the sense that you can buy them
outside the cinema. In Ligotti’s The
Conspiracy Against the Human Race, puppets and puppetry frequently
symbolize this tangling of ontological hierarchy: what should be at the
‘inferior’ level of a manipulated manikin suddenly achieves agency, and, even
more horrifying, what is at a supposedly ‘superior’ level of the puppet master
suddenly finds itself drawn into the marionette theatre. Ligotti writes that it
is a terrible fate indeed
‘When a
human being becomes objectified as a puppet and enters a world that he or she
thought was just a creepy place inside ours. What a jolt to find oneself a
prisoner in this sinister sphere, reduced to a composite mechanism looking out
at the land of the human, or that which we believe to be human by any
definition of it, and yet to be exiled from it.’
With Ligotti, it is not clear which is the most terrifying prospect – an
ultimate puppet master pulling the strings or the strings fraying off into
blind senseless chaos.
Tiso noticed something peculiar about the desire of the toys in the Toy Story series: ‘what they like best
is to be played with by children. But it so happens that at those times they
are limp and inanimate; as is the case whenever they are in the presence of
people, their spark abandons them, their eyes become vacant.’ It’s as if the message
of the Toy Story films rhymes with
that of Ligotti’s pessimistic tract: consciousness is not a blessing bestowed
on us by a kindly toymaker standing in for a beneficent God, but a loathsome
curse.
Kierkegaard’s Paradox
Dennis
Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle features
a young Mkichael Kitchen as the evil. In an echo of Potter’s earlier
‘visitation’ plays, Kitchen’s character, Martin, inveigles himself into people’s
lives and homes by cold reading them like a stage hypnotist.
Potter’s vision of evil is a million miles away from the white-catting
portentousness or Pacino-like histrionics to which countless clichéd cinema
renders have accustomed us. Kitchen’s devil is impeccably polite, insufferably,
cloyingly nice, sanctimoniously religiose. “Religiose” is a word Potter
used with particular contempt, carefully contrasting its pious pomposity with
what he saw as the genuine religious sensibility.
The play pens with two epigraphs: the first from Kierkegaard’s Fear
and Trembling: ‘There dwells infinitely more good in a demoniac than in a
trivial person”, the second from Mary
Poppins (“A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”). Fr Kierkegaard,
the most pressing danger for Christianity was not doubt, but the kind of bluff
certainty peddled by the pompous philosophers like Hegel. Kierkegaard’s Faith
was indistinguishable from terrible anxiety. The paradox of faith for
Kierkegaard was that, if God completely revealed himself, Faith would be
unnecessary. Faith is not a form of knowing; on the contrary. Kierkegaard’s
models were Abraham on the day he was asked to sacrifice Isaac and Jesus’s
disciples: tormented by the uncertainty, unmoored from any of society’s ethical
anchors, staking their lives on fabulous improbabilities.
The Passion of Christ
Zizek is
right to challenge the smug and lazy culturalist consensus that religious
conviction is inherently pathological and dangerous. But he is wrong to suggest
that what is important about Passion is belief. Gibson’s Gnostic vision – which
is simply Christ’s ethical Example rescued from the institutionalized religion
that has systematically distorted it in his name – makes the two traditional
supports of religious belief irrelevant,. Astonishingly, The Passion of Christ demonstrates that neither Revelation nor
Tradition are important for those seeking to become-Christ(ian). What matters
is not so much whether the events described in the film really happened – and
there is no reason to doubt that something resembling them did – but the
life-practice which the Christy story
narrates.
Life as parable.
Let’s dismiss
first of all the idea that the film is anti-semitic. Certainly, the first half
of the film threatens to invite this interpretation. In the run-up to Jesus’
arrest, the film appears to depict the Jewish religious authorities as
near-subhuman monsters, while the Roman imperial powers are viewed sympathetically,
as benign puzzled observers of a distasteful local conflict amongst the people
they have colonized. (In this respect, Gibson appears to buy into the anti-Jewish
narrative retrospectively imposed by the Roman Catholic Church once it had come
to its concordat with the Roman Empire and was keen to excuse its new masters
of any responsibility for the crucifixion.
But once the notorious beating scene happens, the film goes through an
intensive threshold. Here, the Roman soldiers are seen to be gratuitously cruel
psychopaths, whose excessive zeal in punishing Jesus exceeds any ‘duty.’ It is
clear by now that The Passion of Christ
has no ethnic axe to grind: it is about the stupidity and cruelty of the human
species, but more importantly, about an escape route from the otherwise
meaningless and nihilistic cycle of abuse begetting abuse that is human
history.
The Gnostic flashes that surface in the Gospels are given full weight in
Gibson’s film. “My kingdom is not of this world.” But Gibson refuses to give
any comfort to those life-deniers and body-haters that Nietzsche rightly
excoriates in his many attacks on Christianity. There is little supernatural or
transcendent dimension to The Passion’s
vision. If Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, Gibson gives us few reasons
to assume that this kingdom will be the Platonic heaven of which those tired of
the body dream.
The World which Christ rejects is the Word of Lies, the consensual
hallucinations of established power and authority. By contrast, Christ’s
kingdom only subsists whenever there is an Affectionate Collectivity. In other
words, it exists not as some deferred supernatural reward, but in the Ethical
actions of those, who in becoming-Christ, keep his spirit alive. Again, it is
important to stress that this spirit is not some metaphysical substance, but a
strictly material abstract machine that can be instantiated only through
actions and practices. Loving God and loving others more than yourself are
pre-conditions for dissolving your ego and gaining deliverance from the Hell of
Self. .
.
Christ’s Example is simply this: it is better to die than to pass on abuse
virus or in any way vindicate the idiot vacuity and stupidity of the World of
authority.
Hitchcock Films
In Looking Awry, Zizek compares Hitchcock’s
“phallic” montage with the “anal” montage of conventional cinema:
‘Let us
take, for example, a scene depicting the isolated home of a rich family
encircled by a gang of robbers threatening to attack; the scene gains
enormously in effectiveness if we contrast the idyllic everyday life within the
house with the threatening preparations of the criminals outside: if we show in
alteration the happy family dinner, the boisterousness of the children, the
father’s benevolent reprimands, etc., and the ‘sadistic’ smile of a robber,
another checking his knife or gun, a third grasping the house’s balustrade. How
would Hitchcock shoot the scene? The first thing to remark is that the content
of this scene does not lend itself to Hitchcockian suspense insofar as it rests
upon a single counterpoint of idyllic interior and threatening exterior. We
should therefore transpose this ‘flat’, horizontal doubling of the action onto
a vertical level: the menacing horror
should be placed outside, next to the
idyllic interior but well within it:
under it, as its ‘repressed’ underside. Let us imagine, for example, the same
happy family dinner shown from the point of view of a rich uncle, their invited guest. In the midst
of dinner, the guest (and together with ourselves, the public) suddenly ‘sees
too much,’ observes what he is not supposed to notice, some incongruous detail
arousing in him the suspicion that the hosts plan to poison him in order to
inherit his fortune. Such a ‘surplus of knowledge’ has so to speak an abyssal
effect […] the action is in ay redoubled in itself, endlessly reflected as in a
double mirror play . . .things appear in a totally different light, though they
stay the same.’
Public Services
It’s hard to
believe that public services are not more clogged with bureaucracy than they were
pre-Thatcher. Certainly education is choked with stuff . . .targets, action plans,
log books, all of them required conditions by the Learning and Skills Council,
and assessed by Ofsted, whose threat no longer takes the form of an invasive
external entity arriving every two years, but has become introjected into the
institution itself, through the permanent
panoptic vigilance of a bloated managerial strata determined to over-compensate
in order to fully ensure it is meeting central government’s demands. This is
the reality of ‘market Stalinism’ in education.
Is there way
to challenge or roll back the slow, implacable, rapacious proliferation of
bureaucracy? Only by collective action that seems inconceivable now . . .Only
by a change in the ideological climate . . . Only by a switch in the cultural atmosphere
. . .Where to start? While we search desperately for cracks in the Possible,
bureaucracy, that steel spider, patiently spins its grey web . . .
[While the
representations of conventional film pose the interior/exterior antinomy, we live in a state of Hitchcockian
suspense, eh?]
Freud
‘The strongest compulsive
influence arises from the impressions which impinge upon the child when we would
have to regard his psychic apparatus as not yet completely receptive. The fact
cannot be doubted; but it is so puzzling
that we may make it more comprehensible by comparing it to a photographic
exposure which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into
a picture.’ ( Moses and Monotheism)
[this
influence is most characteristic with respect to a child’s first exposures to
adult sexuality, no matter from whom or how, it will always be ‘traumatic’, in
its essential character violent and humiliating- whatever ‘disavowals’ occur in
official culture. . .to tie some of Fisher’s ‘strings’ together]
Entrepreneurialism
Neoliberalism,
my have been sustained by a myth of entrepreneurialism, a myth that the folk
economics of programs like The Apprentice
and Dragon’s Den have played their parts
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, thy 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 inter-passivity.) 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 homogenized and standardized, more
repetitive and fear-driven.
I was struck by an article Caitlin Moran
wrote in the wake of the announcement that Jonathan Ross is to leave the BBC. ‘
After Ross’ $18 million contract’, Moran wrote,
‘endless
fretting pieces were written, asking whether the BBC should ever try to compete
with ITV 1’s salaries. The real question, however, is ‘what would happen to the
BBC if it didn’t? If the only people who work for the BBC are those in it for
the sheer love of it –those who would piously turn down double the wages from
ITV- the BBC would rapidly become the middle-class liberal pink panty-waist
institution of the Daily Mail’s
nightmares, and, I suspect, fold in five years.’
Really? ITV’s high salaries, when they can afford to pay them, were hardly
guarantees of quality; and the idea that Ross is one of us because he was
‘quick, edgy, silly nerd-dandy, into Japanese anime and rackety new guitar
bands’ presupposes a model of ‘alternative’ as shop-worn and discredited as New
Labor. Note that Moran fully accepts the neoliberal logic whereby ‘talent’ is
only motivated by money. (the return of the concept of ‘talent’, with all its
de-punking implications, was perhaps the mot telling cultural symptom of the
last decade; while the application of the word to bankers was its sickest
joke.)
Catching Fire
There’s a punk immanence about Catching Fire which I haven’t seen in any
cultural product in a long time.- a contagious self-reflexivity that bleeds out
from the film and corrodes the commodity culture that frames it. Adverts for
the movie seem like they belong in
the movie, and, rather than a case of empty self-referentiality, this has the
effect of decoding the dominant social reality. Suddenly, the dreary gloss of capital’s
promotional cyber-blitz becomes naturalized. If the movie calls out to us
through the screen, we also pass over into its world, which turns out to be
ours, seen clearer now some distracting scenery is removed. Here it is: a
neo-Roman cyber-gothic barbarism, with lurid cosmetics and costumery for the
rich, hard labor for the poor. The poor get just enough high tech to make sure
they are always connected to the Capitol’s propaganda feed. Reality TV as a
form of social control- a distraction and subjugatory spectacle that
naturalizes competition and forces the subordinate class to fight it out to the
death for the delectation of the ruling class. Sound familiar?
Unemployed Negativity wrote of the first film:
‘It is not enough that the participants kill each other, but in doing so they
must provide a compelling persona and narrative. Doing so guarantees them good
standing in their odds and means that they will be provided with assistance by those
who are betting on their victory. Before they entered the arena they were given
make-overs and are interviewed like contenders on American Idol. Gaining
support of the audience is a matter of life and death.’
This is what keeps the Tributes sticking to their reality TV-defined meat
puppet role. The only alternative is death.
But what if you choose death?. This is the crux of the first film, and I turned
to Bifo when I tried to write about it. “Suicide is the decisive political act
of our times.’ Katniss and Peeta’s threat of suicide is the only possible act
of insubordination in The Hunger Games. And this is insubordination, NOT resistance.
As the two most acute analysts of Control society, Burroughs and Foucault, both
recognized, resistance is not a challenge to power; it is, on the contrary,
that which power needs. No power without something to resist it. No power
without a living being as its subject. When they kill us, they can no longer
see us subjugated. A being reduced to whimpering – this is the limits of power,.
Beyond that lies death. So only if you act as if you are dead can you be free.
This is Katniss’ decisive step into becoming a revolutionary, and in choosing
death, she wins back her life – or the possibility of a life no longer lived as
a slave-subordinate, but as a free individual.
Hippies
The hippies sloppy,
ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug
talk displayed a distain for sensuality characteristic of the Western master
class (‘Hey man, it’s all about the MIND.”)
When hippies rose from their supine hedono-haze to assume power (a very short
step), they brought their contempt for sensuality with them. Brute functional
utilitarianism plus aesthetic sloppiness and an imperturbable sense of their
own rights are the hallmarks of the bourgeois sensibility (look at all those
shops in Stoke Newington that say they’ll open ‘tennish’, and you know exactly
what class you are dealing with).
The hippie power class wanted power without having to o to the effort of power
dressing. Naturally, middle-class hippie ‘feminists’ never missed a stride in
their move from alleged egalitarianism to supercilious judgementalism. What is
the disdain for cosmetics and clothes if not an attack on the working class?
The assumption of bourgeois so-called feminists is that their lives of neurotic
bed-hopping ‘freedom’ and Carrie Bradshawing perpetual adolescent equivocation
are better than the working-class pattern of (once) getting married and (now)
having children young, when it is clear that it is nothing but another trap-
and not necessarily a more congenial one.
Now the bourgeois philistines have destroyed glam and returned us to their
preferred aesthetic mode: Romanticism. The contemporary bourgeois Romantic has
realized Romanticism in its most distilled form yet. The so-called Romantic
poets, musicians and painters of the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth
century remained sensualists, whereas our contemporary Romantics are defined by
their view that sensuality is at best an irrelevance, a distraction from the
important business of the expression of subjectivity.
Romanticism is the dressing up of Teenage Ontology as an aesthetic cosmology.
Teenage Ontology I governed by the conviction that what really matters is interiority: how you feel inside, and what your experiences
and opinions are. In this sense, the
sloppy drunkard Ladette Tracy Emin is one of the most Romantic artists ever.
Like Lads- the real inheritor of the hippie legacy –Emin’s bleary ,blurry,
beery, leery, lairy anti-sensualist sensibility is an advert for the vacuity of
her own preferences.
What we find in Emin, Hirst, Whiteread and whoever the idiot was who rebuilt
his dad’s house in the Tate is a disdain for the artificial, for art as such,
in a desperately naif bid to (re)represent that pre- Warholian, pre-Duchampian,
pre-Kantian unadorned Real. Like our whole won’t –get-fooled-again PoRoMo
culture, what they fear above all is being glamoured. Remember that glamour
means, ‘Any artificial interest in, or
association with an object, through which it appears delusively magnified or
glorified.
Defeating the Hydra
According to the merging orthodoxy in certain sections of the British
media, just about any attempt to offer economic, political or sociological
explanation for al-Qaeda’s emergence is tantamount to an expression of sympathy
for its aims and methods. As Savonarola has pointed out, the PBL and other
reactionaries attempted in the immediate aftermath of Thursday to make the very
word ‘political’ a slander as they desperately cast about trying to establish a
period of non-reflection in which ‘politics’ and thought could be suspended – a
period, that is to say, in which their
politics and their non-thinking could be imposed as the default response.
The most facile and stupid example of this type of argument might have been Nick Cohen’s piece in
the Observer today, rightly
excoriated by Lenin (I say ‘might’ because the amount of shrill stupidity,
sentimental nonsense and emotional pornography churned out by the hacks over
the last few days has reached new levels of stupefaction, as the miserable
reality of central London’s rapacious
Hobbesian inferno, where folks will beat you to death rather than let you get
into the Tube ten seconds before them, has
been magically transformed by the bombs and media fairy dust into the
very essence of an underdog England in which it is WWII forever: to the sound
of choruses of ‘maybe it’s because I’m Londahner’ ringing out from the ghosts
of the music halls, journos have shamelessly done themselves up as pearly kings
and queens, taking on the role of celebrants of a Fantasy London which is as
convincing as Dick Van Dyke’ accent in Mary
Poppins.) The ‘agalma’, the special treasure, of this London resides in the
status of the ‘heroic victim’ that a disaster such as this re-confirms. A
dangerous logic takes hold: we’re under attack, we must be Good.
The supernaturalism of al-Qaeda is crucial to this strategy. If we are the
Good, it can only be the senseless Evil, the irrationally jealous, who would
want to attack us. (This mode of bewildered self aggrandizing is as crucial to
a certain version of American identity as spam-eating-make do-and mend-what-you-complaining-about-that-severed-leg-for
dour fortitude is crucial to Blitz Englishness.) Needless to say, the positing
of an ethnic subject- We, the Good –
whose innate virtue is reconfirmed by being attacked is constitutive of both
al-Qaeda and the post-91 US mindset. A military asymmetry is doubled by a
fantasmatic symmetry.
To talk of al-Qaeda in the theological (rather than in political, social or
economic) terms is to adopt their mode of discourse in an inverted form. It is
a return to the pre-Feurbachian, pre-sociological perspective in which all the
lessons of the nineteenth and twentieth century studies of the social
psychology of religion – undertaken by figures as diverse as Durkheim, Marx,
Weber, Nietzsche and Freud – are forgotten. If a particular strain of religion
is to be understood as, in Cohen’s words, ‘an autonomous psychopathic force’
rather than as a social, economic and psychological phenomena with complex
cause, then all hope of reasoned analysis is a priori ruled out. Unreason is abjected
onto the enemy (even as it is evinced in one’s own not even minimally coherent
ravings, thus legitimizing that ‘the only option’ is military force. . .
destroy all
their infrastructure, kill all the operatives: but you will have only created more
images of atrocity, indestructible and infinitely re-playable repositories of
affect, which, by demanding response and producing (usually an entirely
justified) recrimination, act as the best intensifiers and amplifiers of
Terror.
[ At this point, due to considerations of length, I’ll have to shorten-up my
notes, abbreviating more vigorously, confine myself to identifying key concepts
and sources in Fisher’s writings. It seems to me that his idea of ‘Capitalist
Realism’ creates an impasse or deadlock in the K-punk project. On the one hand
he regards it as an overwhelmingly powerful ‘iron web’ or prison impossible to
escape except in whatever existential freedom might be available by being fully
conscious of it in the greatest theoretical detail possible. Contradictorily,
he also regards it as a fragile ‘house of cards’ which, if only one can be
pulled away by, for instance, a student strike,
the rest will crumble into the dust. So he is smitten by turns with the
depressing vision of a Moloch Empire, and, to use his own term for others, a
‘naif’ expectation of imminent redemption. In this inner dialectic he misses, with some exceptions, the interstitial
opportunities for change identified by Erik Olin Wright and had difficulty
maintaining the sense of a long term strategy which sustains genuine hope. Neither
did he take much notice of social and political developments elsewhere than in
the UK and US, rather more that he reproduced in himself ‘Island Mentality’
historically associated with Britain, and even more so the English. This is
made depressingly clear in the interviews section of the book where he
struggles to say anything new. Nor did
have have the advantage of an interlocutor that Avital Ronell had in the
Parisian psychiatrist Anne Dufourmantelle,
her silent yet equally brilliant partner in self-discovery.]
Privatization of Stress
The radical
therapist David Small gives the immensely suggestive name magical volunteerism to the view that ‘with the expert help of your
therapist or counsellor, you can
change the world you are in the last
analysis responsible for, so that it no longer causes you stress . . .a kind of
psychic entrepreneurialism widely promoted in popular culture which underrates
the need for collective (pubic) action to change the conditions of the world
that press down upon you.
The Proletarian-Bohemian Circuit
See the
previous blog post
Wikileaks
The authoritarian Big Other has always relied upon maintaining a clear
difference between off-the-record utterances and official proclamations, but it
is precisely this distinction which Wikileaks (and its successors) threaten to
abolish.
Hacking Scandal
Hack exculpations appeal
to a market Hobbesianism: they are giving people what they want but what they
won’t admit to liking. When, pickled in the jouissance of self-loathing and
their other stimulants of choice, the hacks style themselves as ‘princes of darkness’,
they see themselves as reflecting the public’s own disavowed cynicism back to
it. Nobody likes working in sewers, but
don’t you all love the pretty little globules of sensation that we dredge up
for you? […] our public life is a mess of officially sanction fairy tales,
crocodilian excuses, and grotesque abuses of the innocent in which market
forces and elite prerogatives set the limits of our understanding and hence our
capacity for self-government.. .The neo-liberal tabloid is an almost too crude
diagram of a Burroughsian biocontrol apparatus: stimulating hedonic excess on
the one hand while condemning it on the other. Surveillance need only be
virtual. There’s always something potentially shaming that can be dragged out
of the closet, for whose fantasy life is not humiliating when exposed to the
glare of the Big Other?
Time-Wars
We subjects
of late of capitalism act as if there is an infinite time to waste on work.
Outrage
Outrage
reflects a fundamental political
misunderstanding, both of our opponents and of the war they are waging.
Such outrage, as Wendy Brown puts it in her crucial essay Moralism as Anti-Politics ‘implicitly figure the state (and other
mainstream institutions) as if it did not have specific political and economic
investments, as if it were not the codification of various dominant social
powers, but was, rather, a momentarily misguided parent who forgot her promise
to treat all her children the same way.’ We too often behave as if we were
engaging in a liberal debate with ungentlemanly opponents, whose social power
will evaporate once the ‘errors’ in their arguments are pointed out.
Benefit Scroungers
The reason
why it’s so easy to whip up loathing for ‘benefit scroungers’ is that – in the
reactionary fantasy – they have escaped the suffering of those that have to submit. This fantasy tells
its own story: the hatred for benefits claimants is really how much people hate
their on work. Others should suffer as we
do: the slogan of negative solidarity that cannot imagine any escape from
the immiseration of work. . . but the unemployed to not escape this condition –
the simulation tasks that they are now induced to perform in order to qualify for
benefit are more than preparation for the futility of paid work, they already
work (for what is so much ‘real ‘ work if not an act of simulation? You don’t
just have to work, you have to be seen working, even when there’s no ‘work’ to
do . . .
Neo-Anarchists
The horizontal
left believes the rhetoric about the obsolescence of the state. The danger of
the neo-anarchist critique is that it essentialises the state, parliamentary
democracy and ‘mainstream media’ – but none of these things is forever fixed.
They are mutable terrains to be struggled over, and the shape they now assume
is itself the effect of previous struggles. It seems, at times, as if the
horizontalists want to occupy everything except the parliament and the
mainstream media .. But why not occupy the state and the media too?
Neo-anarchism isn’t so much of a challenge to capitalist realism as one of its
effects. Anarchist fatalism – according to which it is easier to imagine the
end of capitalism than a left-wing Labor Party- is the complement of the capitalist
realist insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism.
Polls
Always ignore the polls,
wrote Jeremy Gilbert late on election night:
‘you’d get a
better sense of what’s going on with the electorate by sniffing the wind,
sensing the affective shifts, the molecular currents, the alterations in the
structures of feelings. Listen to the music, watch TV, go to the pubs and ride
the tube. Cultural Studies trumps psephology every time.
England
‘What hope for a
country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple?
England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously
foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.
- William
Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
The Red and the Blue
Real wealth is the
collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy. This is Red Plenty. We, and
they, have had it wrong for a while: it is not that we are anti-capitalist, it
is that capitalism, with all its visored cops, its teargas, all the theological
niceties of its economics, is set up to block Red Plenty. The attack on capital
has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that far from being about
‘wealth creation’, capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this
common wealth,. Everything for everyone. All of us first.
Labor has allowed election after election to be fought not on the Red terrain
of re-socialization, but on the Blue territory of identitarian community, with
its border guards (we have as many as you!) and barbed wire fences (they will
be as high as yours!). The genius of the o progressive forces which have seized
the SNP, meanwhile, was to a have moved from the Blue of the identitarian community
–and the nationalism of colonized peoples is of course very different to the
nationalism of the colonisers-to the Red of internationalist cosmopolitan
conviviality. . . As opposed to the essentially spatial image of Blue belonging
– which posits a bounded area, with those inside hostile and suspicious towards
those who are excluded - Red belonging is temporal and dynamic. It is about
belonging to a movement: a movement that abolishes the present state of things,
a movement that offers unconditional care without community (its doesn’t matter
where you come from or who you are, we will care for you anyway.)
Hope (Spinoza)
We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and capacity to act.
‘Confidence’, Spinoza agues, ‘ is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future
object from which cause for doubting has been removed’. Yet it is very difficult,
even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them/us there are few if any ‘future objects
from which the cause of doubting is removed.’
Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects which
arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions. Hope is
something we call upon when we have nothing else . . .whereas hope and fear are
superstitious, confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately
increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so
on- a self-fulfilling prophesy, a virtuous spiral. Here’s a definition of hyperstition,
which, again is the other side of superstitions but this also has its
contradiction and impasse:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/john-shaplin/in-a-time-of-zealotry-/2513941748679383/
The Demise of Communism
When
communism was defeated, it wasn’t just a particular ideology that disappearance
but also the disappearance of modernism’s Promethean dream of a total
transformation of human society. The positive content of communism’, Michel
Hardt argued, ‘which corresponds to the abolition
of private property, is the autonomous production of humanity – a new seeing, a
new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving.’
The arrival
of what I call Capitalist Realism- the widespread acceptance that there is no
alternative to capitalism – therefore means the
end of these new productive ,
perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities. It meant that we could reduced to the same old seeing,
hearing thinking, loving. . .forever. Fredric Jameson long ago argued that
postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, and the feature that
Jameson claimed were characteristic of the postmodern-, the collapse of
historicity, suspension of novelty by pastiche
and recapitulation - are now ubiquitous. The only future that capital can reliably deliver is
technological – we count historical time not in cultural shifts but in
technological upgrades, watching the same old things on higher definition screens
. . .
Therapeutic Society
a
minimalist pastiche of Thomas Szasz, Giorgio Antonucci, R. D. Laing, Franco
Basaglia, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti, and David Cooper. Others involved were
L. Ron Hubbard, Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman. Cooper coined the term
"anti-psychiatry" in 1967, and wrote the book Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry
in 1971 and the precursors but I do agree that these efforts to portray folks
as fragile and vulnerable and the application of the ‘science of psychology in
schools and welfare agencies, and in journalism has been at the very least,
botched badly all at the expense of a more intense commitment to the humanities
in general. He doesn’t even mention the libertarian ‘Self-esteem” movement, a
kind of plague in American public education against which, however, there are
still ways to gain immunity.
