Eastenders 1987

I guess this is around Christmas 1987. The soap opera Eastenders had a story where Arthur stole money from the Christmas club he ran, and this transgression, and its associated guilt and shame precipitated a nervous breakdown. It was something like a Greek tragedy translated into the simple language of teevee drama. And for this kind of thing it was probably pretty good. But could you imagine television being able to articulate this kind of moral delicacy now? How can you demonstrate social horror attending a minor theft, in a society where the establishment steal with impunity every day, and everyone knows it?

If anything pleases me about the current Tory government, and the same goes for New Labour, it’s that it’s only necessary to recall David Cameron’s Mr Punch wickedness, that appalling creep Philip Hammond, or the wretched Gove, for one's own indiscretions to pale into insignificance.

protest in Winchester

I went to this protest in Winchester at the weekend, which was better attended, from what I saw, than the Echo credits; but even so, considering the thousands of people who work for the Council in the South, it was hardly a mass mobilisation. Maybe most people can’t afford to park in Winchester. The speeches made were extremely lucid, and really deserved a bigger audience.

don't take the blue acid

Top Tory found dead in Glastonbury toilet

Was Duke of Edinburgh behind black op?

President Barack Obama and White House staff were today debating the release of a video showing Osama bin Laden being buried at sea.

The dead terror chief was given an Islamic burial in the North Arabian Sea in a bid to stop his fanatical followers turning his final resting place into a shrine.

a what? a sea burial?

are people mad?

From a survey of support for the alternative vote system:

"The survey predicts a 68% no vote against just 32% for yes and, in line with other recent polls, suggests support for electoral change has slumped further since a Guardian/ICM poll last month revealed the growing size of the no lead. The lead then was 16 points, compared with 36 now.

That suggests the campaign has been overwhelmingly lost by the Yes to AV alliance, which began the year with an apparent lead in the polls. In February, a Guardian/ICM poll put the yes camp ahead by two points"

Are people mad? The only reasons not to vote for alternative vote are 1. possibility of electoral fraud from the introduction of voting machines, 2. the hegemonic role of political parties is seen as beneficial.

Essentially, the outcome of alternative vote ought to be fairly close to having a duopolistic election and an open primary at the same time. It would provide an opportunity to end the situation where people feel obliged to vote for hideous new labour warmongers in order to retard NHS privatisation for a couple more years. It frustrates me when people talk about these things in completely abstract terms, forgetting the forces really in play. This is an opportunity to take out egregiously bad politicians - the people who really voted for bombing Libya last month - I really don't understand why people would want to vote against that.

antfarm

My colleague E is more senior than I am, and actually important enough for my employer to send her for psychometric profiling. She was genuinely excited by what she picked up on the course she attended. I like and respect my colleague, who is an intelligent and capable woman - probably more capable than I am, and I was genuinely surprised by how impressed she was with the course's teaching - a sort of shoddy totemism with a vaguely Myers-Briggs flavour. You expect individuals to have unusual enthusiasms, but this whole thing is part of the management culture of my company. The whole management thing, apparently, is that a person does not have a proprietorial sense of self, but imagines their world as a kind of antfarm, subject to inspection by improbable experts, who can tell you what you're about.

Maybe the content of the experts' teaching is ultimately reconcileable with management goals. On the other hand, when I get home and think about this, it seems like the way the profiling course was set up would have allowed the wildest extravagances from the experts conducting it. And my colleague would've been calmly writing down the instructions of a wild eyed maniac, frantically chewing betal:

"you are a Beano double page spread - of the floorboards of a Victorian house - and in the maze of floorboards is a cartoon mouse - cowering - and the mouse is your soul"

Inquiry into certain faculties (1)

Didn't it come out that Egyptian security services had been behind the bombing of a Christian Church at New Year? I'm fairly sure this was on the news, at least reported as an allegation - then nothing. It would be good with these stories to simply collate what's reported in the press at the time. This site features a number a press sources, as well as commentary.

crisis memo (4) - this cat's thesis

A colleague of mine at work recently graduated, and was telling me about his thesis, which touched on the banking crisis of a couple of years ago. Apparently a credible explanation of this crisis, among economists, and the one my colleague was taught, was that the problems originated with the extension of the right of home ownership to low wage workers. The whole thing was presented as if it was a transgression against nature for workers to own property, which inevitably called down vengeance from heaven.

The crisis certainly followed on from a great period for the issuing of bad mortgages, but both these circumstances were results of the maturation of the underlying asset market. Without bad mortgages the market would have levelled off five or ten years sooner, money would have become tighter, market interest rates would have risen, banks would have become insolvent, (as they periodically do).



tightening of money follows from the maturation of asset markets

ambiguities (3): ressentiment

What does it mean when intellectuals talk about ressentiment? For instance, when one talks of ressentiment about Dr Slavoj Zizek's marriage to an Argentinian model?

Clearly, we're meant to take ressentiment to convey more than mere resentment. If people resent bankers' bonuses, for instance, this might be upsetting for the bankers; ultimately it could be seen as being not very nice. On the other hand, the resentment could be justified by the bankers' bonuses being wholly undeserved, simply the distribution of an arbitrary levy on the productive economy. The argument either way is entirely prosaic.

When one talks of ressentiment, one attempts to make the condemnation of common or garden resentment absolute and unarguable, by alluding to the unchallangeable authority of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose texts are supposed to permanently avant-garde expressions of unassimilated genius. But if we're to cultivate a sacred awe of unassimilated genius, it remains to be established why one genius ought to be preferred to others. William Blake holds an opinion entirely contrary to Nietzsche's, telling us that the Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction. If genius is to be deferred to, there is no way of settling which opinion is correct.

And if we look at the arguments themselves, we might find Blake's argument at least the equal of Nietzsche's, both for cogency and for orthographic invention.

What we need (3) - moralising sermons on the folly of smoking cannabis, and other modern ills

Often, what ought to have been obvious from the start, only appears so when it is illustrated by personal experience. For instance, that getting along in a society based on unarticulated - unconscious, irrational - norms, is incompatible with the use of a drug which tends to erode the ability to comply with these norms. I remember my colleague X, in all seriousness, asking another colleague, who had attended drama school, whether academic drama didn't tend to include "impressions" of Woody Woodpecker, and Porky Pig, fixed into the text as "radiating singularities":

the-uh uh-uh-the-uh uh-the-uh th-that's all folks,

such extravagencies being undoubtedly authorised by the currently fashionable texts of Deleuze and Guattari, if these texts were taken completely seriously; that is, if the spirit of modern philosophy were allowed to become unmoored from its bureaucratic civil structure, like a tarpaulin torn from its fixtures by a gust of wind, or a stray binliner, suddenly rearing up to its full height.

masked thugs attack student fees protestors

via

student fees memo

1. The problem with the government's student fees plan is that they've already allowed tuition fees to expand excessively by maintaining an economic system in which property levies are allowed to compound necessary costs. The final expenditure represented by these fees must be mostly property income (has this even been analysed?). Making students personally responsible for paying these fees can hardly result in a "neoliberally" sound allocation of resources, when students are making decisions based on real costs that might be two or three hundred per cent different from real necessary costs. From the point of view of their own "science", the government are overpricing education, misallocating education by personalising fees, and increasing costs where education represents a necessary component cost (e.g. engineering services).

2. This is according to their own "science", presumably they mean to underwrite a social system with inherited class power.

3. If your MP has a bachelors degree, and they intend to vote for this bill, it might be worthwhile asking them if they intend to refund the £27000 worth of education they've already received, and if not, why not.

as the police decoy van is towed away

Maybe next time the police will leave out a grand piano, in white, emblazoned with the metropolitan police logo. But the protesters' concrete experience of the state's cynicism and lies has to be worth more than a trashed decoy van, just in terms of citizenship education.

Most people must understand, at some level, that the point of this government is the restitution of nineteenth century social relations. Even their lying propaganda is nineteenth century. Unless one of these protests succeeds, the government probably will.

from Mount Olympus

"This image has made the front pages because it is exciting. Its violence is liberating to contemplate, in a dangerous, Dionysian way. The ancient Greeks mythologised the irrational, savage, destructive side of the human psyche in stories of the wine god Dionysus and his crazed followers. Down the centuries, pictures of social protest have summoned up those same wine-dark powers or recognised them in moments when the quiet of the city is turned inside out and all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot."

A recent column in the Guardian by Slavoj Zizek managed to include a quotation that was anti Jewish in tendency and anti Gypsy in substance. This week, Jonathan Jones's column manages to misrepresent the students' protest against increased tuition fees, and provide an example, in the author's muddled prose, of the priggishness and petty ignorance that the present university system is alleged to inculcate.

Jones attempts to explain Nietzsche's concept of the "dionysian" in art, of which he is reminded by some pictures he's seen of the students' protest. Perhaps imagining himself to be writing from Mount Olympus, he sees no reason to mention Nietzsche, who existed in a particular historical context, preferring to regard his theory as holy writ. Jones either feels his readers don't deserve to know the context of the ideas they're being fed, or Jones wants to take credit for them: either as their originator, or as a Derek Acorah of philosophy, channeling the voices of the ghosts.

The students' protest was entirely rational in intention. It clearly expressed an open antagonism. It didn't coincide with Jonathan Jones's personal plans and intentions, and so is presented as its opposite: "irrational, savage, destructive", "all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot". With or without the intervention of all the gods of wine, beer and stout, Jonathan Jones seems to be having trouble getting out of his own head.

quotation for a blaawg post about telesales

"The biological necessity for morality arises because, for the species to survive, any animal must have, on the one hand some egoism -a strong urge to get food for himself and to defend his means of livelihood; also- extending egoism from the individual to the family to fight for the interests of his mate and young. On the other hand, social life is impossible unless the pursuit of self-interest is mitigated by respect and compassion for others. A society of unmitigated egoists would knock itself to pieces; a perfectly altruistic individual would soon starve. There is a conflict between contrary tendencies, each of which is necessary to existence, and there must be a set of rules to reconcile them. Moreover, there must be some mechanism to make an individual keep the rules when they conflict with his immediate advantage."

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy

Wild Bean Café

There are literary revolutions, and there are political revolutions, and they are two separate things; but neither has ever been launched in a Wild Bean Café.

***

A solitary

P.C.S.O.

in the Wild

Bean Café

***

quotation for a "Tea Party" blaawg post

"The "Cultural Revolution" had nothing revolutionary about it except the name, and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext. It was a power struggle waged at the top between a handful of men and behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement."

Simon Leys The Chairman's New Clothes

"a pastoral fantasy"

I learnt from this essay by Benjamin Noys that Foucault wrote about neoliberalism too.

A text by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke from 1950 sets out the objectives of government as allowing access to private property, reducing urban sprawl, to be replaced with private housing, the development of craft and small enterprises (described by Röpke as ‘non-proletarian’), and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of community, family, and the local; as Foucault says: ‘You will recognize this text; it has been repeated 25,000 times for the last 25 years.’

I will list the objectives he fixes: first, to enable as far as possible everyone to have access to private property; second, the reduction of huge urban sprawls and the replacement of large suburbs with a policy of medium-sized towns, the replacement of the policy and economics of large housing blocks with a policy and economics of private houses, the encouragement of small farms in the countryside, and the development of what he calls non-proletarian industries, that is to say, craft industries and small businesses; third, decentralization of places of residence, production, and management, correction of the effects of specialization and the: division of labor; and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of natural communities, families, and neighborhoods; finally, generally organizing, developing, and controlling possible effects of the environment arising either from people living together or through the development of enterprises and centers of production.

I was reminded of this by these comments, by former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin:

"A large number of the Arabs and Turks living in this city (Berlin) has no productive function other than selling fruit and vegetables".

Herr Sarrazin objects precisely to Arabs and Turks' retention of petit bourgeois modes of living, and their failure to enthusiastically take up positions as shelf stackers at the Aldi. Together with Chancellor Merkel's lamentations about these same workers' lack of reverence for Pombär, these comments wonderfully illustrate the decomposition of rational thought among the German élite.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that does not realise its worldview. The Roman Empire, or the Islamic Caliphate, attempted to impose a system their leaders approved. Even the Soviet Union imposed an economic system - the bureaucratic command economy - that its leadership understood and approved. Neoliberalism is a sort of pastoral fantasy, created by Western capitalism's own bureaucracy, in place of the scientific analysis that they are incapable of producing.

a new mystification - Castoriadis

C.C.: It’s a fact that the passivity of contemporary man rests on the following imaginary signification: technoscience as capable of resolving problems in his stead. Between 1950 and 1980, the main mystification was that of the technical competency [technicité] of politicians: they know—it’s too complicated—how to comprehend nuclear matters, how many bombs the Russians have, etc. An individual picked off the heap, it seems, wouldn’t be able to comprehend what it means for the Russians to have two thousand bombs and the Americans one thousand five hundred. That’s beyond them; one needs a specialist—and not a nuclear specialist but a specialist in “politics”!—in order to understand it. Or this same individual couldn’t understand why the French State has to throw away eight hundred millions dollars for planes that are said to “sniff” oil at an altitude of five kilometers; in order to understand the need for that, you have to have graduated from France’s finest schools of engineering and administration [être polytechnicien, énarque] and be named Giscard. This farce about the technical competency of politicians prevailed for an entire period.

At present, the two elements coexist. Fabius, for example, still embodies the mystification of technical competency: he’s the “expert.” Léotard embodies the other pole, created by Ronald Reagan, even if he hasn’t acted in Westerns, and . . .

Q.: . . . he runs the marathon.

C.C.: There you have it. We are a country with a classical culture; the marathon is Léotard’s Western.

The Pepsi Challenge

Zizek's latest thing might be thought of as a sort of Pepsi challenge, where Guardian readers get to decide if they like the cool flavours of Robert Brasillach - if reading a newspaper is tasting blind.